III.1 The War All Around

That year, the war ceased to have days and began to have seasons.

One no longer counted by battles: one counted by lost harvests, by cities that changed masters as one changes a soiled garment, by numbers a chronicler would set down in a single line, and which, written out one by one, a whole life would not have sufficed to record. Within the walls, Syracuse had learned to measure time no longer in dawns but in tidings: yesterday's, today's, the one that would arrive tomorrow from some corner of the island where no one, a year before, would have expected his own fate to be decided.

Archimedes, so far as it depended on him, had kept both himself and the city unconquered. So, many years later, would the man who gathered the lives of illustrious men write it: Archimedes, then, being such a man, kept both himself and the city unconquered — so far as it depended on him.1 It was an honest phrase, and it was also a cruel one, for it admitted, in the very breath in which it praised him, that there remained a margin — vast, hostile, indifferent to geometry — that did not depend on him at all.

That margin had a name, and it was Sicily entire. In the course of the siege Marcellus took Megara, one of the most ancient cities of Sicily; he also took the camp of Hippocrates near Acrillae, and there killed more than eight thousand men, falling upon them as they were throwing up their rampart.2 Two sentences, a single breath of the biographer, for a summer and a half of iron.

Megara fell first, and it was not a siege but a punishment: taken by storm, Marcellus destroyed and plundered it, to strike terror into all the rest and above all into the Syracusans.3 He cared nothing for the city in itself — one of the most ancient of the Sicels, which had seen dynasties born and die when Rome was still a village of shepherds on the Tiber — but for the message its ruins would carry to the very gates of Syracuse: see what happens to those who resist.

The news reached the city that same evening, brought by a fisherman who at first had mistaken the smoke for an early sunset. Into Archimedes' courtyard it came later, brought by no one in particular, and it did not shift by a finger's breadth the hand that was raking the sand.

Then came Acrillae's turn, and there the punishment had a face: that of Hippocrates, hunted more than commanding, trying to bring to safety what remained to him of his army behind a rampart of earth. But a rampart is dug with the hands and the bent back, not with the drawn sword; and it was precisely as they were digging, scattered and unguarded like men who believe they still have time, that Marcellus found them. Having found them as they were pitching camp, disordered and scattered, and for the most part unarmed, being foot soldiers, he surrounded them; the cavalry, after a brief clash, fled with Hippocrates to Acrae.4 Unarmed not from cowardice, but because a man who digs does not grip together the spade and the sword. Hippocrates saved himself on horseback; his foot soldiers remained in the earth they were still turning to protect themselves, become all at once the first of their graves.

More than eight thousand. The biographer wrote it as one writes a storehouse total, and perhaps he was right: after the third thousand, even grief becomes arithmetic — the same arithmetic, Archimedes sometimes thought when the news reached him like a passing shadow, that he applied to the sand. Save that his asked for no tears, and that one did.

Then the consul turned his standards elsewhere: he traversed a great part of Sicily, drew cities away from the Carthaginians, and was everywhere victorious over those who dared to oppose him.5 The cities that had wagered on Carthage returned, one after another, to wager on Rome. Not out of love: for the same reason a drowning man clutches at the first beam, because it is there, and it is hard, and the rest is water.

The consul no longer had the air of the man who had landed two summers before with his sambucae and his rams, certain of taking Syracuse in an afternoon like any provincial town. He had learned — an old man with a compass had taught him, without meaning to — that one can win every battle and still lose the war against time; and now he won small battles, everywhere, with the stubborn patience of one who has ceased to seek the blow that decides everything and contents himself with the sum of a thousand lesser blows.

But time, it was soon discovered, spared no one — not even the man who had chosen it as a weapon.

The months of autumn came, and with autumn an enemy no machine of Archimedes could ever have struck, for it had no standards, no walls, stood nowhere in particular against which a stone might be aimed. To this was added pestilence, an affliction common to both sides, which easily turned men's minds from thoughts of war.6 Common: the word weighed more than any truce ever signed beneath those walls, for it said that for once the fever did not distinguish between the besiegers and the besieged.

The Latin chronicler, who usually counted armies and not single bodies, for that autumn made himself almost a physician; and with the same steady hand with which he had counted the talents of stone hurled against the sambucae, he wrote what no stone had ever done to any army: cotidianaque funera et mors ob oculos esset et undique dies noctesque ploratus audirentur.7.

Within the walls, in a courtyard the war had not yet found the way to reach, Archimedes still filled his cosmos with sand. Eight thousand dead at Acrillae were, for the number he was pursuing, less than a single grain. Less than the thousandth part of a grain. He knew it, and drew from it neither comfort nor horror: it was a fact, and facts — unlike men — do not ask to be mourned, only to be set in the right place in the order of magnitudes. He went on tracing his orders of myriads as though the walls of Syracuse were, they too, a hypothesis of Aristarchus: so distant, so still, as to be taken for eternal while one calculates what lies beyond.

It was Damon who brought him, that evening, the true temperature of the city — the one no consul writes in his dispatches. He was returning from the market of the Great Harbour8 with empty hands: fish cost as much as silver, the granaries had tightened, and for the first time he had seen unloaded from a ship not soldiers but the fevered, laid out like bales of cloth on the quay, some already covered to the face by those who no longer had the patience to wait for them to stop breathing before doing it.

"There are more of them every day," he said, setting down beside the stool a pitcher no one had asked him for. "And they are not all wounded by the sword. Many burn with fever, and there is no machine that heals them."

Archimedes lifted his gaze from the plane of sand for the space of a breath. "How many?" he asked. Not out of pity: from the same hunger for figures that had kept him bent over the courtyard for weeks.

Damon did not know. No one truly knew — and it was precisely this, thought the boy without being able to say it with such clarity, the kind of number his master could never have named: not because it was too great, but because it changed every night, and a number that changes is not a number. It is a wound still open.

Archimedes returned to the sand. Outside, autumn went on burning armies and cities with the same indifferent hand with which it burned the grain in the ungathered fields, because there was no longer anyone, that year, to reap it in time.

No one, in that season, could have said which of the two sieges lasted longer: the one Marcellus conducted against the walls, or the one time conducted against everyone, with no distinction of standards, with the same hand that had emptied Megara and filled the graves of Acrillae. Only one of the two, however, had a man who went on, every day, counting its extent a grain at a time. As though to count were a way of resisting; as though a number, once written, could no longer be lost — unlike a city, an army, a body left unburied because no one had the strength any longer to mourn it according to the rite.

Three lines: to that would be reduced, under the heading "Siège," an entire season — Megara destroyed, Acrillae won, "a great part of Sicily subdued." Three lines for eight thousand men and for a fever that had stopped counting its own dead one by one. Of the afternoon Archimedes spent, that same week, in proving to himself that the next order of myriads was written with a single letter more, the dictionary would know nothing: of room, for an afternoon, dictionaries have never had any. And yet it was that afternoon, and not Acrillae, the one thing of that autumn that has reached us intact.

Outside, Sicily changed its flag, city after city, and the dead accumulated in two armies that had ceased to be enemies only before the fever. Within, the sand waited to be counted to the very end. Neither of the two, that autumn, imagined which of the two patiences would be spent first — nor that what would decide the fate of Syracuse would be neither the one nor the other, but a feast, and a gate left open an hour too long.