Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/389

 the most abandoned lives. Such was the effect produced by his verses, that Lycambes and his daughters are said to have hanged themselves. At Thasos the poet passed some unhappy years; his hopes of wealth were disappointed; according to him, Thasos was the meeting-place of the calamities of all Hellas. The inhabitants were frequently involved in quarrels with their neighbours, and in a war against the Saians—a Thracian tribe—he threw away his shield and fled from the field of battle. He does not seem to have felt the disgrace very keenly, for, like Alcaeus and Horace, he commemorates the event in a fragment in which he congratulates himself on having saved his life, and says he can easily procure another shield. After leaving Thasos, he is said to have visited Sparta, but to have been at once banished from that city on account of his cowardice and the licentious character of his works (Valerius Maximus vi. 3, externa 1). He next visited Siris, in lower Italy, a city of which he speaks very favourably. He then returned to his native place, and was slain in a battle against the Naxians by one Calondas or Corax, who was cursed by the oracle for having slain a servant of the Muses.

The writings of Archilochus consisted of elegies, hymns—one of which used to be sung by the victors in the Olympic games (Pindar, Olympia, ix. i)—and of poems in the iambic and trochaic measures. To him certainly we owe the invention of iambic poetry and its application to the purposes of satire. The only previous measures in Greek poetry had been the epic hexameter, and its offshoot the elegiac metre; but the slow measured structure of hexameter verse was utterly unsuited to express the quick, light motions of satire. Archilochus made use of the iambus and the trochee, and organized them into the two forms of metre known as the iambic trimeter and the trochaic tetrameter. The trochaic metre he generally used for subjects of a serious nature; the iambic for satires. He was also the first to make use of the arrangement of verses called the epode. Horace in his metres to a great extent follows Archilochus (Epistles, i. 19. 23-35). All ancient authorities unite in praising the poems of Archilochus, in terms which appear exaggerated (Longinus xiii. 3; Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, xxxiii.; Quintilian x. i. 60; Cicero, Orator, i.). His verses seem certainly to have possessed strength, flexibility, nervous vigour, and, beyond everything else, impetuous vehemence and energy. Horace (Ars Poetica, 79) speaks of the “rage” of Archilochus, and Hadrian calls his verses “raging iambics.” By his countrymen he was reverenced as the equal of Homer, and statues of these two poets were dedicated on the same day.

His poems were written in the old Ionic dialect. Fragments in Bergk, Poetae Lyrici Graeci; Liebel, Archilochi Reliquiae (1818); A. Hauvette-Besnault, Archiloque, sa vie et ses poésies (1905).

ARCHIMANDRITE (from Gr. , a ruler, and  , a fold or monastery), a title in the Greek Church applied to a superior abbot, who has the supervision of several abbots and monasteries, or to the abbot of some specially great and important monastery, the title for an ordinary abbot being hegumenos. The title occurs for the first time in a letter to Epiphanius, prefixed to his Panarium (c. 375), but the Lausiac History of Palladius may be evidence that it was in common use in the 4th century as applied to (q.v.). In Russia the bishops are commonly selected from the archimandrites. The word occurs in the Regula Columbani (c. 7), and du Cange gives a few other cases of its use in Latin documents, but it never came into vogue in the West. Owing to intercourse with Greek and Slavonic Christianity, the title is sometimes to be met with in southern Italy and Sicily, and in Hungary and Poland.

ARCHIMEDES (c. 287–212 ), Greek mathematician and inventor, was born at Syracuse, in Sicily. He was the son of Pheidias, an astronomer, and was on intimate terms with, if not related to, Hiero, king of Syracuse, and Gelo his son. He studied at Alexandria and doubtless met there Conon of Samos, whom he admired as a mathematician and cherished as a friend, and to whom he was in the habit of communicating his discoveries before publication. On his return to his native city he devoted himself to mathematical research. He himself set no value on the ingenious mechanical contrivances which made him famous, regarding them as beneath the dignity of pure science and even declining to leave any written record of them except in the case of the  (Sphere-making), as to which see below. As, however, these machines impressed the popular imagination, they naturally figure largely in the traditions about him. Thus he devised for Hiero engines of war which almost terrified the Romans, and which protracted the siege of Syracuse for three years. There is a story that he constructed a burning mirror which set the Roman ships on fire when they were within a bowshot of the wall. This has been discredited because it is not mentioned by Polybius, Livy or Plutarch; but it is probable that Archimedes had constructed some such burning instrument, though the connexion of it with the destruction of the Roman fleet is more than doubtful. More important, as being doubtless connected with the discovery of the principle in hydrostatics which bears his name and the foundation by him of that whole science, is the story of Hiero’s reference to him of the question whether a crown made for him and purporting to be of gold, did not actually contain a proportion of silver. According to one story, Archimedes was puzzled till one day, as he was stepping into a bath and observed the water running over, it occurred to him that the excess of bulk occasioned by the introduction of alloy could be measured by putting the crown and an equal weight of gold separately into a vessel filled with water, and observing the difference of overflow. He was so overjoyed when this happy thought struck him that he ran home without his clothes, shouting , “I have found it, I have found it.” Similarly his pioneer work in mechanics is illustrated by the story of his having said  (or as another version has it, in his dialect,  ), “Give me a place to stand and I (will) move the earth.” Hiero asked him to give an illustration of his contention that a very great weight could be moved by a very small force. He is said to have fixed on a large and fully laden ship and to have used a mechanical device by which Hiero was enabled to move it by himself: but accounts differ as to the particular mechanical powers employed. The water-screw which he invented (see below) was probably devised in Egypt for the purpose of irrigating fields.

Archimedes died at the capture of Syracuse by Marcellus, 212 In the general massacre which followed the fall of the city, Archimedes, while engaged in drawing a mathematical figure on the sand, was run through the body by a Roman soldier. No blame attaches to the Roman general, Marcellus, since he had given orders to his men to spare the house and person of the sage; and in the midst of his triumph he lamented the death of so illustrious a person, directed an honourable burial to be given him, and befriended his surviving relatives. In accordance with the expressed desire of the philosopher, his tomb was marked by the figure of a sphere inscribed in a cylinder, the discovery of the relation between the volumes of a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder being regarded by him as his most valuable achievement. When Cicero was quaestor in Sicily (75 ), he found the tomb of Archimedes, near the Agrigentine gate, overgrown with thorns and briers. “Thus,” says Cicero (Tusc. Disp., v. c. 23, § 64), “would this most famous and once most learned city of Greece have remained a stranger to the tomb of one of its most ingenious citizens, had it not been discovered by a man of Arpinum.”

Works.—The range and importance of the scientific labours of Archimedes will be best understood from a brief account of those writings which have come down to us; and it need only be added that his greatest work was in geometry, where he so extended the method of exhaustion as originated by Eudoxus, and followed by Euclid, that it became in his hands, though purely geometrical in form, actually equivalent in several cases to integration, as expounded in the first chapters of our text-books on the integral calculus. This remark applies to the finding of the area of a parabolic segment (mechanical solution) and of a spiral, the surface and volume of a sphere and of a segment thereof, and the volume of any segments of the solids of revolution of the second degree.

The extant treatises are as follows:—

(1) On the Sphere and Cylinder ( ). This treatise is in two books, dedicated to Dositheus, and deals