I.5 The Pact that Ends
The wind of which we have already spoken — the one that since winter had blown toward Carthage without ever changing direction again — took less than two years to become a tempest. It took, to be precise, little more than a season: the time it takes a boy to learn to have himself called tyrant, and a city to decide it would not endure it.
The first conspiracy failed, and in failing did more harm than a success would have. Denounced by a palace informer, it yielded but a single name: Theodotus, the man who had recruited the others. He was handed over to Adranodorus for torture, and he held out as long as a body can hold out; then he lied. He did not name a true accomplice: he said the plot's author was Thraso — the only one, among the young king's counsellors, who still spoke in favour of Rome — and the tyrant, who wished to believe it, believed it at once. Thraso was put to death, along with others as innocent as he.
As for the true conspirators, while Theodotus was being torn apart for days, so great was their trust in his courage and his loyalty, and so great the strength he himself found to keep the secret1, that none went into hiding or fled. And once Thraso was removed, who was the only bond remaining with the Roman alliance, the situation without doubt tended at once toward the break2. A lie told under torture, to save the guilty, had killed the one man who might have stopped them.
The second conspiracy did not fail. It had no need of betrayals or of tribunals: only of a narrow street and a pretext. A mere handful of conspirators sufficed: they took vacant houses that overlooked the narrow lane by which the king was accustomed to go down to the forum, and they were almost all, as it happened, soldiers3. To one of them, who was the king's personal bodyguard and was named Dinomenes, a slight task was entrusted: to feign that his sandal had come unfastened, and so hold back a few paces the rest of the retinue, while the king, for a moment, walked on ahead alone.
That moment was enough. When the assault was launched against the king as he passed with no armed men about him, he was pierced by many wounds before help could reach him4. The guards fled, as soon as they saw the king stretched upon the ground5. No god, no thunderbolt, none of the portents the chroniclers love to tell: a boy in the street, on an ordinary weekday, killed as he walked toward the market like anyone else in Syracuse. It was, of all his brief reign, the only moment in which he resembled his grandfather.
The city rejoiced a whole afternoon — then discovered that freedom, no sooner regained, did not know to whom it belonged. Adranodorus, who for the old king had kept the keys of the Citadel, tried to keep them for the new order as well; but an informer betrayed him, and the new praetors, having set a guard at the gates, killed Themistus and Adranodorus the moment they entered the senate-house6. Conspirators and executioners exchanged roles from one week to the next, and a chronicler who saw it all left written a sentence that holds for every public square: the multitude either serves humbly or lords it with arrogance; freedom, which lies in the middle, it knows neither how to build with measure nor how to keep7. In a few weeks Syracuse burned through two governments, until the square — which by now knew how to shout only names, no longer arguments — shouted the last two: Hippocrates and Epicydes. They made them praetors. With them, what Hieronymus had only whispered — and what Thraso, dead in another man's place, was no longer alive to prevent — became edict: Syracuse turned its back on Rome, and its face to Carthage.
To Rome the news arrived as news from Sicily always arrives: late, and already changed twice along the way. The senate wasted no time lamenting the ingratitude of a city that for fifty years had called Rome friend. It simply decided: they decree that province to Marcus Marcellus, one of the two consuls8.
They called him, in the barracks more than in the books, the Sword of Rome. It was true, and it was a small truth: by nature a lover of war, and in conflicts full of impetuosity and ardour; but for the rest a modest man, humane, and so devoted to Greek studies that he honoured and admired those who excelled in them9, although his duties had never allowed him to attain, in those studies, the competence he would have wished. Here was a man who would have liked to have time for geometry, and had never had it, sent against a man who had all the time in the world for geometry and wanted nothing else. Rome, that winter, did not yet know it: it had merely assigned a good province to a good general, because Syracuse was in turmoil after the death of the tyrant Hieronymus10, and it was the kind of turmoil for which one sends armies, not letters.
So two wills, without yet knowing it, began to walk one toward the other: that of an old man who wished only to count, and that of a soldier who wished only to win well.
Appius Claudius, who already commanded the legions landed in Sicily, would march by land: to him the patient labour of the siege, the mud, the trenches, the name the books are the first to forget. To Marcellus, from the sea, would fall the honour — or the burden, it was not yet clear which of the two — of being remembered as the one who took the city.
In the courtyard, the sand was still the same as ever. It was Damon — the youngest of the workshop, the one who sharpened the instruments without ever fully grasping the demonstrations, yet ready to walk through fire to defend them — who opened the gate, that morning, to the two men sent by the new government: not the courteous ambassadors of the days when it was a matter of ships and wonder, but functionaries with the pinched brows of men who have done their sums badly and must now redo them in haste.
They were asking the geometer to leave the sand. To think of the walls.
It was not, in truth, an entirely new request. Years before, old Hiero — the true one, the patient one — had had built, at his own expense and with his own care, over many years, with the singular art of Archimedes11, engines that still slept dismantled in the arsenals of Achradina12: levers, counterweights, ropes drawn taut by force that by now no one else knew how to draw taut any longer. They were not asking him to invent. They were asking him to wake them.
Archimedes listened without rising from his stool. Before him he had three circles, and a fourth that still did not come out right. He answered that machines, unlike theorems, were never true twice in the same way: the enemy changed, the wind changed, even the machine changed. A circle remained a circle even at Carthage. Then he rose all the same.
Many centuries later, one who would truly have wished to understand him wrote of him a sentence that is already, in two lines, the whole tragedy of this book: Archimedes is erat, unicus spectator caeli siderumque, mirabilior tamen inuentor ac machinator bellicorum tormentorum operumque13. Unicus — unmatched —, and then, immediately after that mirabilior tamen, more admired for the other thing. Even his contemporaries, it seems, already knew in what order they would remember him.
At the unfixed dawn of a day of that spring, a sentry upon Euryalus, or perhaps only a fisherman coming home late, saw the horizon do a thing the horizon never does: fill with sails. The wall of Achradina, washed by the sea as has already been said, Marcellus assaulted with sixty quinqueremes14. Sixty ships of war, laden with weapons and missiles of every sort, like one who comes to an appointment bringing all that he possesses, certain it will be enough.
From the land, the walls of Syracuse did not stir. In a courtyard behind those walls, an old man raised his eyes from the sand only once, watched the sea turn white with hulls, and went back to counting.
The compiler, under the entry SYRACUSE, would not have recorded the duration of the siege that on that morning began in earnest. Almost two years: the time — no one could yet know it — barely enough for an old man to finish counting how much of it remained to him, and not a grain more.