Person
Archimedes
Mathematician of Syracuse, killed when the Romans took the city in 212 BCE. Plutarch gives three versions of the death. None of them is "Do not disturb my circles."
Life
Archimedes lived at Syracuse, in Sicily. The usual estimate puts his birth around 287 BCE. He wrote on geometry, and Plutarch says King Hiero persuaded him to turn some of that geometry into machines. During the Roman siege of 212 BCE those machines, in Plutarch’s account, kept Marcellus’s ships and ladders off the walls.
He was killed when the city fell. Plutarch’s Life of Marcellus gives three versions: a soldier kills him for refusing to leave a diagram unfinished; a soldier kills him after he asks for time to complete a proof; soldiers kill him on the road because they think a box of instruments is gold. The English “Do not disturb my circles,” and the Latin Noli turbare circulos meos, do not occur in that account. The picture on this page is Thomas Degeorge’s canvas of 1815, which paints the diagram version. It is a history painting, not a portrait from the third century BCE.
Thomas Degeorge, The Death of Archimedes, 1815. A nineteenth-century history painting of the anecdote, not a likeness from life. Public-domain reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. Image file. Public domain. See the Commons file for the reproduction status outside the United States.
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