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MARY JAEGER. Archimedes and the Roman Imagination. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. xiii + 230 pp. cloth, $65.
What classical scholar is not familiar with one or more anecdotes of Archimedes' life? Few will not be able to recall the story of how this Greek mathematician invented a method for determining the volume of an object with an irregular shape while taking a bath and, excited by his new discovery, took to the streets naked crying, "Eureka!" Few will be ignorant of how Archimedes single-handedly repelled Marcellus' attack on syracuse with his war engines and eventually was killed by a roman soldier during the sack of the city while still working on one of his theorems. yet, classicists' acquaintance with and interest in Archimedes does not seem to go much beyond this summary knowledge of these few anecdotes.
For all his intellectual brilliance, Archimedes is a marginal figure in classical studies. He is a sort of outsider in a field that for a long time has been (and still is) largely interested in those historical characters who neatly fit one of the two following categories: writers (e.g., poets, historians, philosophers, orators) and statesmen. it is one of the great merits (but surely not the only one) of Jaeger's new book to have brought Archimedes to the forefront of classical studies. To be sure, Jaeger does not attempt to write a new biography of this Greek mathematician and inventor or to ascertain the historicity of the tradition about Archimedes. As she rightly points out, what we know about Archimedes' life is meager, anecdotal, and has, at best, a tenuous relationship to the reality of Archimedes's life. rather, in her book, she traces the biography of the figure of Archimedes from the Hellenistic age through late antiquity and up to its rediscovery by Petrarch. in this journey, she uses the figure of Archimedes as represented by various roman and Geek authors as a sort of hermeneutic tool which gives insight not into the real man but rather into the works of those authors who contributed to the creation of such a figure. she does not simply extract the stories which form the "Life of Archimedes" from the narrative contexts in which they appear. she returns...