The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

Shortly after Archimedes’s masterful show in Syracuse harbor, however, the city faced the deadliest threat of all. There was a new regional power in the central Mediterranean basin, the imperial republic to the north: Rome. Breaking Syracuse to its will was the key to Rome’s hegemony over Sicily and the rest of Italy, and in 214 BCE an enormous Roman fleet and army gathered at the entrance to the harbor. Syracuse went to battle stations, and its most famous citizen, now in his seventies, sprang into action. The best description of what happened next is by the Greek historian Polybius. He wrote it not long after the siege of Syracuse, when some of the participants may still have been alive. He tells us how the Syracusans put Archimedes in charge of constructing their defenses and how he laid them out so that “they would have everything ready to hand, and could respond to any attack by the enemy with a countermove.”31 The Romans were hardly amateurs when it came to besieging cities. Their plan was a simultaneous land and sea assault, with boats equipped with massive mobile siege towers rowing up to storm Syracuse’s walls. However, as Polybius relates, “Archimedes had constructed artillery which could cover a whole variety of ranges, so that while the attacking ships were still at a distance he scored so many hits with his catapults and stone-throwers” that the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus had to call off the attack before his men reached the walls. On the landward...