Circumference: Chapter 3

The latter by this time had already had an eventful career: a Macedonian-leaning social conservative, he was already a prolific author when Cassander, the strongman in Pella, installed him as dictator of Athens.

The notion of a purely secular center of learning and research was an idea whose time had not yet come; the modern university has a roughly analogous history, originally having much closer ties to religious institutions (for example, Oxford University had its roots in the settlement of various monastic orders in Oxford; Harvard College was founded as a seminary by a clergyman, John Harvard).

The firsthand account of Alexander’s campaigns by Ptolemy I is almost certainly reflected in the extant histories by Arrian and Rufus, but the primary source would be of monumental interest.

It appears that books from all over the known world were not only collected, but assiduously translated into Greek.

In 145 the newly enthroned King Ptolemy VIII, suspecting disloyalty among his Greek subjects in the capital, expelled many prominent intellectuals from the city, including the head librarian, Aristarchus. For his trouble, the king’s epithet was popularly changed from Euergetes (“Benefactor”) to Physcon (“Fatty”).

The rarified atmosphere naturally bred precious, recondite humor: we hear of one scholar who exercised his wit by rewriting all twelve thousand lines of the Odyssey without once using the letter s.

Invective, ad hominem and otherwise, flew in the form of cheap pamphlets — the precursor to the intemperately fired-off e-mail.

The ostensible purpose of the Museum was to honor the Muses — the deities upon whom artistic creation depends.

This method seems prosaic to us, even obvious, because it has become ubiquitous — by using the alphabet, which is universally known to literate people, as a mnemonic device, Zenodotus hit on a powerful and convenient way to organize the Library’s huge holdings.

Based on its preoccupation with matters linguistic and literary — in short, on philology — we might regard the Museum as the world’s first department of classics.

As someone equally comfortable in the vagaries of grammar, the forest of myth, and the straight and narrow corridors of mathematics, he was perhaps uniquely capable not only of putting Greekness on a rational footing, but of rationalizing the entire world.

For devotees of fine rhetoric, it suggested his passion for a well-turned argument (and, if necessary, a stinging insult).

The men clearly shared an ongoing correspondence — indeed, Archimedes’s somewhat didactic tone notwithstanding, it appears to have been a correspondence between equals.

According to Finley, the Greeks and Romans eschewed technological innovation in part because their societies were poor in mechanical know-how, but awash in cheap human muscle power.

The point applies even to the planets and stars, notwithstanding their ethereal nature: “The true astronomer...will never imagine...that [things] material and visible can also be eternal and subject to no deviation — that would be absurd; and it is equally absurd to take so much pains in investigating their exact truth....Let us leave the heavens alone.”