The Cave and the Light Page 14

  Thanks to the efforts of a single old man, the Romans were beaten and demoralized. “The Romans began to believe they were fighting a supernatural enemy,” Polybius says, “as they found themselves constantly struck down by opponents whom they could never see.”c Each time they tried to move their siege engines toward the walls, volleys of catapult arrows and stones greeted their advance. Each time their ships entered the harbor, the great grappling hooks swung down and scattered the mighty triremes as if they were toy boats. When they fell back to count their losses, Archimedes’s machines continued to harass their retreat.

  According to Marcellus’s biographer Plutarch, things got so bad that each time the Romans saw a piece of timber or rope appear above Syracuse’s walls, they would cry: “Look! Archimedes is aiming one of his machines at us!” and turn and run.34 Marcellus decided there was no way to take the city by storm. “Archimedes uses my ships to ladle sea-water,” he grumbled to his officers. He decided instead that the Romans would wait it out and hope a blockade of the harbor would finally starve Syracuse into submission.

  They did not have to wait long. Few ancient sieges ended by taking the city by force. Most ended with the besieged population starved into cannibalism and then submission or betrayed by one of their own, usually at night. The lock on a crucial gate left deliberately open; a party of enemy soldiers entering by a side door in the walls or a barred window opened from inside in the dead of night; a local prominent citizen who decides the enemy’s victory will be his opportunity for gaining power and who bribes a guard to look the other way.

  That was how most ancient sieges ended, and so it happened with Syracuse. “Marcellus noticed a particular tower which was carelessly guarded [perhaps deliberately?] and into which he could infiltrate men unobserved.”35 One night, as the Syracusans were celebrating a feast day in honor of the goddess Artemis, the Romans stormed the tower and burst into the city. Archimedes’s triumph had been short-lived.

  Marcellus had wanted to spare the magnificent ancient city and capture it intact. His men and officers, however, were hungry for loot and blood and demanded their age-old right to plunder a captured city. Marcellus gave way, although “he wept at the thought of [Syracuse’s] fate,” according to Plutarch, “and of how its appearance would be transformed in a few hours as his soldiers plundered it.” On one point, however, he was absolutely adamant: Take Archimedes alive.

  So as Roman legionnaires poured out into Syracuse’s streets and looted, raped, and murdered their way across the city, a handful of picked soldiers passed along the smoke-filled, blood-strewn alleys looking for Archimedes’s house. They found it in a quiet corner and bounded up the steps.

  Archimedes had not heard the screams of his panicked fellow citizens. He was not even aware that the city he had defended so skillfully had fallen to the enemy. He was sitting in a chair, absorbed in a difficult geometric problem that he had drawn in the sand table (or abacus) on his desk. He did not even notice the Roman soldiers entering the room.

  A legionnaire stood behind Archimedes’s chair and prodded him with his bloodstained sword.

  The old man looked up, startled and angry. “Do not disturb my circles!” he shouted.

  The soldier snapped. Perhaps he was exhausted from the terrible siege and carnage; perhaps he was pumped with adrenaline from the sudden Roman victory. Perhaps he had seen too many friends and comrades killed by Archimedes’s volleys of iron darts or thrown down and drowned by his great grappling hooks. Whatever the reason, with a single lethal lunge he killed the old man where he sat.36

  When he heard the news that Archimedes was dead, Roman general Marcellus bitterly regretted the passing of the man who—had he been taken alive—might have raised Roman siege warfare to a whole new level. “He abhorred the man who had killed him as if he had committed an act of sacrilege,” Plutarch tells us, “and sought out Archimedes’ relatives and treated them with honor.”37 Science had its first hero martyr, and the power of technology to move and shape events was fixed firmly in the Western imagination.

  The death of Archimedes and the fall of Syracuse also marked the end of an independent Hellenistic world. A new power now ruled the Mediterranean: Rome.38

  As it happened, the rise of Rome would also give the rivalry of Plato and Aristotle a whole new lease on life.

  * * *

  * The Muses were the nine Greek female deities supposed to inspire the most important learned arts: Euterpe (lyric poetry), Thalia (comedy and idyllic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Calliope (epic poetry), Terpsichore (choral dance and song), Clio (history), Erato (love verse and mimicry), Polyhymnia (sacred song), and Urania (astronomy). For more on Aristotle’s literary legacy, see chapter 23.

  † The fire was set inadvertently by Julius Caesar and his Roman legionnaires, the wreckers of ancient Greece’s legacy in more ways than one. And watching helplessly from the royal palace as those centuries of learning went up in smoke would be Ptolemy I’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter Queen Cleopatra.

  ‡ According to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, no fewer than fifty-five separate spheres.

  § Eighteen centuries later, Ferdinand Magellan would show that the distance was much shorter, 5,734 miles.

  ‖ Although direct evidence is lacking, he describes Conon of Samos as his teacher and friend, and at least some of his writings were dedicated to Eratosthenes, suggesting personal contact with that formidable mathematical brain.

  a Dositheus is a Jewish name (the Greek for Matthew, or Matityahu). Alexandria had a large Jewish community, so it’s not surprising that Jews would have studied at the Museum or used the Great Library. If Dositheus was a Jew, then his correspondence with Archimedes is the only one between a Greek and a Jew to survive from the ancient pagan world.

  b See chapter 19.

  c So did Archimedes also deploy his most legendary weapon, a series of convex mirrors to focus the rays of the sun and set Roman ships and rigging on fire? The best ancient sources, Polybius and Plutarch, make no mention of it. The oldest account is by the first century CE philosopher Lucian, who merely mentions Archimedes setting Roman ships on fire by artificial means; he says nothing about mirrors. The best modern scholars doubt the story. This is not to say Archimedes wouldn’t have found a way to make such a “death ray” work, if he had thought of it.

  The Death of Archimedes, 212 BCE

  Eight

  HOLE IN THE SOUL: PLATO AND ARISTOTLE IN ROME

  The study of history is … the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of Fortune.

  —Polybius (200–118 BCE)

  At last he had found it.1

  He had sworn he would. Finally, near the gate of Archradina, the vow was fulfilled. He could feel a deep sense of personal, even national, satisfaction. One hundred and forty years earlier, the ground around him would have been strewn with the bodies of his fellow Romans, soldiers killed during the siege of the city of which he was now Rome’s quaestor, or tax collector.

  Because the once-proud city-state of Syracuse was now capital of the Roman province of Sicily. When he arrived from Rome, Marcus Tullius Cicero was barely thirty-two and on the verge of a brilliant political career.

  One desire, however, had consumed him when he wasn’t counting revenues or assessing taxes. In his spare time he had searched the city from end to end, until he came to this neglected corner overgrown with brushwood and thorns. It was a cemetery, and in the shadows stood row after row of marble columns and funerary monuments. Cicero must have wondered which was the right one.

  Then, “I observed a small column standing out a little above the briars,” he wrote later, “with the figure of a sphere and a cylinder upon it.” Cicero immediately turned to his Syracusan guide and the laborers with him and cried, “I think I’ve found it!”

  The men set to work with scythes, cutting a path through the briars and thorns so Cicero could get close enough to examine the column. The marble was mottled with lichens and neglect. Along th
e base of the pedestal he could barely make out a faded inscription, “although,” he wrote afterward, “the latter parts of all the verses were effaced almost half away.”

  Still, there was no doubt about it. This was the tomb of the great Archimedes.

  Cicero must have glowed with satisfaction. The Syracusans had had no idea where their most famous citizen had been laid to rest 140 years earlier. Some had even sworn the tomb didn’t exist. Cicero, however, had learned from dusty ancient sources that Archimedes had asked that his funerary monument, or stele, be inscribed with the sphere and cylinder, as a tribute to what the canny old scientist regarded as his greatest discovery: that the volumes of these two solids share a 3:2 ratio.

  Cicero’s discovery of Archimedes’s tomb was a first-class piece of detective work, perhaps the world’s first example of applied archaeology. On the whole, however, the Romans made bad detectives. They were perhaps the least curious people in history, as well as the most acquisitive. Cicero himself barely mentioned Archimedes or mathematics again, either in his books or in his plentiful letters.* Instead, “an Archimedean problem” became Cicero’s pet phrase for any dilemma of insoluble complexity.2 For most Romans, that meant virtually any problem for which neither Plato nor Aristotle offered a clear answer.

  Although they professed to despise the Greeks as a people, the Romans developed a strange dependence on Greek culture and on its two greatest thinkers. Rome had begun as a rough, rather crude agricultural community with a keen taste for war, not unlike the Spartans. Then around 380 BCE, just as on the other side of the Mediterranean Plato was composing the Republic, they overthrew their more sophisticated neighbors the Etruscans, and things began to take off.

  In less than two hundred years they had conquered the entire Italian peninsula, driven northward into the Celtic kingdoms of Gaul, overwhelmed the Greek colonies of Sicily including Syracuse, and absorbed the empire of their only rival in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. Although Romans saw their serial conquests as proof of their master-race status, the fact was Greeks were instrumental in their success, then and later. Greek science and technology helped their armies and navies move and fight, just as Greek art filled their homes and villas and Greek literature their libraries.

  By Cicero’s time, any Roman of distinction could speak Greek as well as he did Latin. Many traveled to Greece to receive their education at the Academy or the Lyceum, or both. Others like Cicero were raised by Greek tutors who taught them the basic tenets of Plato’s ethical doctrines and Aristotle’s treatises on logic and rhetoric.3

  Later Greek engineers built their fortifications and temples, including the famous Pantheon. Greek philosophy provided the rational framework for understanding their own laws and history; Greek artisans kept them supplied with consumer goods; and Greek gladiators and charioteers kept them entertained in the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus.

  The Romans mastered Greek culture and made it essential to the functioning of their empire. But they never went beyond it or challenged it. Like the vast majority of classical statues we see in museums today, everything was a Roman copy of a Greek original. Even distinctly Roman contributions to the history of architecture, like the dome, arch, and barrel vault, were only extensions of Greek engineering principles.

  In that sense, the civilization the Romans inhabited remained forever foreign and opaque to them—like the codes of software applications the average person installs on his or her iPad and uses every day. When the software hits a glitch, most of us are helpless without a manual to help. And the manuals the Romans increasingly relied on for understanding the glitches in Greek culture, as well as their own, were Plato and Aristotle.

  Of course, they admired and absorbed a wide range of other Greek authors and thinkers, including thousands of works that are now lost. Roman law, drama, and political thought, including Cicero’s, would be unimaginable without the input of the Stoics. The greatest philosophical poem of the ancient world, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) owed a huge debt to Epicurus.

  All the same, taken together, the works of Plato and Aristotle dealt with such a wide range of subjects, and offered such a sense of completeness and comprehensiveness, that Roman readers found them reassuring. You couldn’t go wrong, it seemed, if you relied on one or the other to understand some issue, whether it was astronomy† and physics or politics and poetry.

  Everyone from leading politicians to the best chefs read Plato’s dialogues. Aristotle’s presence loomed over Roman politics as well as science. As scholars Jonathan Barnes and Miriam Griffin write, Plato and Aristotle “formed an integral part” of an educated Roman’s mental equipment; they were “tools for thinking analytically and making rational decisions.”4 It is not too far-fetched to say that it is the Romans who permanently etched Plato and Aristotle into the grain of Western civilization, just as they made them the governing intellects of their empire.

  Yet ironically, thanks to one man, Plato had sealed the fate of that empire almost before it got started.

  He was Polybius, a native of Megapolis in the wild country of Arcadia in western Greece, but his education was as sophisticated as any young man of status from Athens or Alexandria. He arrived in Rome in 167 BCE and soon found work as a tutor to the sons of the most prominent Roman politician of the age, Publius Aemilius Paulus. Paulus was determined to give his boys the best possible education, including philosophy and rhetoric, sculpture and drawing, as well as a thorough grounding in Greek grammar and literature.

  There was, however, a major point of contention between Polybius and his Roman patron. In 168, Paulus had led Roman legions in crushing the Macedonians at Pydna, signaling the end of an independent northern Greece. Polybius’s hometown had been allies of Macedonia, and Polybius himself had been involved in the anti-Roman resistance. Taken prisoner, he had originally been transported to Italy for interrogation and probably execution. Only a chance conversation with one of Paulus’s friends saved him and landed him an interview with his country’s conqueror. Whatever his true feelings about the Romans, Polybius realized that with his education and background (he could not only write history and read philosophy, but ride and hunt all day), he could make a new life for himself as tutor and mentor to the sons of Rome’s most powerful politician.

  The one who fell most under his spell was the youngest, Publius Scipio Aemilianus. He also happened to be heir to the same Scipio who had repelled Hannibal’s invasion of Italy.‡ Polybius proved to be more than just a pedagogue to young Publius. The former Greek resistance fighter became the young man’s friend and confidant. He went with him on his first military campaign in Spain. Seven years later in 146, he watched as his protégé led a Roman army against Carthage in the third and final war between the two great rivals. It is even possible Polybius donned a helmet and shield and joined in the final assault and breaching of Carthage’s walls.5

  He certainly watched the savage retribution Publius Scipio Aemilianus meted out to its former enemy, in which every Carthaginian inhabitant was either killed or sold into slavery and every trace of the city was obliterated, with salt sown on the razed site so that nothing would ever grow there again. Carthage’s former territories were turned into the Roman province of Africa. Then, shortly afterward, word arrived at the jubilant camp that Rome’s Senate had displaced the heirs of Alexander and turned the former kingdom of Macedonia into a Roman province as well.6

  For Polybius, it was a moment of revelation, but also inspiration. There is no record of his feelings at that moment, when the power he had fought all his life became the supreme power of the civilized world. But surrounded by the stench of dead bodies and with the ruins of Carthage still smoldering in the background, he now decided he would write a complete account for posterity of how the Romans succeeded in just fifty-six years§ in making themselves virtual masters of the civilized world, “an achievement,” as Polybius wrote, “without parallel in human history.”7

  He brought to the task many g
ifts. One was a boundless curiosity so typical of the Aristotelian mind but entirely lacking among the Romans. He traveled to Italy to retrace Hannibal’s march across the Alps, pausing in mountain passes to contemplate the great Carthaginian general’s feat and how it nearly brought Rome to the brink of destruction. He interviewed the elderly Numidian king Masinissa, who had known Hannibal and who helped Polybius to reconstruct the politics of the period. He even convinced his former pupil Scipio to lend him ships and money to explore the African coastline beyond the Pillars of Hercules.8

  Polybius also had the Platonist’s thirst for a unifying theory that rises above mere contigencies and appearances. Previous historians like Thucydides and Xenophon had written about their own times or from the perspective of their own people and culture. Polybius wanted to write an entirely new kind of history, one with a universal theme—the role of the unexpected or Fortune in the making of human events. He meant to turn history into a science based on clear rational principles backed up by observation. Inevitably, he turned to both Aristotle and Plato for help. It was a intellectual breakthrough—and a model for all historians in the future.

  Polybius used Aristotle first of all in order to explain why the Romans had managed to remain a strong and free and stable republic despite catastrophes like Hannibal’s invasion and the sacking of the city by the Gauls a century and half before. Aristotle’s Politics classified all governments as rule by either the One (monarchy), the Few (aristocracy), or the Many (democracy). Each had its characteristic problems, Aristotle said, and none was destined to prosper forever. However, a “mixed constitution” that included elements of all three would hold up best over time.9

  Polybius concluded that was exactly what the Romans had done. The republic had its monarchical element with its two consuls, who enjoyed absolute authority, or imperium, on the battlefield and in times of national crisis. It had its aristocratic element with the Roman Senate, which was not elected but chosen instead from Rome’s best families and most distinguished heroes and which made the major decisions for the city’s foreign policy, including signing treaties and deciding to go to war.