A Gladiator Dies Only Once (12 page)

“Ah, but now that we’ve found one another here in a strange city, you must stay with me for a while, Gordianus.” Cicero sounded sincere, but then, all politicians do. I suspected the invitation for an extended stay was merely a polite gesture. “What a remarkable livelihood you have,” he went on, “hunting down murderers and scoundrels. Of course, one hardly meets a better class of people, being in government service, especially in the provinces. Ah, but here’s Tiro!”

Cicero’s young secretary gave me a smile and mussed Eco’s hair as he passed behind our couches. Eco pretended to take offense and put up his fists like a boxer. Tiro indulged him and did likewise. Tiro had an affable, unassuming nature. I had always found him easier to deal with, and to like, than his master.

“What is it, Tiro?” said Cicero.

“Your other three guests have arrived, Master. Shall I show them in?”

“Yes. Tell the kitchen slaves that they can bring out the first course as soon as we’re all settled.” Cicero turned back to me. “I hardly know these fellows myself. I was told by friends in Lilybaeum that I should meet them while I was here in Syracuse. Dorotheus and Agathinus are important businessmen, partners in a shipping firm. Margero is said to be a poet, or what passes for a poet in Syracuse nowadays.”

Despite his disdainful tone, Cicero made a great show of welcoming his guests as they entered the room, springing up from his couch and extending his arms to give them a politician’s embrace. He could hardly have been more unctuous had they been a trio of undecided voters back in Rome.

The meal, much of it harvested from the sea, was excellent, and the company more genial than Cicero had led me to expect. Dorotheus was a heavyset, round-faced man with a great black beard and a booming voice. He joked continually during the meal, and his good humor was contagious; Eco particularly succumbed to it, often joining his own odd but charming bray to Dorotheus’s pealing laughter. From certain bits of conversation that passed between Dorotheus and his business partner, I gathered that both men had cause to be in high spirits, having recently struck some very lucrative deals. Agathinus, however, was more restrained than his partner; he smiled and laughed quietly at Dorotheus’s jokes, but said little. Physically, he was quite the opposite of Dorotheus as well, a tall, slender man with a narrow face, a slit of a mouth, and a long nose. They seemed a perfect example of how a successful partnership can sometimes result from the union of two markedly different natures.

The third Syracusan, Margero, certainly looked and played the part of a pensive Greek poet. He was younger than his wealthy companions and quite handsome, with ringlike curls across his forehead, heavy lips, and a dark-browed, moody countenance. I gathered that his verses were quite fashionable at the moment in Syracusan intellectual circles, and I sensed that he was more an ornament than a friend to the two businessmen. He seldom laughed, and showed no inclination to recite from his poems, which was probably for the best, considering Cicero’s snobbishness. For his part, Cicero only occasionally struck a patronizing tone.

There was talk of business regarding the port of Syracuse and the Sicilian grain harvest, talk of the season’s dramatic festivals at the old Greek theater in the city, talk of the current fashions among the Syracusan women (who always lagged a few years behind the women of Rome, as Cicero felt obliged to point out). Much of the conversation was in Greek, and Eco, whose Greek was limited, inevitably grew restless; eventually I dismissed him, knowing he would find the conversation much more fascinating if he could eavesdrop from the kitchen with Tiro.

Eventually, over fresh cups of wine after the final course of savory onions stewed in honey with mustard seeds, Cicero steered the conversation to the past. He had spent his year in Sicily making himself an expert on the island’s long and tumultuous history, and seemed quite pleased at the chance to demonstrate his knowledge to a native audience. Little by little his voice fell into a speechifying rhythm that invited no interruption. What he had to say was fascinating—I had never heard so many gruesome details of the great slave revolts that wracked Sicily in the previous generation—but after a while I could see that his Syracusan guests were growing as restless as Eco.

Cicero grew especially impassioned when he turned to Hiero, the ruler of Syracuse during its golden age. “Now there was a ruler, an example to all the other Hellenic tyrants who reigned over the Greek cities in his day. But then, you must know all about the glory of Hiero’s reign, Margero.”

“Must I?” said Margero, blinking and clearing his throat like a man awakening from a nap.

“Being a poet, I mean. Theocritus—his sixteenth idyll,” Cicero prompted.

Margero merely blinked again.

“The sixteenth idyll of Theocritus,” said Cicero, “the poem in which he extols the virtues of Hiero’s reign and looks forward to his ultimate victory over Carthage. Surely you know the poem.”

Margero blinked his heavy lashes and shrugged.

Cicero frowned disapprovingly, then forced a smile. “I mean those verses, of course, which begin,

“This is ever the business of Muses, of poets,
to sing praise to gods, to sing hymns to heroes. . .

“Surely, Margero . . .?”

The young poet stirred himself. “It is
vaguely
familiar.” Dorotheus laughed softly. Agathinus’s thin lips compressed into a smile. I realized that Margero was having Cicero on.

Cicero, oblivious, prompted him with more lines:

“Bravely the men of Syracuse grip their spears
and lift up their wickerwork shields.

Among them Hiero girds himself like a hero of old,
with a lion’s head atop his helmet.”

“Horsehair,” Margero grunted.

“What’s that?”

“‘With a
plume of horsehair
atop his helmet,’” said Margero, indolently raising an eyebrow. “Lion’s head, indeed!”

Cicero reddened. “Yes, you’re right—‘with a plume of horsehair . . .’ Then you
do
know the poem.”

“Slightly,” allowed Margero. “Of course, Theocritus was just blowing hot air to try to get Hiero’s favor. He was a poet without a patron at that particular moment; thought he might enjoy the climate here in Syracuse, so he dashed off an idyll to get Hiero’s attention. Figured the tyrant might be shopping for an epic poet to record his victories over Carthage, so he sent some sycophantic scribbles by way of applying for the post. A pity Hiero didn’t take him up on the offer—too busy killing Carthaginians, I suppose. So Theocritus dashed off another encomium, to King Ptolemy in Alexandria, and landed a job scribbling on the Nile instead. A pity, how we poets are always at the whim of the rich and powerful.”

This was more than Margero had said all evening. Cicero eyed him uncertainly. “Ah, yes. Be that as it may, Hiero did drive back the Carthaginians, whether any poets were there to record it or not, and we remember him as a great ruler, in Rome, anyway. And of course, among educated men, his friend Archimedes is even more famous.” Cicero looked for a nod from his guests, but the three of them only stared back at him dumbly.

“Archimedes, the mathematician,” he prompted. “Not a philosopher, to be sure, but still among the great minds of his time. He was Hiero’s right-hand man. A thinker in the abstract, mostly, consumed with the properties of spheres and cylinders and cubic equations, but quite a hand at engineering catapults and war machines when he set himself to it. They say that Hiero couldn’t have driven the Carthaginians from Sicily without him.”

“Ah,” said Agathinus dryly,
“that
Archimedes. I thought you meant Archimedes the fishmonger, that bald fellow with a stall on the wharves.”

“Oh, is the name really that common?” Cicero seemed on the verge of apprehending that he was being mocked, but pressed on, determined to lecture his Syracusan guests about the most famous Syracusan who ever lived. “I refer, of course, to the Archimedes who said, ‘Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth,’ and demonstrated as much to Hiero in miniature by inventing pulleys and levers by which the king was able to move a dry-docked ship by a mere flick of his wrist; the Archimedes who constructed an extraordinary clockwork mechanism of the sun, moon, and five planets in which the miniature spheres all moved together in exact accordance with their celestial models; the Archimedes who is perhaps most famous for the solution he devised to the problem of the golden crown of Hiero.”

“Ah, now you are bound to lose me,” said Dorotheus. “I’ve never had a head for logic and mathematics. Remember, Agathinus, how our old tutor used to have weeping fits, trying to get me to understand Pythagoras and all that?”

“Ah, but the principle of the golden crown is quite simple to explain,” said Cicero brightly. “Do you know the story?”

“In a vague, general, roundabout way,” said Dorotheus, with laughing eyes.

“I’ll make the tale brief,” promised Cicero. “It seems that Hiero gave a certain weight of gold to an artisan, with a commission to make him a crown. Soon enough, the man returned with a splendid gold crown. But Hiero heard a rumor that the artisan had pilfered some of the gold, and had substituted silver for the core of the crown. It weighed the correct amount, but was the crown made of solid gold or not? The piece was exquisitely crafted, and Hiero hated to damage it, but he could think of no way to determine its composition short of melting it down or cutting into it. So he called on Archimedes, who had helped him with so many problems in the past, and asked if he could find a solution.

“Archimedes thought and thought, but to no avail. Gold was heavier than silver, that much he knew, and a blind man could tell the two apart by weighing them in his hands; but how could one tell if a given object was made of silver covered with gold? They say that Archimedes was sitting in a tub at the baths, noticing how the level of the water rose and fell as the bathers got in and out, when the solution suddenly came to him. He was so excited that he jumped from the tub and ran naked through the streets, shouting,
‘Eureka! Eureka!’
—’I have found it! I have found it!’ ”

Dorotheus laughed. “All the world knows that part of the tale, Cicero. And for better or worse, that’s how the world pictures Archimedes—as an absentminded old genius.”

“A
naked
absentminded old genius,” Agathinus amended tartly.

“Not a pretty picture,” said Margero. “A man of a certain age should know better than to subject others to his bony nakedness, even in private.” It seemed to me that he shot a caustic look at Agathinus, who stared straight ahead. I realized that the two of them had hardly said a word to each other or exchanged a glance all night.

“Gentlemen, we digress,” said Cicero. “The point of the story is the solution that Archimedes devised.”

“Ah, now this is the part that I’ve never been quite able to follow,” said Dorotheus, laughing.

“But it’s really quite simple,” Cicero assured him. “This is what Archimedes did. He took an amount of gold of a certain weight—a single Roman uncia, let’s say. He placed the uncia of gold in a vessel of water, and marked how high the waterline rose. Then he took an uncia of silver, placed it in the same vessel, and marked the water-line. Being a lighter substance, the uncia of silver was larger than the uncia of gold, and so displaced more water, and thus caused a higher waterline. Then Archimedes took the crown and, knowing the exact number of uncias of gold that Hiero had given the artisan, calculated how high it should cause the waterline to rise. If the waterline rose higher than expected, then the crown could not be made of solid gold, and must contain some material of greater volume per uncia, such as silver. Sure enough, the crown displaced more water than it should have. The artisan, his deception discovered, confessed to having covered a silver crown with gold.”

“I see,” said Dorotheus slowly and without irony. A light seemed genuinely to dawn in his eyes. “Do you know, Cicero, I have never before been able to grasp Archimedes’s principle.”

“Ah, but you should. It can be of great practical use to a man dealing in payments and commodities, as you do.”

“Yes, I can see that,” said Dorotheus, nodding thoughtfully.

Cicero smiled. “You see, it’s really simple, as most basic principles are. But it takes a man like Archimedes to discover such principles in the first place.” He gazed at his wine by the lamplight. “But absentminded he certainly was, always drifting into his world of pure geometry. At the baths, they say, he would even use himself as a tablet, drawing geometrical shapes in the massage oil on his belly.”

This image pleased Dorotheus, who slapped his own belly and laughed heartily. Even Agathinus grinned. Margero merely raised an eyebrow.

“Thus Archimedes met his death as absentmindedly absorbed in mathematics as ever,” said Cicero. “But I’m sure you all know the story of his end already . . .”

“Vaguely,” allowed Agathinus.

“Oh, but you must enlighten us,” said Dorotheus.

“Very well, if you insist. After Hiero died, the Romans occupied Sicily, to keep it as a bulwark against Carthage. On the day that Syracuse was taken by the general Marcellus, Archimedes was on the beach, working out a theorem by drawing figures with a stick in the sand, when a troop of Roman soldiers came marching up. Archimedes, who didn’t even know that the city had been taken, took no notice until the soldiers began to tramp across his drawings. He made a rude remark—”

“He suggested that they all go copulate with their mothers, as I recall,” said Margero, smiling languidly.

Cicero cleared his throat. “At any rate, one of the soldiers flew into a rage and killed Archimedes on the spot.”

“I had no idea that a preoccupation with mathematics could be so dangerous,” quipped Agathinus, straight-faced.

“At least Archimedes knew how to mind his own business,” said Margero quietly. Again, I thought I saw him glare at Agathinus, who showed no reaction.

Cicero ignored the interruption. “When the Roman general learned of the tragedy, he was mortified, of course. He ordered a grand funeral procession and the construction of an elaborately ornamented tomb inscribed with the greatest of Archimedes’s theorems and decorated with sculptures of the forms whose properties he discovered—the sphere, the cone, the cylinder, and so on. I say—where is the tomb of Archimedes? I should like to see it while I’m here.”