I.4 The Death of the King

The wind, that autumn, took to changing without warning: in the morning it rose from the Great Harbour1 gentle as ever, and in the early afternoon it veered round from the Little Harbour2, dry, almost put out. Archimedes noticed it first as a geometer — an angle that would not close, a symmetry betrayed — and only later, with an irritation he did not like to acknowledge, as a citizen: something in the city was turning its back on something else, and the sea, which usually did no more than mirror her, that year seemed to run ahead of her.

The king who for half a century had governed that wind — peace bought by dint of patience, tribute paid in advance, smiles turned always to the right quarter — was going out. Hiero was near his ninetieth year, and the court guarded him like a fire that must not die before its appointed time. It was no easy thing, now close upon his ninetieth year and besieged night and day by the blandishments of women, to free his mind and turn it to the public care3. His daughters wanted the royal name upon the brow of their grandson, and the true government in the hands of their husbands; the old man, who in seventy years of reign had never chosen in haste, for the last thing of all would have wished to choose alone: to leave Syracuse free4, so that a kingdom built up and consolidated by honest art should not perish, mocked, under a boy's dominion5.

Archimedes had never believed it was affection, that half-century of peace. Hiero loved Rome no more than he loved his own old age: he had done the reckoning — what a war costs, what peace yields — and had chosen the smaller sum, with the same coldness with which a geometer chooses, between two hypotheses that explain the same phenomenon, the simpler. For this he had been the one man of power Archimedes had truly respected: he reasoned.

He did not manage it in time. Or perhaps he lacked the courage: to free a city is to cease being its father, and fathers, as everyone knows, always put off the last decision.

There was, in that postponed decision, an absence the old man had already carried for a season, and which Archimedes too carried, more silently. The boy of the tribune — the one to whom he had once written ταῦτα δέ, βασιλεῦ Γέλων6, the one who should have inherited not a throne but a number — was already under the earth.

Gelon had grown up, and in growing had learned to grow impatient. After Cannae, when the fortune of Rome seemed to have overturned for good, scorning at once his father's old age and the Roman alliance, he had gone over to the Carthaginians7, and had begun to arm men with an urgency that to Hiero looked like insolence and that was perhaps only the haste of one who fears he may die before he reigns. He would have thrown Sicily into turmoil, had a death — so opportune as to cast a shadow of suspicion even upon his father — not overtaken him just as he was arming a multitude and soliciting allies8.

So the historian wrote it, many years after, with the caution of one who knows that a shadow is not a proof. Archimedes, who lived by proofs, never knew what to make of it. A theorem is demonstrated or refuted; an opportune death is neither demonstrated nor refuted — it stays there, suspended between father and son, like a question no compass can close. For once in his life, before an enigma, he had no desire to solve it. He preferred, quite simply, to go on mourning the boy, and to leave the man — the man who had betrayed, perhaps killed, perhaps only waited too long to reign — to history, which feeds on such things better than he does.

Then, in the winter, it was Hiero's turn as well. There was no battle, no certain poison, nothing that merited a verse: only an old man who stops breathing in the room where he had already chosen his own guardians. He left the boy fifteen tutors, and besought them, in dying, to keep inviolate toward the Roman people that fidelity which he himself had cultivated for fifty years9. Fifty years. Archimedes was seventy-two: he had known Hiero king for almost the whole of his own adult life, and that figure — quinquaginta annos — rang truer to him than any epitaph.

The funeral was regal, renowned more for the love and affection of the citizens than for the care of his own kin10. It was no courtiers' hyperbole: Archimedes saw the true crowd, unsummoned, that followed the bier as far as Ortygia. Rome herself, in more fortunate years, had sent him gifts and called him friend and ally11; now the friend and the ally were shut in the same coffin, and no one in Syracuse yet knew whether the word ally would outlive the king who had borne it for half a century.

The will was read in assembly, and the boy — he was then almost fifteen years old12 — was led before the people that they might approve it. Few applauded, drilled to do so; the many kept silent, as one keeps silent in a house that has just lost its father and does not yet know who will pay his debts.

For seventy years Syracuse had lived an anomaly of which no one, while it lasted, had been aware enough: for so many years they had seen them, Hiero and his son Gelon, no different from the other citizens either in the fashion of their dress or by any other mark13. A king dressed like anyone, seated in the market like anyone: the nearest thing, perhaps, to that incorporeal equality which theorems grant to all without looking anyone in the face. Then they saw the purple, the diadem, the armed guards; and sometimes they saw him come out of the palace on a four-horse chariot of white steeds, in the manner of the tyrant Dionysius14.

Among the newcomers to the palace, two names soon passed from mouth to mouth in the agora: born at Carthage but descended from a grandfather exiled from Syracuse, Carthaginians themselves on the mother's side15. Hippocrates and Epicydes had come as ambassadors of Hannibal, and had never left again: through their agency an alliance was struck between Hannibal and the tyrant of Syracuse, and they remained with him, not against Hannibal's will16. The tyrant. The Roman historian would never have called Hiero so, in fifty years; for Hieronymus a few months sufficed.

Archimedes was not in the square to see it. He no longer went to the square, not since they had forced him to move a ship in order to be applauded; if he wished to know what was happening in the city, it was the city herself that brought it to him in the workshop, on a boy's shoulders. It was Damon, the youngest of his own — the one who sharpened his instruments and never quite grasped the demonstrations but would have walked through fire to defend them — who told him of the white chariot, imitating without meaning to, with his hands, the way the new king held his chin raised. "He looks like a god," said Damon, not knowing whether it was admiration or disgust. "He looks like someone who has never counted for anything in his life," answered Archimedes, and turned back to the tray of sand.

It was the very coronation he himself had refused, that day on the mole, when the whole city was crying out his name for a ship that was nothing but lever and rope. Hieronymus, fifteen years old and not one demonstration behind him, had taken without hesitation what had been offered to Archimedes and what he had handed back with irritation: the splendour that proves nothing, and for that very reason convinces everyone.

The wind, that winter, stopped changing at random. It began to blow in a single direction, the one no one in Syracuse yet dared to name aloud: toward Carthage, toward the new counsellors who surrounded the boy with the too-large crown, toward a war that old Hiero had spent fifty years putting off with the sole weapon of patience. Archimedes, back in his courtyard, traced a circle in the sand and looked at it a long while, as if in that closed line he might still read something he could no longer see in the open city.

But a circle, however perfect, does not foretell the wind. This, of all the things he knew, was the one Archimedes had never claimed to demonstrate.