ARCHIME'DES.
It was during the reign of Hiero II. that Archimedes, a native of Syracuse, and a supposed distant relation of the king, made the scientific discoveries and inventions that have secured for him the honor of being the most celebrated mathematician of antiquity. He was equally skilled in astronomy, geometry, mechanics, hydrostatics, and optics. His discovery of the principle of specific gravity is related in the following well-known story: Hiero, suspecting that his golden crown had been fraudulently alloyed with silver, put it into the hands of Archimedes for examination. The latter, entering a bath-tub one day, and noticing that he displaced a quantity of water equal in bulk to that of his body, saw that this discovery would give him a mode of determining the bulk and specific gravity of King Hiero's crown. Leaping out of the tub in his delight, he ran home, crying, "Eure'ka! eureka!" I have found it! I have found it!
To show Hiero the wonderful effects of mechanical power, Archimedes is said to have drawn some distance toward him, by the use of ropes and pulleys, a large galley that lay on the shore; and during the siege of his native city by the Romans, his great mechanical skill was displayed in the invention and manufacture of stupendous engines of defence. Later historians than Polybius, Livy, and Plutarch say that on this occasion, also, he burnt many Roman ships by concentrating upon them the sun's rays from numerous mirrors. SCHILLER gives the following poetic account of a visit, to Archimedes, by a young scholar who asked to be taught the art that had won the great master's fame:
To Archimedes once a scholar came:
"Teach me;" he said, "the Art that won thy fame;
The godlike Art which gives such boons to toil,
And showers such fruit upon thy native soil;
The godlike Art that girt the town when all
Rome's vengeance burst in thunder on the wall!"
"Thou call'st Art godlike—it is so, in truth,
And was," replied the master to the youth,
"Ere yet its secrets were applied to use—
Ere yet it served beleaguered Syracuse.
Ask'st thou from Art but what the Art is worth?
The fruit? For fruit go cultivate the Earth.
He who the goddess would aspire unto
Must not the goddess as the woman woo!"
—Trans. by BULWER.
Among the discoveries of Archimedes was that of the ratio between the cylinder and the inscribed sphere, and he requested his friends to place the figures of a sphere and cylinder on his tomb. This was done, and, one hundred and thirty-six years after, it enabled Cicero, the Roman orator, to find the resting-place of the illustrious inventor. The story of his visit to Syracuse, and his search for the tomb of Archimedes, is told by the HON. R C. WINTHROP in a lecture entitled Archimedes and Franklin, from which we quote as follows:
Visit of Cicero to the Grave of Archimedes.
"While Cicero was quæstor in Sicily—the first public office which he ever held, and the only one to which he was then eligible, being but just thirty years old—he paid a visit to Syracuse, then among the greatest cities of the world. The magistrates of the city of course waited on him at once, to offer their services in showing him the lions of the place, and requested him to specify anything which he would like particularly to see. Doubtless they supposed that he would ask immediately to be conducted to some one of their magnificent temples, that he might behold and admire those splendid works of art with which —notwithstanding that Marcellus had made it his glory to carry not a few of them away with him for the decoration of the Imperial City—Syracuse still abounded, and which soon after tempted the cupidity, and fell a prey to the rapacity, of the infamous Verres.
"Or, haply, they may have thought that he would be curious to see and examine the Ear of Dionysius, as it was called—a huge cavern, cut out of the solid rock in the shape of a human ear, two hundred and fifty feet long and eighty feet high, in which that execrable tyrant confined all persons who came within the range of his suspicion, and which was so ingeniously contrived and constructed that Dionysius, by applying his ear to a small hole, where the sounds were collected as upon a tympanum, could catch every syllable that was uttered in the cavern below, and could deal out his proscription and his vengeance accordingly upon all who might dare to dispute his authority or to complain of his cruelty. Or they may have imagined, perhaps, that he would be impatient to visit at once the sacred fountain of Arethusa; and the seat of those Sicilian Muses whom Virgil so soon after invoked in commencing that most inspired of all uninspired compositions, which Pope has so nobly paraphrased in his glowing and glorious Eclogue—the 'Messiah.'
"To their great astonishment, however, Cicero's first request was that they would take him to see the tomb of Archimedes. To his own still greater astonishment, as we may well believe, they told him in reply that they knew nothing about the tomb of Archimedes, and had no idea where it was to be found, and they even denied that any such tomb was still remaining among them. But Cicero understood perfectly well what he was talking about. He remembered the exact description of the tomb. He remembered the very verses which had been inscribed on it. He remembered the sphere and the cylinder which Archimedes had himself requested to have wrought upon it, as the chosen emblems of his eventful life. And the great orator forthwith resolved to make search for it himself. Accordingly, he rambled out into the place of their ancient sepulchres, and, after a careful investigation, he came at last to a spot overgrown with shrubs and bushes, where presently he descried the top of a small column just rising above the branches. Upon this little column the sphere and the cylinder were at length found carved, the inscription was painfully deciphered, and the tomb of Archimedes stood revealed to the reverent homage of the illustrious Roman quæstor.
"This was in the year 76 before the birth of our Savior. Archimedes died about the year 212 before Christ. One hundred and thirty six years only had thus elapsed since the death of this celebrated person, before his tombstone was buried beneath briers and brambles; and before the place and even the existence of it were forgotten by the magistrates of the very city of which he was so long the proudest ornament in peace, and the most effective defender in war. What a lesson to human pride, what a commentary on human gratitude was here! It is an incident almost precisely like that which the admirable and venerable DR. WATTS imagined or imitated, as the topic of one of his most striking and familiar Lyrics:
"'Theron, among his travels, found
A broken statue on the ground;
And searching onward as he went,
He traced a ruined monument.
Mould, moss, and shades had overgrown
The sculpture of the crumbling stone;
Yet ere he passed, with much ado,
He guessed and spelled out, Sci-pi-o.
"Enough," he cried; "I'll drudge no more
In turning the dull Stoics o'er;
For when I feel my virtue fail,
And my ambitious thoughts prevail,
I'll take a turn among the tombs,
And see whereto all glory comes."
I do not learn, however, that Cicero was cured of his eager vanity and his insatiate love of fame by this "turn" among the Syracusan tombs. He was then only just at the threshold of his proud career, and he went back to pursue it to its bloody end with unabated zeal, and with an ambition only extinguishable with his life.'"
CHAPTER XV.
THE MACEDONIAN SUPREMACY.