Archimedes may have been the foremost military inventor of the day, but he was, by all accounts, not an enthusiastic one. Left to his own devices, he might have devoted himself entirely to theoretical pursuits, leaving the application of his insights to practical problems to other, less gifted, thinkers. In this excerpt from Plutarch’s Life of Marcellus, the Roman author and historian set the stage for Archimedes’s role in the defense of Syracuse by placing him in a larger intellectual context. As Plutarch described him, Archimedes occupied a position between practical inventors at one extreme, and Platonic idealists who rejected even the use of physical models for demonstration purposes at the other. As you read the excerpt, think about the factors that shaped Archimedes’s working life. What brought Archimedes to Syracuse? Whose interests did his presence there serve?

Archimedes did not regard his military inventions as an achievement of any importance, but merely as a by-product, which he occasionally pursued for his own amusement, of his serious work, namely the study of geometry. He had done this in the past because Hiero, the former ruler of Syracuse, had often pressed and finally persuaded him to divert his studies from the pursuit of abstract principles to the solution of practical problems, and to make his theories more intelligible to the majority of mankind by applying them through the medium of the senses to the needs of everyday life.

It was Eudoxus and Archytas who were the originators of the now celebrated and highly prized art of mechanics. They used it with great ingenuity to illustrate geometrical theorems, and to support by means of mechanical demonstrations easily grasped by the senses propositions which are too intricate for proof by word or diagram. For example, to find the problem of finding two mean proportional lines, which are necessary for construction of many other geometrical figures, both mathematicians resorted to mechanical means, and adapted to their purposes certain instruments named mesolabes taken from conic sections. Plato was indignant at these developments, and attacked both men for having corrupted and destroyed the ideal purity of geometry. He complained that they had caused her to forsake the realm of disembodied and abstract thought for that of material objects, and to employ instruments which required much base and manual labour. For this reason mechanics came to be separated from geometry, and as the subject was for a long time disregarded by philosophers, it took its place among the military arts.

However this may be, Archimedes in writing to Hiero, who was both a relative and a friend of his, asserted that with any given force it was possible to move any given weight, and then, carried away with enthusiasm at the power of his demonstration, so we are told, went on to enlarge his claim, and declared that if he were given another world to stand on, he would move the earth. Hiero was amazed, and invited him to put his theorem into practice and show him some great weight moved by a tiny force. Archimedes chose for his demonstration a three-masted merchantman of the royal fleet, which had been hauled ashore with immense labour by a large gang of men, and he proceeded to have the ship loaded with her usual freight and embarked a large number of passengers. He then seated himself at some distance away and without using any noticeable force, but merely exerting traction with his hand through a complex system of pulleys, he drew the vessel towards him with as smooth and even a motion as if she were gliding through the water. The king was deeply impressed, and recognizing the potentialities of his skill, he persuaded Archimedes to construct for him a number of engines designed both for attack and defence, which could be employed in any kind of siege warfare. Hiero himself never had occasion to use these, since most of his life was spent at peace amid festivals and public ceremonies, but when the present war broke out, the apparatus was ready for the Syracusans to use and its inventor was at hand to direct its employment.

Source: Ian Scott-Kilvert, trans., Makers of Rome: Nine Lives by Plutarch (London: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 98–99. Copyright © Ian Scott-Kilvert, 1965. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

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