ARCHELAUS, king of Macedonia (413-399 B.C.), was the son of Perdiccas and a slave mother. He obtained the throne by murdering his uncle, his cousin and his half-brother, the legitimate heir, but proved a capable and beneficent ruler. He fortified cities, constructed roads and organized the army. He endeavoured to spread among his people the refinements of Greek civilization, and invited to his court, which he removed from Aegae to Pella, many celebrated men, amongst them Zeuxis, Timotheus, Euripides and Agathon. In 399 he was killed by one of his favourites while hunting; according to another account he was the victim of a conspiracy.
Diodorus Siculus xiii. 49, xiv. 37; Thucydides ii. 100. See [Macedonia].
ARCHELAUS OF MILETUS, Greek philosopher of the 5th century B.C., was born probably at Athens, though Diogenes Laërtius (ii. 16) says at Miletus. He was a pupil of Anaxagoras, and is said by Ion of Chios (ap. Diog. Laërt. ii. 23) to have been the teacher of Socrates. Some argue that this is probably only an attempt to connect Socrates with the Ionian school; others (e.g. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers) uphold the story. There is similar difference of opinion as regards the statement that Archelaus formulated certain ethical doctrines. In general, he followed Anaxagoras, but in his cosmology he went back to the earlier Ionians. He postulated primitive Matter, identical with air and mingled with Mind, thus avoiding the dualism of Anaxagoras. Out of this conscious “air,” by a process of thickening and thinning, arose cold and warmth, or water and fire, the one passive, the other active. The earth and the heavenly bodies are formed from mud, the product of fire and water, from which springs also man, at first in his lower forms. Man differs from animals by the possession of the moral and artistic faculty. No fragments of Archelaus remain; his doctrines have to be extracted from Diogenes Laërtius, Simplicius, Plutarch and Hippolytus.
See [Ionian School]; for his ethical theories see T. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (Eng. trans., 1901), vol. i. p. 402.
ARCHENHOLZ, JOHANN WILHELM VON (1743-1812), German historian, was born at Langfuhr, a suburb of Danzig, on the 3rd of September 1743. From the Berlin Cadet school he passed into the Prussian army at the age of sixteen, and took part in the last campaigns of the Seven Years’ War. Retiring from military service, on account of his wounds, with the rank of captain in 1763, he travelled for sixteen years and visited nearly all the countries of Europe, and resided in England for ten years (1769-1779). Returning to Germany in 1780, he obtained a lay canonry at the cathedral of Magdeburg, and immediately entered upon a literary career by publishing the periodical Litteratur- und Völkerkunde (Leipzig, 1782-1791). This was followed in 1785 by England und Italien (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1787), in which he gives a remarkably unprejudiced appreciation of English political and social institutions. Between 1789 and 1798 he published his Annalen der britischen Geschichte (20 vols). But the work by which he is best known to fame is his brilliantly written history of the Seven Years’ War, Geschichte des siebenjährigen Krieges (first published in the Berliner historisches Taschenbuch of 1787, and later in 2 vols., Berlin, 1793; 13th ed., Leipzig, 1892). This work, though as regards the main facts and details it only follows other writers, is still a useful source of information upon the epoch with which it deals. In 1792 Archenholz removed to Hamburg, and there, from 1792 to 1812, edited the journal Minerva, which had a great reputation for its literary, historical and political information. Archenholz died at his country seat, Oyendorf, near Hamburg, on the 28th of February 1812.
ARCHER, WILLIAM (1856- ), English critic, was born at Perth on the 23rd of September 1856, and was educated at Edinburgh University. He became a leader-writer on the Edinburgh Evening News in 1875, and after a year in Australia returned to Edinburgh. In 1879 he became dramatic critic of the London Figaro, and in 1884 of the World. In London he soon took a prominent literary place. Mr Archer had much to do with introducing Ibsen to the English public by his translation of The Pillars of Society, produced at the Gaiety Theatre, London, in 1880. He also translated, alone or in collaboration, other productions of the Scandinavian stage: Ibsen’s Doll’s House (1889), Master Builder (1893); Edvard Brandes’s A Visit (1892); Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1892); Little Eyolf (1895); and John Gabriel Borkman (1897); and he edited Henrik Ibsen’s Prose Dramas (5 vols., 1890-1891). Among his critical works are:—English Dramatists of To-day (1882); Masks or Faces? (1888); five vols. of critical notices reprinted, The Theatrical World (1893-1897); America To-day, Observations and Reflections; Poets of the Younger Generation (1901); Real Conversations (1904).