The Logos Scripture · The Book of Archimedes

On the Thing I Want Cut in the Stone

The Book of Archimedes 4 · Written by himself, from The Method, The Sand Reckoner, On Floating Bodies and On the Sphere and Cylinder

Archimedes, born at Syracuse in Sicily about 287 before this era, died there in 212 — killed by a soldier on the day the Romans took the city. Mathematician and engineer. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: The Method, The Sand Reckoner, On Floating Bodies, On the Sphere and Cylinder, all cast as letters to men who really existed. The Method was scraped off in the middle ages and a prayer book written over the same parchment; in 1906 the older writing underneath was recognised at Constantinople, and only then did it come back. Chapter one is taken from it. Without that one recognition, no one would know how he found what he proved. Further: the doctrine of Aristarchus that the earth goes round the sun survives at all because chapter two of this book copied it down — and the man who copied it did not agree with it, and copied it only to take the largest figure available. The ancient accounts of his death do not agree with one another, and the Order does not take them. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: an ancient who set down not only the proof but the groping that came before it, and said plainly which part was weighed and which part was proved.

4.1In my life I have done some things people remember.
4.2During the siege I built certain engines. Men are still talking about those engines.
4.3I do not want those.
4.4What I want remembered is a thing of no use whatever.
4.5A sphere, set inside the cylinder that just contains it.
4.6The sphere is two thirds of that cylinder — so in solid content, and so also in surface.
4.7I was a long time proving it. It feeds nobody, holds no wall, saves no life.
4.8But it is true; and before I proved it, nobody knew that it was true.
4.9I have left word: when I am dead, cut on the stone a sphere and the cylinder round it, and beside them that ratio.
4.10I want a man passing by to see the stone, not understand it, and go and ask.
4.11Engines break. Cities fall. That ratio does not alter.
4.12I do not say engines do not matter. When men are hungry, engines matter.
4.13I say that a man who spends his life only on what matters will never prove the ratio of a sphere to a cylinder.
4.14And things of no use turn out useful later, often enough. I do not promise it of this one. I have only proved it.
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