(Coda) Under the Entry

A hundred and thirty-seven years after the fall, a Roman quaestor of thirty-one went searching for a tomb among the brambles, outside the walls, and in all of Syracuse he found not one man able to point it out to him.

His name was Marcus Tullius Cicero, and he was as yet nobody. He had closed out a year of his quaestorship at Lilybaeum busying himself with grain — the humblest of the trades Rome entrusted to its ambitious young men — and before setting off again he wished to see Syracuse, of which men spoke at Rome as of a marvel buried beneath its own plunder. He asked after the sepulchre of the great geometer. The greater part of the Syracusans had no idea what he was speaking of. Some even denied that a sepulchre had ever existed: the honours the city had voted to the man who had defended her had ended, they said, like everything else, in the sack.

He walked through a city that had once been, even the conquerors said, the greatest of the Greek cities and the fairest of all, and that now wore its sacking as an old woman wears the jewels of a better time — still in their place, but frayed, dimmed, sitting a little crooked on the shoulders. The quarters all remained: the island clasped in its embrace of water, the upper city, the theatres, the walls climbing to the heights. All that was missing, Cicero thought as he walked, was the memory of those who had made them great before they became merely great to look at.

Cicero did not surrender to that shared shame — the shame of a people that stops remembering who had made it worthy of being remembered. He went out by one of the city's gates, toward the ancient tombs ranged outside the walls like teeth in an old mouth, and he sought not a name but a figure: they had told him that on the column were carveda sphere within a cylinder1, and beneath it, some verses now illegible, eaten away by the rain and by time.

He found it among the bramble-thickets of blackberry that no one had cut in decades, small, all but sunk into the earth. He parted the thorns with his hands, so it is said — and I believe it, for it is the only gesture worthy of the scene: a man stooping into the mud for a dead man whom his own city had let fall twice, first beneath the sword and then beneath oblivion.

He found the sphere. He found the cylinder. He had no need to read the verses to know who lay buried there: the sign was enough. Beneath the brambles of a province the Romans reckoned a granary to be squeezed, there rested the most exact monument a man had ever asked for himself — not a face, not a name in large letters, but a ratio between two solids, the one thing, out of a whole life, that this man had judged worthy of surviving him.

He summoned, so the story goes, the leading citizens of Syracuse to see what he, a foreigner and a quaestor passing through, had found without a single one of them showing him the way. He did not reproach them: he had no need. The fact alone was enough, set out in silence among the cut brambles — a Roman restoring to the Syracusans their own dead man — for someone to lower his eyes. He had the tomb cleared. He had nothing new carved: it was enough for him that what was already there should become visible again.

Five years later, that same quaestor would return to Sicily — no longer to count grain, but to gather the grievances of an entire province against a governor who had plundered it as a master plunders a house he knows he will never have to give back. And in a Roman court, to shame that man — his name was Gaius Verres — Cicero drew from the memory of his listeners not his own visit to the tomb, which he perhaps kept to himself, but an older and better-known story: that of the general who had taken Syracuse two generations before, and who, it was said,

requisisse etiam dicitur Archimedem illum, summo ingenio hominem ac disciplina, quem cum audisset interfectum permoleste tulisse2 — Marcus Claudius Marcellus. The very man who had wept.

Cicero let his breath fall for an instant, then drove the blow home:iste omnia quae requisivit, non ut conservaret verum ut asportaret requisivit3. Two men had sought Archimedes across time. One to mourn him. The other, fifty years later, to steal him anew — not the body, dust now beneath his sphere, but all that remained around him: the statues, the vases, even a likeness of Jupiter that Marcellus, armed and victorious,

M. Marcellus armatus et victor viderat, quod religioni concesserat4 — had not touched. Verres removed it from the temple without anything, in him, yielding to anything.

Of all this — of the weeping of a Roman general for an old Greek who had never once grasped a sword — there remain today a few lines in an oration written for a wholly different purpose: to humiliate a thief before a jury. Archimedes appears there in passing, an anecdote in support of a plea about stolen Corinthian vases. Not even Cicero, who granted him that line of pity, believed he was writing for him. He was writing against Verres. Archimedes was already, by then, an argument: it was only a matter of loading him well.

Nor is this book, perhaps, innocent. Here too Archimedes serves a purpose: to say that a man always exceeds his index-card, that a life brims over any definition that would contain it. It is a good argument, the best one can make with him — but it remains an argument, and he remains the instrument by which it is proved. Perhaps this is the fate of one who loved an incorporeal thing more than his own fame: to be forever used to say something else, and never, himself, to be able to answer.

Eighteen hundred years after the first compiler of this book — the one who wrotegéomètre, who wrotekilled, and passed at once to the next entry — a young apprentice named Damon, had he lived so long, would have recognized in those eleven words very little of the master who armed the machines each night while by day he traced circles that neither army knew how to read. But that same dictionary, elsewhere, betrayed itself.

In the pages that precede the letter A — in the discourse with which the compiler apologizes in advance for all that the alphabet is about to flatten — the pen slipped from his hand a first time:De tous les grands hommes de l'antiquité, Archimede est peut-être celui qui mérite le plus d'être placé à côté d'Homere.5 A digression, he apologized straightaway. He did not delete it. And it happened to him again, many pages further on, far from his own alphabetical voice — under the entryATTENTION, between a Montmort and a Clavius, among the geometers who had learned to concentrate through long practice. There, almost by chance, the last morning resurfaced:qui ne s'apperçut ni du sac de sa patrie, ni de l'entrée du soldat furieux dans son cabinet, qu'il prit sans doute pour quelqu'un de ses domestiques, puisqu'il lui recommanda de ne pas déranger ses cercles.6 The dictionary that had disposed of him in eleven words did not know it had just contradicted itself.

A century later another dictionary, that of Daremberg and Saglio, did not grant him even the eleven words: it catalogued temples, arms, coins, institutions — not men — and so Archimedes had, this second time, not even an entry of his own from which to be disposed of. He appeared only in passing, on loan beneath others' entries. UnderArithmétique, someone paused to tell in full the game of the sand:Archimède a écrit un petit traité (ὁ Ψαμμίτης, — dans les traductions latines : De numero arenae) qui nous est parvenu, sur le nombre de grains de sable que pourrait contenir une sphère qui aurait pour diamètre la distance de la terre aux étoiles fixes7 — the very calculation written in Doric for a boy named Gelon, now expounded in French to readers who will never know the name of that child-king. And it closed, almost in spite of itself, with a line that no other entry in the same dictionary grants to anyone:du peuple subtil dont Archimède est la plus grande gloire scientifique8.

Among the neighbouring entries, in alphabetical order, ARCHIMEDES remained wedged like a man in a queue he had not chosen: before him, perhaps, the architecture of a city that was not his; after him, some ardour of poets who would never have read him. The compiler was not to blame: he was plying his trade, which is to put things in order, and order needs but a single line per man, not seventy-two years. But a line, however honest, does not contain a breath. It contains a dead man already seated on the right shelf.

Eleven words opened this book. There remain, at the end, more or less as many — those of one dictionary, then of another, each convinced it was correcting the last, each guilty of the same cut: to remember the man for the endless screw and for the burning mirror he perhaps never built, not for the sentence with which, as a young man, he had promised a child-king to count the sand of the whole world —ταῦτα δέ, βασιλεῦ Γέλων9 — nor for the other, the one the soldiers told one another for centuries around the fires, the last he uttered, in a Doric the legionary could not recognize, to a shadow that fell across his diagram:μή μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε10.

The compiler could not know what a circle was, to such a man: he had counted them by the thousand in the sand of his own courtyard, before that sand became the field of a battle, and then, forever, the earth of a garden shut outside the walls — beneath a stone that two centuries had sufficed to hide, and a quaestor still without fame, fortunately, to find again.

He had not believed it on the authority of a king, nor for the astonishment of a crowd on the quay, nor because Archimedes said so. He had written once, to a boy who would later be king, that a true thing is trueδιὰ τὰν ἀπόδειξιν11 — and no dictionary, no soldier, no century that forgets a tomb can strip a circle of the right to remain true even when everyone falls silent.

Between the comma and the full stop of eleven words, between the sphere and the cylinder of a forgotten tomb, between a child-king to whom he had promised the sand of the world and a soldier who did not know how to wait — there was, there still is, a man who was counting.

The book closes here. The breath does not.