alright fellow.'
'Rather dour-looking.'
'I think he just has a very dry sense of humor.'
'And the poet?'
'Margero was clearly in no mood to recite poetry. He seemed to be rather preoccupied. There was something going on between him and Agathinus…'
'I think I can explain that,' offered Tiro.
'You weren't in the room.'
'No, but I was in the kitchen, soaking up local gossip from the slaves. Agathinus and Dorotheus are Margero's patrons, you see; every poet needs patrons if he's to eat. But lately there's been a chill between Agathinus and Margero.'
'A chill?'
'Jealousy. It seems they're both paying court to the same pretty boy down at the gymnasium.'
'I see.' The two were rivals in love, then. Margero was younger and more handsome than Agathinus, and could compose love poems; but Agathinus had the attractions of money and power. Clearly, the two of them had not yet fallen out completely-Margero still depended on Agathinus for patronage, Agathinus still used the poet as an ornament-but there was friction between them. 'Any other interesting gossip from the kitchen slaves?'
'Only that Agathinus and Dorotheus just received payment for their largest shipment ever of imported goods from the East. Some people say that they're now the richest men in Syracuse.'
'No wonder Cicero was advised to make friends with them.'
'Do you need anything else before you retire?' asked Tiro, lowering his voice. Eco, not even undressed, was already softly snoring on his couch.
'Something to read, perhaps?'
'There are some scrolls in the room that Cicero uses for an office…'
I ended the night curled under a coverlet on my couch, puzzling by lamplight over a musty old scroll of the works of Archimedes, amazed at his genius. Here were such wonders as a method for deter-mining the surface area of a sphere, explained so lucidly that even I could almost understand it. At length I came upon the proposition which had resulted from the problem of the gold crown:
Proposed: A solid heavier than a fluid will, if placed in it, descend to the bottom of the fluid, and the solid will, when weighed in the fluid, be lighter than its true weight by the weight of the fluid.
Yes, well, that much was obvious, of course. I read on.
Let A be a solid heavier than the same volume of fluid, and let (G + H) represent its weight, while G represents the weight of the same volume of the fluid…
This was not quite so clear, and I was getting drowsy. Cicero's explanation had been easier to follow. I pressed on.
Take a solid B lighter than the same volume of the fluid, and such that the weight of B is G, while the weight of the same vol-ume of the fluid is (G + H). Let A and B be now combined into one solid and immersed. Then, since (A + B) will be of the same weight as the same volume of fluid, both weights being equal to (G + H) + G, it follows that…
I gave a great yawn, put aside the scroll, and extinguished the lamp. Alas, it was all Greek to me.
The next morning, at daybreak, I roused Eco, grabbed a handful of bread from the pantry, and the two of us set out for the Achradina Gate.
The stretch of road outside the walls was just as Agathinus had described it, with a great maze of tombs on either side, all overgrown with brambles and vines. It was an unsettling place, even in the pale morning light, with an air of decay and desolation. Some of the stone monuments were as large as small temples. Others were simple stelae set in the earth, and many of these were no longer upright but had been knocked this way and that. Crumbling sculptural reliefs depicted funeral garlands and horses' heads, the traditional symbols of life's brief flowering and the speedy passage toward death. Some of the monuments were decorated with the faces of the dead, worn so smooth by time that they were as bland and featureless as the statues of the Cyclades.
Agathinus was nowhere to be seen. 'Perhaps we're early,' I said. Eco, full of energy, began nosing about the monuments, peering at the worn reliefs, looking for pathways into the thicket. 'Don't go getting lost,' I told him, but he might as well have been deaf as well as mute. He was soon out of sight.
I waited, but Agathinus did not appear. It was possible that he had arrived before us and lacked the patience to wait, or that his business had kept him from coming. There was also the chance that he had changed his mind about helping me, decent enough fellow for a Roman though I might be.
I tried to remember his description of the tomb's location. On the north side, he had said, about a hundred paces from the road, and decorated with sculptures of geometrical shapes. Surely it couldn't be that hard to find.
I began nosing about as Eco had done, looking for ways into the thicket. I found his tracks and followed them into a sort of tunnel through the thorns and woody vines that choked the pathways between the monuments. I moved deeper and deeper into a strange world of shadowy foliage and cold, dank stone covered with lichen and moss. Dead leaves rustled underfoot. Whenever the pathway branched I tried to follow Eco's footsteps and called out his name to let him know that I was behind him. I soon realized that finding Archimedes's tomb would not be such a simple task after all. I con-sidered turning and retracing my steps back to the road. Agathinus might have arrived, and be waiting for me.
Then I heard a strange, twisted cry that was not quite a scream, but rather the noise a mute boy might make if he tried to scream.
Eco!
I rushed toward the noise, but was confounded by the branching maze and the echo of his cry among the stone tombs. 'Cry out again, Eco! Cry out until I find you!'
The noise echoed from a different direction. I wheeled about, banged my head against the projecting corner of a monument, and cursed. I reached up to wipe the sweat from my eyes and realized I was bleeding. Eco cried out again. I followed, stumbling over creeping vines and dodging crooked stelae.
Suddenly, above a tangle of thorns, I glimpsed the upper part of what could only be the tomb of Archimedes. Surmounting a tall square column chiseled with faded inscriptions in Greek was a sphere, and surmounting the sphere, balanced on its round edge, was a solid cylinder. These two forms were the concrete representation of one of the principles I had encountered in my reading the night before-but all such thoughts fled from my mind as I found a way through the thicket and stepped into a small clearing before the tomb.
In front of the column there were several other geometrical sculptures. Upon one of them, a cube almost as tall as he was, stood Eco, his eyes wide with alarm. Next to the cube and equally as tall was a slender cone that came to a very sharp point. The point was dark with blood. Impaled on the cone, face-up, long, spindly limbs splayed in agony, was the lifeless body of Agathinus. His upside-down features were frozen in a rictus of pain and shock.
'You found him like this?'
Eco nodded.
How had such a thing happened? Agathinus must have been standing on the cube where Eco now stood, and somehow fallen backward onto the point. I flinched, picturing it. The force of his fall had pushed his body halfway down the cone. But why should he have been standing on the cube at all? The faded inscriptions on the column could as easily be read from the ground. And how could he have been so careless as to fall in such a dangerous spot?
Unless someone had pushed him.
I thought of a triangle, not of the sort which Archimedes studied, but with properties just as predictable-a triangle made not of abstract lines but of the powerful forces that link mortal to mortal.
I told Eco to stop gawking and get down from the cube.
Given the circumstances of our discovery, and the fact that we were strangers in Syracuse, Eco and I might very well fall under suspicion ourselves if it was decided that Agathinus had been murdered. I thought it best to report what I had seen to Cicero, to let him handle reporting the death to the appropriate provincial magistrate, and then to book passage for Rome and have as little to do with the mat-ter as possible.
'But Gordianus,' Cicero protested, 'this sort of thing is your specialty. And if I understand you correctly,
