Do Not Disturb My Circles

The story

In 212 BCE a Roman army under Marcellus took Syracuse, on Sicily, during the Second Punic War. Hannibal was still in Italy. Archimedes was in the city. Plutarch says his machines had held the Romans off the walls for a long time, and that what grieved Marcellus most was the mathematician’s death.

Perrin’s 1917 translation gives three accounts, and they are not the same story. In the first, Archimedes is alone, working a problem with a diagram, and does not notice that the city has fallen. A soldier orders him to come to Marcellus. He refuses until he has finished the demonstration. The soldier draws his sword and kills him. In the second, the soldier arrives already threatening to kill him at once, and Archimedes begs for a little time so the result will not be left incomplete. The soldier does not wait. In the third, Archimedes is carrying mathematical instruments to Marcellus, sundials and spheres and quadrants, and soldiers kill him because they think the box is full of gold.

What the three share is that Marcellus was angry, turned from the killer as from a polluted man, and looked after Archimedes’ family. What they do not share is a sentence. “Do not disturb my circles,” and the Latin Noli turbare circulos meos, are a later way of making the first version neat. Plutarch’s diagram is a diagram. He does not say it was circles, and he does not quote a plea to leave them alone.

Degeorge’s Death of Archimedes (1815) picks the tidy scene: the old man, the drawing, the soldier. The curiosity in the ancient text is the third version, which has no diagram at all. He dies because the instruments looked like treasure. The war around that afternoon is the same war as the boyhood oath Hannibal was said to have sworn.