Archimedes and the Roman Imagination

The great mathematician Archimedes, a Sicilian Greek whose machines defended Syracuse against the Romans during the Second Punic War, was killed by a Roman after the city fell; yet it is largely Roman sources, and Greek texts aimed at Roman audiences, that preserve the stories about him. Archimedes’ story, Mary Jaeger argues, thus becomes a locus where writers explore the intersection of Greek and Roman culture, and as such it plays an important role in Roman self-definition. Jaeger uses the biography of Archimedes as a hermeneutic tool, providing insight into the construction of the traditional historical narrative about the Roman conquest of the Greek world, and the Greek cultural invasion of Rome.