Archimedes of Syracuse
Before you step inside, I ask you just one favour: set aside for a moment the anecdotes you have heard about me and the stories that, over time, have separated the genius from the man.
I am Archimedes. Nothing more, nothing less.
A man deeply attached to Syracuse and Sicily, driven by curiosity, imagination and a desire to understand. A man like you, but with a particular instinct for observing, connecting ideas and searching for answers.
And yet, less than two centuries after my death, Cicero was already lamenting how much the memory of me had faded in my own city. It was he who searched for my tomb and brought it back to public attention, while Syracuse itself seemed to have almost lost all trace of it.
I confess there is something deeply bitter in all this. Syracuse had an extraordinary past, and yet time would eventually consign both the city and one of its best-known citizens to oblivion.
And this was happening while my ideas continued, silently, to travel through the centuries: handed down through incomplete and fragmentary manuscripts, yet still capable of contributing to some of the fundamental principles on which modern mathematics and physics would later develop.
And in the end, the very city to which I remained attached throughout my life came to forget me.
Archimedes Beyond the Legend
My name is associated with countless inventions, discoveries and scientific applications that have endured through the centuries. On this page, you will encounter many of them, together with lesser-known aspects of my life, my studies and the geometrical and mathematical principles that made much of my work possible.
Here, at the Archimedes and Leonardo Museum in Syracuse, my story also meets that of Leonardo da Vinci, who studied and revisited themes, problems and knowledge inherited from the scientific tradition of antiquity.
I studied and wrote on different materials: wax tablets, commonly used in the ancient world, and sheets of papyrus, which were more expensive and valuable. Some of the works attributed to me have reached the present day through a long and complex history of transmission; others have been lost.
What survives, however, is enough to reveal the image of a scientist capable of bringing together mathematics, observation and practical application.
They say I was centuries ahead of my time. Yes, without question, I was. My ideas, my methods and my way of observing the world would continue to speak to science for many centuries after me.
My Syracuse
“Urbem Syracusas maximam esse Graecarum, pulcherrimam omnium saepe audistis. Est, iudices, ita ut dicitur..”
“You have often heard that Syracuse is the greatest of the Greek cities and the most beautiful of them all. Gentlemen of the jury, it is exactly as they say…”
Syracuse, a Great Mediterranean City
I am deeply proud of my city. Without wishing to boast, I can say that for centuries Syracuse was one of the great metropolises of the ancient world.
According to our tradition, the city was founded by a group of Corinthians who arrived here between 735 and 734 BC, led by Archias, a Bacchiad and, according to tradition, a descendant of the hero Heracles.
They settled on Ortygia, and the choice proved a fortunate one. Its position at the heart of the Mediterranean encouraged trade, while nature itself offered particularly favourable conditions: two safe harbours, abundant water and territory that was easy to defend.
The city grew rapidly and dramatically. After Ortygia came Akradina and Tyche, mainly residential districts; Neapolis, rich in monumental buildings; and finally Epipolae, the highest part of the city and vital to its defence.
A City of Monuments and Culture
Of course, this development was marked by bloody wars, internal feuds and sudden political upheavals, which took Syracuse from tyranny to republican government. Yet none of this diminished the beauty or vitality of my city.
Temples, theatres, squares and magnificent public buildings adorned it. I think of the Temple of Apollo, built in the 6th century BC, or the Temple of Athena, constructed in the 5th century BC and transformed over the centuries into what you now know as the Cathedral of Syracuse.
I also remember with pride the mighty walls that surrounded the city, stretching for more than twenty kilometres: an imposing defensive system that, many years later, would also become the setting for my war machines.
I remember Aeschylus’ The Persians, performed in the theatre of Neapolis, built on the southern slopes of the Temenite Hill. And I remember the story of Arethusa, the nymph transformed into a spring by Artemis, so closely associated with these places that even today the adjective “Aretusean” immediately evokes Syracuse.
By the time I was born, Syracuse had already been, for centuries, one of the most beautiful and flourishing centres of what you call classical civilisation. Even Plato had come here three times, between 388 and 360 BC, convinced that he could put his political ideas into practice.
Poor fool! He came up against not only the mistrust of those in power, but also a Syracusan society deeply conscious of its own strength and prosperity. “We need nothing, thank you!” is almost the response one can imagine.
And, more than in philosophy, my fellow citizens excelled in painting, ceramics, the creation of exquisite jewellery and even the culinary arts.
Syracuse, a Mediterranean Power
The splendour of the Syracusan court, its wealth and its desire to expand repeatedly brought the city into conflict with powerful enemies.
Carthage was one of its main rivals for control of Sicily during the Greco-Punic wars. Athens, meanwhile, tried to break Syracusan power during the Peloponnesian War, but the Athenian expedition to Sicily ended in a crushing defeat in 413 BC.
Syracuse thus consolidated its position as one of the major powers of the western Mediterranean, capable of competing militarily, economically and politically with some of the most important cities and powers of the ancient world.
Syracuse in My Time
When I was born, in 287 BC, King Agathocles had been dead for just two years. Syracuse then controlled a vast part of Sicily and was one of the most important cultural centres in the Mediterranean, connected through a dense network of scientific, political and economic relationships that also extended to Alexandria in Egypt.
In 270 BC, Hiero II came to power, a great ruler. I knew him well; he was a dear friend of mine. Almost my entire life and career unfolded during his reign. Hiero devoted himself to the administrative, economic and cultural reorganisation of the kingdom and did everything in his power to keep Syracuse out of the increasingly imminent conflict between Rome and Carthage.
During the First Punic War, which began in 264 BC, he chose to abandon the alliance with the Carthaginians and side with Rome. It was a decisive decision that secured Syracuse a long period of prosperity and peace.
In these circumstances, I was able to study in Alexandria with Eratosthenes and others, devote myself to science and work on extraordinary projects, such as the construction of the Syrakosia, the largest ship of the ancient world.
What splendid years they were. It seemed that Syracuse would never know decline.
The End of a Delicate Balance
But things turned out differently.
In 216 BC, the heir to the throne, Gelo, died; the following year, Hiero II also passed away, at the remarkable age of ninety. In a very short time, the political balance that had guaranteed Syracuse stability and prosperity began to crumble.
His grandson Hieronymus, still very young, came to the throne. He had replaced his grandfather’s caution with dangerous ambition.
A terrible trade-off.
Hieronymus broke the alliance with the Romans, mocked their envoys by asking about the defeat at Cannae, and allied himself with Hannibal, harbouring the ambition of extending his control over Sicily.
The Roman Senate reacted swiftly and sent an army against Syracuse under the command of the consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus.
The Siege of Syracuse
I could sense that we were heading towards catastrophe, but I did everything I could to defend my homeland.
The siege was long, uncertain and marked by constant shifts in the fighting. For a time, it even seemed that my efforts and inventions might prevent defeat: the war machines used in the defence of Syracuse placed the Romans in serious difficulty, and until then they had perhaps underestimated our ability to resist.
But they did not give up. They captured one of our ambassadors, who had been sent to seek help from Philip, King of Macedonia, and arranged a prisoner exchange. It was also through such tactics that they managed to gather valuable information about our defences and the city walls.
Then, one night in 212 BC, taking advantage of the celebrations in honour of Artemis, which had already been going on for three days, they succeeded in overcoming the fortifications and taking us by surprise.
It was the end of the Syracuse I had known. And the end of me as well.
My Legacy
How did my studies reach later generations? What winding paths did they follow?
The story I am about to tell you, in broad outline, involves great artists and scientists, adventurers and swindlers, and more than once disappears into mystery. Follow me — you won’t regret it.
My Works Through the Centuries
With the fall of the Roman Empire, a veil of silence descended over my life and my works. The exceptions were a small number of Byzantine scholars, such as the renowned Leo the Mathematician, to whom I shall always remain indebted, and several mathematicians from the Arab world, including the three brothers Muhammad, Ahmad and al-Hasan, known as the Banu Musa.
And so, until the 13th century, the Latin West knew relatively little about who I had been and what I had accomplished. Even my name seemed to fade into oblivion: sources began to record forms derived from Arabic, such as “Ersemides” or “Arsamithes”.
From Constantinople to the West
But history, as we know, is also shaped by momentous upheavals. It was one such event that led to my rediscovery in Europe: the conquest and sack of Constantinople.
In April 1204, the crusaders travelling to the Holy Land to liberate Jerusalem stopped along the way and sacked the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Its inhabitants saw themselves as the heirs of classical Rome, and the city preserved some of the most important literary treasures of the ancient world, many of them rooted in the cultural tradition of Alexandria in Egypt. Among them were some of my writings.
Unlike the hundreds of thousands of volumes that were destroyed, three books containing some of my texts survived the devastation, probably after being taken from the city. They later became known, with little imagination, as Codices A, B and C.
These three manuscripts, most likely produced between the 9th and 10th centuries, perhaps at the initiative of Leo the Mathematician, followed different paths. The so-called Codex B was last recorded in 1311 in the Papal Library of Viterbo. Codex A, meanwhile, was still known to be preserved in Venice in 1564, before disappearing without trace.
It was thanks to copies of these manuscripts and their transcriptions that the masters of Humanism and the Renaissance, including dear Leonardo da Vinci, who is my permanent guest here, were able to study part of my work.
By the end of the 1260s, all my works that are known and readable today were available in Latin, with the exception of the Sand Reckoner and the Method.
Nothing, however, was known of the third manuscript, the famous Codex C, now known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, the protagonist of an even more adventurous story, which I will tell you about shortly.
Rediscovery in the Renaissance
Returning to Codices A and B, which reached the West by routes that remain somewhat unclear, in 1269 the Flemish cleric William of Moerbeke, a Dominican living at the papal court in Viterbo, produced a Latin translation of them.
I owe much to his patient and meticulous work, which proved fundamental to the later spread of my studies and inventions. It was also thanks to these translations that part of my work reached some of the most gifted minds of Humanism and the Renaissance, awakening renewed interest in my writings.
Around the middle of the 15th century, Pope Nicholas V, the humanist Tommaso Parentucelli and founder of the Vatican Library, commissioned Jacopo da San Cassiano, also known as Iacobus Cremonensis, to produce a new translation of Codex A before the manuscript disappeared forever.
This version was in turn copied by none other than Piero della Francesca and, in all likelihood, also passed through the hands of Leonardo da Vinci.
By then, the veil that had shrouded the figure of the legendary Archimedes for centuries had finally been torn away.
The advent of printing did the rest. My works began to circulate ever more widely across Europe, inspiring and influencing scholars and scientists of the calibre of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.
But that is another story.
Codex C: The Archimedes Palimpsest
The famous Codex C deserves a chapter of its own. Reconstructing even part of its history means travelling through centuries of events, changes of ownership, losses and rediscoveries. But let us begin with the ending.
On Thursday, 29 October 1998, Codex C was auctioned at Christie’s in New York. It consisted of 174 parchment leaves bearing transcriptions of some of my works.
Given its extremely poor state of preservation, I would never have imagined that it could be purchased for 2 million dollars, plus approximately 200,000 dollars in auction fees, by a London bookseller acting on behalf of an anonymous buyer.
Yet the manuscript was extraordinarily valuable. Codex C preserves two texts of exceptional importance: the Method and the Stomachion, works that are fundamental to understanding aspects of my mathematical thought and the way I approached problems.
Soon afterwards, the mysterious buyer entrusted the manuscript to William Noel, head of the rare books department at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, asking him to oversee the study and conservation of the volume and covering the costs himself.
One chapter in the adventurous history of the Palimpsest had thus come to an end. Over the course of its eleven centuries of existence, it had passed through different places, cultures and continents. Another was about to begin: a long scientific investigation involving palaeographers, conservators, analysts, computer specialists, physicists, philologists and historians of mathematics.
What Is a Palimpsest?
To fully appreciate this story, however, you first need to understand what a palimpsest is and how it was made.
The term comes from the Latin palimpsestus, itself borrowed from the Greek παλίμψηστος, and literally means “scraped again”.
During the Middle Ages, because parchment was so expensive, it was fairly common to reuse sheets that had already been written on. When the original text was no longer considered of interest, it was removed by washing and scraping; a new text was then written on the same surface, either in the same direction or across the earlier writing.
Codex C underwent the same treatment.
In 1229, the monk and scribe Johannes Myronas erased my text — I feel ill just thinking about it — and replaced it with transcriptions of prayers and exorcisms.
The Journey of Codex C
At this point, it is worth rewinding the story a little further and following the trail of Codex C, from its disappearance in 1204 to its arrival in Baltimore, after centuries of movements and events that still remain partly shrouded in mystery.
Like Codices A and B, Codex C also survived the sack of Constantinople. From there, the manuscript was taken to Jerusalem and, with little regard for its original contents, turned into a prayer book. It later reached the Monastery of Mar Saba, in the Judean Desert, where it remained for an uncertain period of time.
In 1846, the Codex reappeared in the Library of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople, the Metochion. That year, the philologist Konstantin von Tischendorf came across it and recognised the presence of an ancient Greek mathematical text, though he did not realise that it was a work by Archimedes. He removed one leaf from the manuscript and took it with him to Cambridge, where it remains today.
The true significance of the text was recognised by the Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who in 1906 succeeded in identifying, beneath the later writing of the palimpsest, the Archimedean text and the Doric dialect in which it had been written.
Codex C in the 20th Century
But the adventures of Codex C were far from over. From Asia Minor, its story moved to Europe.
After the turmoil that affected Turkey at the end of the First World War, many manuscripts were transferred from the Metochion in Constantinople to the National Library of Athens. Codex C, however, never reached the Greek capital. It disappeared, perhaps stolen and sold, before resurfacing in Paris in the 1930s, in the hands of the Jewish antiquarian Samuel Guerson, who had purchased it from the Armenian Dikran Kelekian, one of the best-known art dealers of the 20th century.
When the Nazis entered Paris in 1940, Guerson found himself in serious difficulty. His possessions had already been seized, and the Palimpsest was all he had left. He therefore offered it to his friend Marie Louis Sirieix and, to convince him of the manuscript’s value, created several false miniatures depicting sacred images.
Sirieix bought the book, and Guerson managed to escape. In all likelihood, the manuscript then remained hidden for decades in a damp cellar, suffering further damage.
Later, Anne Sirieix, Marie Louis’s daughter, tried to have it restored, but the intervention ended up further compromising its state of preservation.
And so we come to your own time and, finally, to the New York auction of 1998, where this story began.
Me and Leonardo
A Connection Across the Centuries
People call individuals like me geniuses: men capable of recognising, within the infinite fabric of things, patterns and connections that escape others; of translating them into complex forms of expression; and of turning them into tools with which to understand and, at least in part, master nature.
These rare gifts, for which we may thank the gods, transcend the boundaries of space and time, creating a dense network of relationships, connections and affinities between people who lived in very different places and eras.
One such affinity is undoubtedly the one that links me to Leonardo da Vinci across no fewer than seventeen centuries. Leonardo held me in deep admiration, and I had the honour of inspiring many of his studies and creations.
Both of us embodied, in remarkably similar ways, the aspiration to understand reality through reason and experience. In our creativity and our insatiable curiosity, there is something universal: the desire to push beyond our own limits through observation, study and experimentation.
Science, Technology and Invention
The imagination of later generations was deeply struck by my achievements, giving rise to numerous legends about the learned man capable of astonishing fellow citizens and enemies alike with a kind of spectacular science.
But for Leonardo, that would not have been enough. For him, the real fascination must have lain above all in the connection between science and technology, between theory and its practical applications: a relationship I had sought to make tangible by combining mathematical research with the practice of mechanics and the construction of machines.
The many references Leonardo made to my works in his writings, drawings and studies reveal a scholar engaging with the texts of a master from a distant age, seeking to understand their principles, reinterpret them and translate them into new solutions.
In this sense, the connection between us stems not only from admiration, but also from a similar way of understanding knowledge: to observe, understand, experiment and transform ideas into practical applications.
Leonardo and the Science of the Ancients
Leonardo sought to free himself from the image of the “craftsman” shaped by the workshop training he had received under Verrocchio. He also aspired to be recognised as a man of science, and references to classical models helped lend greater cultural prestige to his research.
Beginning with Humanism and continuing into the Renaissance, there was a renewed interest in the science of the ancient world, particularly that of the Hellenistic age. Like others before him and many after him, Leonardo sought to recover knowledge already contained in Greek scientific texts, which during those centuries were being copied, translated and circulated ever more widely in Italy.
Perhaps — and I do mean perhaps, as Lucio Russo has also argued — Renaissance intellectuals were not always able to fully grasp the complexity of ancient science. They were often drawn above all to its practical and tangible achievements: perspective, pneumatic machines, hydraulics, anatomy and war machines.
And yet my scientific world was extraordinarily advanced and sophisticated. Alexandria in Egypt was one of its main centres, a place where different disciplines reached exceptionally high levels and interacted with one another.
Consider Eratosthenes, who achieved a remarkably accurate measurement of the Earth’s circumference; Euclid, with his axiomatic method and systematic development of geometry; Aristarchus of Samos, associated with the idea of a heliocentric system; or Hipparchus, one of the great figures of ancient astronomy and the development of trigonometry.
We were part of a scientific age of exceptional richness, so advanced that, centuries later, many Renaissance thinkers still appeared to be engaged in reconstructing and fully understanding a body of knowledge that had in part been lost.
A Connection to Discover at the Museum
This Museum, my home, where Leonardo is the guest of honour, is the ideal place to explore the connection that unites us.
Through the models, machines, studies and applications of our principles, visitors can see how ideas born in vastly different eras have continued to speak to one another across time.
Understanding the relationship between Leonardo and me ultimately means understanding both of us more fully: the way we observed reality, approached problems and transformed knowledge into practical experience.
Text freely adapted from Archimede e Leonardo, incontro tra geni by Gastone Saletnich
Credits
Graphic Design
Fabrizio Brischetti
Web Design
Fabrizio Brischetti
Exhibition Design
Teatro Stabile di Catania
Scientific Committee
Archimedes and Leonardo Museum – Syracuse