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Archimedes: life of the week
00:34:32
Professor Michael Scott explores the life and legacy of Archimedes, one of antiquity’s most brilliant minds
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- [00:02]
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- [01:49]
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Hello and welcome to Life of the Week where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and and significant figures. From ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies. Today, we know Archimedes best as a mathematician, but if he was known for anything in his own time, it was for his war machines. Not least a great claw that could pluck ships straight from the ocean. In this Life of the Week episode, Professor Michael Scott talks us through the ancient Greek polymath's myriad creations and why his work is still relevant today. He was speaking to Kev Lottchen.
- [02:38]
Kev Lock
Michael, thank you so much for joining me. We're talking about Archimedes today and I suppose my first question should be for those who don't know who he is, who is Archimedes Well, I suspect if.
- [02:49]
Michael Scott
People have heard anything to do with Archimedes, they're imagining a naked figure running down the street soaking wet, got out of his bath. That seems to be the image that most people have in their heads of Archimedes. But if before we get to that moment and imagine kind of slightly unpleasant image, probably in some ways, let's, let's dial back and think, where are we? We're in Sicily, in the city of Syracuse. When are we? At the very end, really of the third century bce. And this is a time when Rome is not yet the superpower empire it will become. Its influence is expanding, expanding, expanding, and has just really kind of eaten up Sicily for the first time. And Archimedes is a man living in the town of Syracuse in Sicily, and he's doing a lot of work for the local king of Sicily, solving all sorts of problems. And so really, Archimedes, I like to think of him as a bit of a polymath problem solver. He was doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, helping with a buoyancy problem, a weighing problem, a geometry problem, a mechanical machine inventing problem, all to help both the king and Syracuse as a city navigate through the problems and realities of sort of realpolitik in that part of the world in the third century bce. And it just so happens that a number of his inventions and ideas have really echoed through the ages to the extent that he is considered by some to be the kind of finest mathematician of antiquity and to have really conceived of a whole number of mathematical concepts which are way beyond me. I do ancient history and archaeology. The maths is kind of way beyond me. That really still echo and influence the way we live our lives today.
- [04:36]
Kev Lock
You mentioned maths. There also a physicist, astronomer, inventor, engineer. I think I've got them all. Have I missed any?
- [04:42]
Michael Scott
Probably, you know, kind of on his off days, he was probably a gardener, wasn't he? On his down days, this was, this was one of these people, you know, they pop up through history, don't they, in different places where they really are polymaths. Their brain is clearly wired in a certain way to be curious about the world, and they seek solutions in whatever they turn their mind to be thinking about. Now we like to label people with kind of, oh, they're a mathematician or they're a physicist or they're an astronomer or etc. Whereas I think we just have to think of Archimedes as a brilliant jack of all trades.
- [05:13]
Kev Lock
So he may have been an ancient Greek Monty Don, we'll never know.
- [05:18]
Michael Scott
Yeah. The fact is, we know almost nothing about him as a person and about his life. The sources that survive for us that tell us anything about him come from decades, centuries later, and they're perilously few and far between. They're little comments thrown away here and there in various manuscripts. What do we know about him? We know that he lived in his seventies, so he had a good life. Born about the 280s BCE, died towards the end of the third century, around about 212 BCE, we think. Think he was the son of an astronomer. So, you know, something in the family, kind of. Clearly that curious intellectual kind of endeavour. But after that it becomes pretty patchy. We don't know if he got married, we don't know if he had kids. We don't know whether he was actually from quite a humble background and rose up because of his genius and his brilliance, or whether actually he was a relative of the king himself and so enjoyed, you know, quite a lot of patronage as a result. Different sources tell different stories, things. And we're left almost with a sort of, you know, Archimedes is a donut subject. There's a big hole in the middle where we'd love to know about Archimedes the man and what he did like to eat for breakfast and all these sorts of things, but we simply just don't have that. That information.
- [06:38]
Kev Lock
Now, you did mention there that maybe he was related to a king. That was an actual rumour, though, wasn't it? It's not just you saying it. He was potentially related to this king.
- [06:46]
Michael Scott
Yeah, absolutely. So that's what one of the various ancient sources scattered through time between him and us today have him. And that would have put him in a rather good position. Right. Because the king, he was a pretty grandiose guy and he had pretty big ideas about what he wanted Syracuse to do as a city and what he wanted things to be done for him. Right. And so there were endless commissions that Archimedes profited from. So maybe he was getting kind of these commissions because he was a family member, and maybe he was getting them on the back of his sheer genius and ability to deliver. We just don't know.
- [07:21]
Kev Lock
Well, the king is related to this incident of naked Archimedes running through the street, screaming about something or other. Could you bring those elements together for us?
- [07:31]
Michael Scott
Yeah. So, again, we don't know for sure.
- [07:34]
Kev Lock
Right.
- [07:34]
Michael Scott
What happened. These are different stories told at different times by different ancient sources, but the one that has captured everyone's attention and really stuck in people's heads is supposedly the king had a crown and he'd asked for this crown to be made and he'd given the people making it pure gold to make it with. But he was slightly suspicious that the people making it had cheated him a little bit and put some bit cheaper silver inside the crown rather than using all of the gold, and kept a bit of the gold for themselves. And so his task, his question to Archimedes is, can you work out without cutting this crown in half, how can we know that it's full of gold? And Archimedes is supposed to have pondered on this problem and is supposed to have been sitting in his bath one day and suddenly realized that the more he sunk into the bath, the more the water level around him rose. And this has become the Archimedes principle, if you want, if he's not sitting naked, running down the street screaming, then if we want to be more serious about it, we talk about the Archimedes principle, or the principle of buoyancy, that effectively whatever goes under the water, its weight will be held up by a force equal to it that will push it back up. So as long as what's above the water is not heavier than what's below the water, it'll float. And that principle is what's still used to keep ships afloat today. But in this particular case, Archimedes suddenly realised he could use it to test whether the crown was made of solid gold or not. Because he put the crown in, in a bath and he saw how much the water level rose. He then got the same amount of pure gold that was supposed to be in the crown, put it in the bath and saw how much further the water level rose. Then he got the same amount of silver and he put that in the bath and saw that it didn't rise as much as the crown did. And on the basis of that, he was able to prove that probably the crown was a mix of gold and silver and the king had indeed been cheated. So that is one version of the story. And the moment that everyone remembers is that Archimedes, when he realized this fact, when he was sitting in the bath, as he sunk down in the bath, the water level rose. He is supposed to have jumped out of the bath immediately, full of excitement, run screaming out of his house. Why he felt the need to run out of his house screaming, you know, I'm not quite sure, and certainly why he felt the need to do it without his clothes on, shouting the word eureka. Now, eureka is actually an ancient Greek word, means I have found it, I have discovered it, I have discovered the solution. And this is the image that we have of Archimedes not as the serious polymath covering up with all of these very technical, mathematical, fluid based, geometrical based solutions and theorems and ideas, but as a totally naked, probably quite ugly, middle aged man running down the street shouting and screaming, eureka.
- [10:29]
Kev Lock
I also imagine him to be a fairly old man with beards because I think, oh, venerable ancient Greek thinker. But do we have any sense of when in his life that might have been?
- [10:37]
Michael Scott
No, no, we don't at all. He definitely would have been in his middle age. So what does that qualify you as? Sort of 30s, 40s, you know, kind of when he's working for the King, this isn't his first commission. He's been doing lots of different bits and bobs. He's not a young 20 year old in his prime. Things are certainly starting to slip a bit, I should imagine, as he goes running around. Now that's the story that really attracts people's attention. That's the story that's in one set of sources. Another set of sources is slightly more prosaic that there wasn't a crown involved here. Actually, this story gets tied into another of the projects that the King commissioned Archimedes to resolve. And this really shows up the king to be the kind of person he was. The king wanted to have constructed for him the biggest ship that had ever been built in the whole of antiquity. If I say the Titanic of the ancient world. This was a ship that was intended to have a library on it. Very nice, very nice. A swimming pool and all sorts. A temple. There was going to be a temple to the gods on this boat, right. It was going to be absolutely enormous. And the king's intention was to build this and then to give it as a gift to a fellow ruler, the ruler of Egypt at the time, the King Ptolemy. So it was supposed to be a grandiose gift from king to king. But no one had ever built something this big in history. And no one knew whether you could build something that big and whether it would actually float or whether it would actually sink. And so that's why this Archimedes principle about the weight of the crown and the level of the water going up and down gets overlapped in other sources with the project that Archimedes was given was to work out whether this boat would float or not. And he came up with as a result, the Archimedes principle that said, yes, as long as what's below the water is heavier than what's above the water, it will float because of the buoyancy principle that he discovered. So whether there was a crown involved, whether whether he actually ever ran naked down the street shouting eureka. Or whether it was to do with building the biggest ship ever in antiquity, we're not quite sure.
- [12:38]
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- [13:10]
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Michael Scott
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- [14:10]
Kev Lock
Now, I have to ask because you did make a comparison. The Titanic of its era, it may have floated. Did it survive its maiden voyage?
- [14:17]
Michael Scott
It supposedly did. They built it. It survived its maiden voyage. It got all the way to Egypt. It was warmly welcomed as a gift. And then the king probably, I think in Egypt probably forgot about it because can you imagine trying to row this thing and sail this thing around, you know, it's not something you take out for a lazy Sunday afternoon sale, you know, this was massive. And, and it's a little bit like I always imagine when you hear these stories of the kings and queens of England being given an elephant or a giraffe and you go, well, this is a lovely gift, but what do I do with it now?
- [14:51]
Kev Lock
We've kind of painted Archimedes as A little bit of a joke, but this buoyancy principle is just one element of all the serious maths that, you know, he does. Can you tell us a bit about why he remains so important as a mathematician?
- [15:04]
Michael Scott
One of the things that comes through, again, the multiple different sources, the fragments that we have about Archimedes, is that he was in constant contact with other great thinkers of the time. And there weren't many of them in Syracuse in Sicily, actually, in this period in the third century bce. The real hot spot, the intellectual hotspot of the Mediterranean, was in Egypt, in Alexandria, the city that had been founded the century before by Alexander the Great. And this was where really the great intellectuals of the day were living and working. And what we get the sense of from the sources is that he was in constant written communication with these intellectuals, sharing ideas, discussing theorems, and particularly theorems and ideas involved with geometry and mathematics. And these are all to do with how the relationship between different shapes can be theorized and thus how you can know if you have one shape, what the volume or mass or shape of another is, and what is that kind of mathematical relationship between the two. So you can predict what one will be if you know the other. Now, all of this sounds a bit like a bit of fun and games, but actually these mathematical principles and relationships have remained true to this day, and they've been built on and they are still used in the mathematics, the geometry and the engineering of the world today. And it's really this kind of explosion of interest in mathematics that was going backwards and forwards in this kind of pen pal campaign between Archimedes and the intellectuals of Alexandria. That is why many, looking back, consider Archimedes to be the finest mathematician in antiquity. And to this day, there is a great prize in mathematics called the Fields Medal. And if you are lucky enough to win this prize, the sort of medal that you get still to this day has an image of Archimedes on it.
- [16:54]
Kev Lock
But you said we see his face on the coin. How do we know what he looks like?
- [16:59]
Michael Scott
We have absolutely no idea. It's completely made up. There are stereotypical images of what people from the ancient world look like, particularly in the Mediterranean. As you said, you've already said he had a beard. Every image of him has a beard. It is a curious thing because when he died, he was clearly buried in Syracuse. But he doesn't seem to have had that fame at the time that we now attribute to him. Some centuries later. The great Roman orator Cicero was sent off to become Roman governor of Sicily. And when he got there, he asked to see Archimedes grave, and he was told no one knew where it was. Completely been lost. I mean, even people in his hometown of Syracuse hadn't any idea where his grave was. And Cicero famously, supposedly himself found the tomb of Archimedes, and he commented on the fact that it was overgrown and it had been neglected and abandoned, and he's restored it to pristine condition.
- [17:53]
Kev Lock
But.
- [17:54]
Michael Scott
But again, Archimedes sort of falls a little bit by the wayside, getting into the Middle Ages and then into the period just before the Renaissance that his works or his correspondence with these Alexandrian intellectuals seems to have just regathered a load of interest as we move into that period again of discovery and quest for knowledge, that becomes the Renaissance. And it's really at that moment that the great figures of the Renaissance pick up on Archimedes as this great father of mathematics and inquiry and as a hero hero that they're being inspired by as they take some of his principles and choose to push them further forward. And how does that relate to what he looks like? Obviously, the Renaissance was also an absolutely crucial moment for painters and artists to represent figures from Greek and Roman antiquity, because they saw Greek and Roman antiquity as such a kind of inspirational moment in human history for their own time in human history. And it's, of course, as a result of what the Renaissance artists thought ancient Greek and Romans looked like. The beards, the togas, the older white men kind of look. That is how we've gone on to conceptualize him mostly as a result. And all the modern images and statues that you see of him do follow in that vein. I think one of the kind of saddest notes of Archimedes life is if you go to Syracuse, as I was recently there, and you think, you know, this is a pretty famous son of Syracuse, right? You know, most people have heard of Archimedes, who's heard of the king that he was working for. And yet there's really only one sculpture of Archimedes in Syracuse today, and it's by a roundabout, and it's not a very nice sculpture. I have to say. He's not represented very nicely at all. Let's just put it this way. I certainly wouldn't want to see this figure running naked down the street towards me in any way, shape or form.
- [19:48]
Kev Lock
Reading between the lines that Cicero found his tomb. You've been to Syracuse and said, there's only this one statue by a roundabout. So presumably the tomb has been lost again since this first time.
- [19:57]
Michael Scott
Yeah, absolutely. There are some Ideas about where it might be, including under a modern day hotel. People are not going to go excavating that much to find the tomb because I suspect there won't be that much left of it. And if you're thinking, hang on a second, I've seen the latest Indiana Jones movie. I've seen how they go back through time to meet with Archimedes. Indiana Jones, of course, as Indiana Jones always does, manages to find Archimedes tomb 10 seconds flat pretty much when it's eluded everyone else for centuries. I can confirm that you cannot get to the tomb of Archimedes through the Ear of Dionysus as you do in the latest Indiana Jones film. So I have checked that out and that's definitely not the case.
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Kev Lock
And just remind us very briefly, what is the Ear of Dionysus?
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Michael Scott
So the Ear of Dionysus is the name for a cave in one of the quarries of Syracuse. And these quarries have a very unpleasant history in that if we dial back a couple more centuries before Archimedes to when the Athenians attacked Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War at the end of the 5th century BCE they attacked Syracuse. They failed in their attack and many of the captive soldiers were put to work in these quarries which in the heat and the backbreaking work they were forced to undertake was a very miserable long term punishment that only ended with the sweet relief of death for many of them. And in these quarries today which you can visit, there is an oddly shaped cave which has an entrance that looks a little bit like a little bit like an ear. And it was ascribed to a God, the Ear of Dionysus. It was said that the God would hear your request if you went and spoke it inside the ear of Dionysus.
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Kev Lock
Sticking with Indiana Jones, we can see some of his more far fetched inventions in action. How was he as an inventor? He seems to have quite a surprising gift for warfare.
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Michael Scott
Yeah. This is the scene, this is the moment when Indiana Jones travels back through time and lands in Syracuse at perhaps Archimedes in antiquity most famous moment. We've become used to thinking about him running out of his bath. But actually in antiquity I think if he was remembered for anything, he was remembered as an inventor of machines that could help defend the city of Syracuse. And what happened is in 214 BCE, a couple of years before Archimedes died, there broke out what's known as the Second Punic War. So this was the big face off across the Mediterranean between Rome on the one hand and Carthage from North Africa on the Other hand and it's the Second Punic War because they'd already done it once. There had been the First Punic War that had gone on for decades and had led to effectively Sicily becoming part of the Roman world. The Second Punic War is most well remembered because it's Hannibal, Hannibal is charging across the Alps with his elephants. Hannibal the Carthaginian taking the fight back to the very heart of. But there were many fronts actually that the Second Punic War was fought on and one of them ended up being in Syracuse again because the king of Syracuse, not the king that Archimedes had been working for for most of his life, that king had died. It was his successor who suddenly had the bright idea that instead of allying with Rome which Syracuse had done for most of the last 60 to 80 years, Syracuse would actually change allegiance and fight for the Carthaginians. And supposedly this was because Carthage promised Syrac domination of the whole of Sicily once Carthage had beaten back Rome and dealt with Rome etc. And so suddenly the city of Syracuse found itself on the opposite side of the table from Rome. And Rome did not take kindly to this and so launched a fleet to come and attack and obliterate Syracuse. So this fleet approached and Archimedes was press ganged. You know you served the previous king, now you serve me. Defend the city. Turn your brilliant mind to inventing things that can help protect us. And the ancient sources talk about a whole series of invention that Archimedes came up with. So things like bigger catapults than had ever been invented before that could throw larger and heavier loads out from behind the city walls of Syracuse towards the Roman fleet coming into the sea, hopefully striking ships and sinking them. Then there were also cranes that could swing over the city walls and drop large lead weights supposedly and hopefully onto a ship that would crash through them. As a result it would sink. But perhaps the most infamous of all is called the claw. And this was Archimedes invention where again it was a kind of a big lever and pulley system of a big kind of wooden or metallic claw that reached over the city walls, could reach down and then was strong enough to actually grasp a Roman ship and supposedly then pull it back up out of the water and then release it and drop it. And the idea being that if it was dropped it would then actually break apart under the impact when it hit the se and again it would sink and fall to the bottom of the ocean.
- [24:57]
Kev Lock
So he's kind of invented that arcade game several centuries earlier. Grab a little toy outfit.
- [25:03]
Michael Scott
Right.
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Kev Lock
He's done that on a huge scale.
- [25:05]
Michael Scott
Absolutely. And this time, apparently, as opposed to those most machines where however many times you try and however many pound coins you put in your claw, never grabs anything long enough to actually be able to pull it out, this claw apparently was really quite successful and really posed difficulties for the Roman attacking force. There's other sources that talk about slightly more sort of inventions. We're not really sure whether these happened, but the Archimedes sort of laser gun was another one. He came up with this idea that if you focus the power of the sun through a whole collection of mirrors and focused it on a ship, you could make the ship burst into flames and explode. But the sources make it pretty clear that you had the biggest military machine in the world at the time bearing down on you, and a claw and a catapult and cranes are only going to help protect you for so long. And eventually, the Romans did overwhelm the city of Syracuse, and their Roman soldiers were running through the streets as a result. And supposedly, according to the Roman sources, a Roman soldier came across Archimedes, who was still supposedly drawing up plans, ideas, the next invention, whatever it might be, told him to stop, told him to come with him because he was under arrest, effectively, or, you know, and Archimedes refused to do so. He was, I'm just, you know, finishing the problem. I'm just working on this. And this soldier, who had no idea who he actually was, just thought he was the upper t old Syracusan who wouldn't do what he was told, chopped his head off and killed him. And that's the end of archimedes in about 212 BCE. Now, again, the ancient Roman sources talk about the Roman commander of the Roman invasion, a guy called Marcellus, when he found out that Archimedes had been killed, being absolutely very unhappy about this, he supposedly had said, no, I don't want Archimedes killed. He's been such a good inventor. He's caused us so many problems, actually, we can capture him. We can put him to use working for us. So he was quite annoyed that Archimedes couldn't go on working now for the Romans. And if that soldier hadn't killed him, who knows what Archimedes could have ended up doing for the Romans in the decades to come.
- [27:06]
Kev Lock
Well, maybe they would have had a death ray.
- [27:08]
Michael Scott
Yeah, I mean, you know, the Romans could have been even more unbelievably successful than they actually were if they'd had Archimedes spinning a few more ideas for them. But it wasn't to be be.
- [27:18]
Kev Lock
But that's really interesting because you said earlier that Archimedes was perhaps not so well known in his lifetime, but the Romans knew him. So presumably that's for his inventions that fame had spread. Whereas for the maths the bit that's really endured for us at the time, that was overlooked almost.
- [27:34]
Michael Scott
Yeah. And I think it's because of what you could see at the time, you know, the maths was all of those mathematical discussions were happening in a very closed group of people. That was the correspondence with the other intellectuals in Alexandria, a world away in Egypt and with other intellectuals. It was going on in that tight knit little circle. But the claw, the catapults, everyone was seeing them on the streets and everyone was seeing the big ship that we talked about earlier that he helped build. So it's those kinds of elements of Archimedes life were really known at the time. And then it's and clearly were known by his enemies as well as by his friends, as you point out, out. Whereas now the things that have really endured for us are those, as you say, mathematical principles that we still base our ideas of how the world works on today.
- [28:25]
Kev Lock
I wonder if you tell us a very small amount about the Archimedes screw. That's the one which I don't think we've touched on.
- [28:30]
Michael Scott
Some of the sources talk about it as being an invention of Archimedes and then others would go, ah, no, that's nothing to do with Archimedes. You know, that's an all apocryphal story. But again it's to do with this big, big ship that the king of Syracuse had built. And one of the problems of wooden ships in the day was that they leaked a bit and so there would always be water building up in the bottom of ships. And how did you get rid of this water before it became a massive problem? This screw, which was a sort of tube, if you like, that you put at an angle and inside it was this spiral. And as a result, if you turned the spiral, water got carried from the bottom of the tube up and out the top of the tube. So it's an early form of pump, pump effectively, but which required no more effort to make work than somebody sitting there turning that screw. And that kind of screw, that ability to get water from a lower place to a higher place through nothing more than the sheer effort of sweat on your back, has been in use ever since and is still in use around the world today.
- [29:27]
Kev Lock
And if I could push you, what do you think his greatest invention is.
- [29:30]
Michael Scott
For me, it's pretty hard to get away from the claw. You know, the idea of the claw is. It's just so fantastical, isn't it? You can just imagine him sitting there going, guys, I've got a great idea. And sort of explaining this idea and the audacity, the bravery to come up with this idea, the mechanical brilliance to be able to oversee its creation. And then I just imagine the impact it might have had if you were a Roman commander of a ship or you were a soldier sitting on one of these ships sailing towards the city of Syracuse, and you saw this enormous claw reaching out over to you, picking up ships out of the sea. That was the kind of power that no one had in those days. And Archimedes had, had made it real. So for me, I'm on the side of the claw, but I suspect I'm in a minority. And most people would talk about his mathematical theorems and the ideas and relationships of the shapes that govern a whole series of mathematics. That's probably my ignorance of mathematics and my understanding of mathematics that's making me go for the claw, because I can envisage that a bit more. But alongside that, the buoyancy principle. We see it in everything we do, in everywhere we go. And if it took. It took an old man running down the street naked to come up with that idea, that's a pretty good impact on the way our world works, as well. As a historian of the ancient world, I'm only too well aware that all too often the people who get the airtime from the ancient world are the politicians, the rulers, the military generals. And not enough air time, not enough space is given to thinking about the creators, the thinkers. And for me, Archimedes is absolutely one of those. He's someone who pushed the boundaries of knowledge, of discovery, of inquest, in that sort of polymath way where he just looked at what he was interested in and tried to solve the problems that were around him. And that, for me, is a real inspiration for the kind of people we need in the world today. We've got enough rulers, we've got enough politicians, we've got enough military generals. We don't necessarily have enough people who look at the problems of the world and just go, how can we solve this?
- [31:42]
Advertiser
That was Michael Scott, professor in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick, speaking to Kev Lock. Thanks for listening to today's Life of the Week. Be sure to join us again next time to learn about another fascinating figure from the past.