Archimedes, the most famous mathematician of classical antiquity, was killed in 212 BC, as a small piece of collateral damage in the Roman sack of the Greek city of Syracuse. Syracuse itself was a rather larger piece of collateral damage, having picked the wrong side in Rome's second war with Carthage. It was not a good year for the ancient Greek cities of the western Mediterranean. Hannibal, still prowling around southern Italy picking off Roman allies, attacked the city of Tarentum. The operation was botched. The Roman garrison held onto the citadel and then itself sacked the lower city. As the Second Punic War drew to a close, Rome was poised to leap across the Adriatic. By the middle of the second century Carthage and Corinth would both be smouldering ruins. Archimedes' contemporaries must have felt the net already closing around them.

LRB 18 November 2010 | PDF Download