It's the end of the third century before Christ. The city-state of Syracuse is a critical seaport in Rome's second war with Carthage. One of the ancient world's most beautiful cities, it is also the home of the famous Greek mathematician Archimedes. When Syracuse comes under Carthaginian control in 214 B.C., the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus storms the city with 40,000 soldiers and 60 warships, only to be confronted by the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever seen, all built and designed by Archimedes. The Roman army is turned back as though toy soldiers three separate times. Unwilling to concede, Marcellus blockades the city by land and sea, determined to starve Syracuse into submission. Timon Leonidas, an orphan of the war, is Archimedes' slave during the last three years of the mathematician's life and through the duration of the siege. Timon tells the story of a city held hostage from the perspective of a young Greek, privy to the political intrigue that boils around his master. When Syracuse finally falls, Marcellus' first concern is to secure its greatest asset, the aging mathematician. In one of the most poignant moments in all of history, a Roman soldier, certain the scientist is casting a hex, strikes Archimedes down as he sketches out a geometry problem. In his last moments, Archimedes gives his cherished slave a gift more powerful than any weapon used in the siege, but with the promise that it can only be revealed to save his life-a promise that becomes Timon's fate to break.

It's two hundred and ten years before the birth of Christ. Rome's second war with Carthage is in its eighth year. Hannibal's army, yet to know defeat, roams the Italian peninsula ravaging the farmland and pressuring Latin cities to abandon their loyalty to Rome. Marcus Claudius Marcellus, just back from a successful siege of Carthaginian controlled Syracuse, demands that the Roman Senate give him an army to confront the Carthaginian chieftain and finally force him out of Italy. Over the next two years, Marcellus and his two legions pursue Hannibal's army in a subtle game of cat and mouse-Hannibal seeking perfect ground for battle, Marcellus daring to challenge a man who has tricked one Roman general after another. Three times the two armies clash with no decisive outcome. Facing recall in Rome for his inability to finally defeat Hannibal, Marcellus vows before the People's Assembly to destroy Hannibal's army in the coming spring. Despite growing criticism from his enemies in the Senate, Marcellus is given one last chance to achieve what he believes is his destiny. Timon Leonidas, a Greek refugee from the war, travels with Marcellus and his army as a scribe and mapmaker through three tension-filled campaigns. Timon tells the tragic story of one of Rome's greatest field marshals, detailing Marcellus' political battles, his strained family life, and his obsessive quest for unparalleled glory on the battlefield.

Excerpt from Archimedes If the ordinary person were asked to say off-hand what he knew of Archimedes, he would probably, at the most, be able to quote one or other of the well-known stories about him: how, after discovering the solution of some problem in the bath, he was so overjoyed that he ran naked to his house, shouting eupƞka, eupƞka (or, as we might say, "I've got it, I've got it"); or how he said "Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth"; or again how he was killed, at the capture of Syracuse in the Second Punic War, by a Roman soldier who resented being told to get away from a diagram drawn on the ground which he was studying. And it is to be feared that few who are not experts in the history of mathematics have any acquaintance with the details of the original discoveries in mathematics of the greatest mathematician of antiquity, perhaps the greatest mathematical genius that the world has ever seen. History and tradition know Archimedes almost exclusively as the inventor of a number of ingenious mechanical appliances, things which naturally appeal more to the popular imagination than the subtleties of pure mathematics. Almost all that is told of Archimedes reaches us through the accounts by Polybius and Plutarch of the siege of Syracuse by Marcellus. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Sand-Reckoner from author Gillian Bradshaw is a historical account that reimagines the life of one of ancient Greek's greatest minds. The young scholar Archimedes has just had the best three years of his life at Ptolemy's Museum at Alexandria. To be able to talk and think all day, every day, sharing ideas and information with the world's greatest minds, is heaven to Archimedes. But heaven must be forsaken when he learns that his father is ailing, and his home city of Syracuse is at war with the Romans. Reluctant but resigned, Archimedes takes himself home to find a job building catapults as a royal engineer. Though Syracuse is no Alexandria, Archimedes also finds that life at home isn't as boring or confining as he originally thought. He finds fame and loss, love and war, wealth and betrayal-none of which affects him nearly as much as the divine beauty of mathematics. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This eBook has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans or Parallel Lives is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, probably written at the beginning of the second century AD by Plutarch. Parallel Lives comprises 23 pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman, as well as four unpaired, single lives. It is a work of considerable importance, not only as a source of information about the individuals described, but also about the times in which they lived. Volume I contains 13 pairs of biographies from Theseus and Romulus to Cimon and Lucullus, with comparisons.