Chapter 4. ARCHYTAS (fourth
century B.C.)
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Archytas of Tarentum, son of Mnesagoras or,
if we may believe Aristoxenus, of Hestiaeus, was another of the
Pythagoreans. He it was whose letter saved Plato when he was about
to be put to death by Dionysius. He was generally admired for his
excellence in all fields ; thus he was generalissimo of his city
seven times, while the law excluded all others even from a second
year of command. We have two letters written to him by Plato, he
having first written to Plato in these terms :
"Archytas
wishes Plato good health.
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"You have done well to get rid of
your ailment, as we learn both from your own message and through
Lamiscus that you have : we attended to the matter of the memoirs
and went up to Lucania where we found the true progeny of Ocellus
[to wit, his writings]. We did get the works
On Law,
On Kingship, Of Piety, and
On the Origin of the
Universe, all of which we have sent on to you ; but the rest
are, at present, nowhere to be found ; if they should turn up, you
shall have them."
This is Archytas's letter ;
and Plato's answer is as follows:
"Plato to Archytas
greeting.
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"I was overjoyed to get the memoirs which you sent,
and I am very greatly pleased with the writer of them ; he seems to
be a right worthy descendant of his distant forbears. They came, so
it is said, from Myra, and were among those who emigrated from Troy
in Laomedon's time, really good men, as the traditional story shows.
Those memoirs of mine about which you wrote are not yet in a fit
state ; but such as they are I have sent them on to you. We both
agree about their custody, so I need not give any advice on that
head. Farewell."
These then are the letters which passed
between them.
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Four men have borne the name of Archytas : (1)
our subject ; (2) a musician, of Mytilene ; (3) the compiler of a
work
On Agriculture ; (4) a writer of epigrams.
Some speak of a fifth, an architect, to whom is attributed a book
On Mechanism which begins like this : "These
things I learnt from Teucer of Carthage." A tale is told of the
musician that, when it was cast in his teeth that he could not be
heard, he replied, "Well, my instrument shall speak for me and win
the day."
Aristoxenus says that our Pythagorean was never
defeated during his whole generalship, though he once resigned it
owing to bad feeling against him, whereupon the army at once fell
into the hands of the enemy.
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He was the first to bring
mechanics to a system by applying mathematical principles ; he also
first
employed mechanical motion in a
geometrical construction, namely, when he tried, by means of a
section of a half-cylinder, to find two mean proportionals in
order to duplicate the cube.
1 In geometry, too, he was the first to discover the
cube, as Plato says in the
Republic.2