in the city-state of Syracuse, then a part of ancient Greece, in what is modern-day Sicily. His death ray is said to have proven particularly effective.Īrchimedes was born in 287 B.C. But Archimedes' war machines had kept the Romans at bay. The soldier had been two years in coming the Romans had held Archimedes' home of Syracuse under siege for two years.
The soldier flew into a rage and beat the 75-year-old genius to death. Archimedes, in the thick of determining a geometry proof using figures drawn in the sand on his floor, dismissed the stranger: "Do not disturb my diagrams," Archimedes told him. A Roman soldier sent to capture Archimedes entered his home. Archimedes was so gripped by excitement at his breakthrough that he ran naked through the streets shouting "Eureka!" And his death came from a lack of comprehension that he was in danger. When he came up with his principle of hydrostatics, he'd been in the bath. You can thank Archimedes for steel ships and hot air balloons.Īrchimedes was every bit a mad genius, and he was socially handicapped by the breadth of his intellect. He concluded that objects lose an amount of weight when they're in water equal to the weight of the fluid they displace (Archimedes' principle of hydrostatics). But he also created calculus proofs 2,000 years before calculus itself was invented. He is responsible for calculating pi that alone would have assured him a place in the annals of history. For more than 50 years, Archimedes churned out answers to great mathematic and practical questions. The Greek mathematician Archimedes is one good example that all geniuses are not equal. This collection does not pretend to present an exhaustive or a balanced view of ancient corruption (even less so of integrity), but we do hope that it may contribute towards awareness of, protest against and informed evaluations of this social plague.Some geniuses propel advancement more than others. Such aspects indeed came to the fore: how the ancients conceptualised corruption in terms of body, disease and other metaphors, how the forces driving human nature (ambition, desire) were linked to corruption and how the vocabulary reflects social, political and personal motivations, how historians and their audiences are implicated in reporting, and often not reporting, corrupt practices, how watch-dog institutions themselves tend to be corrupted, how the gods function as last resort when societies start feeding off themselves, how idealisation of the past influences descriptions of contemporary society and a disliked figure grows into an archetype of corruption, the grey area between gift-giving and bribery, between support networks and illegitimate privileging, even an arguable link between democracy and the very notion of corruption. Rather, participants wished to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon by holding up the mirror of antiquity and perhaps see reflected aspects that would otherwise have remained understated.
The conference did not aim at offering the consolation that corruption has been present throughout the centuries. The topic itself arose from a concern, worldwide and also in South Africa, about the infiltration into the fabric of current society of rampant corruption in all its various and destructive manifestations. This collection of articles stems from the Unisa Classics Colloquium of October 2010, which dealt with the theme ‘Integrity and Corruption in Antiquity’.
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