A classical dictionary: containing a copious account of all the proper names mentioned in ancient authors with tables of coins, weights, and measures used among the Greeks and Romans and a chronological tableLemprière, John
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A classical dictionary: containing a copious account of all the proper names mentioned in ancient authors with tables of coins, weights, and measures used among the Greeks and Romans and a chronological table
Lemprière, John
Classical dictionaries
=Archilŏchus=, a poet of Paros; who wrote elegies, satires, odes, and
epigrams, and was the first who introduced iambics in his verses.
He had courted Neobule the daughter of Lycambes, and had received
promises of marriage; but the father gave her to another superior
to the poet in rank and fortune; upon which Archilochus wrote such a
bitter satire, that Lycambes hanged himself in a fit of despair. The
Spartans condemned his verses on account of their indelicacy, and
banished him from their city as a petulant and dangerous citizen.
He flourished 685 B.C., and it is said that he was assassinated.
Some fragments of his poetry remain, which display vigour and
animation, boldness and vehemence, in the highest degree; from which
reason, perhaps, Cicero calls virulent edicts, _Archilochia edicta_.
_Cicero_, _Tusculanæ Disputationes_, bk. 1.――_Quintilian_, bk. 10,
ch. 1.――_Herodotus_, bk. 1, ch. 12.――_Horace_, _Art of Poetry_, li.
79.――_Athenæus_, bks. 1, 2, &c.――――A son of Nestor, killed by Memnon
in the Trojan war. _Homer_, _Iliad_, bk. 2.――――A Greek historian who
wrote a chronological table, and other works, about the 20th or 30th
olympiad.
=Archimēdes=, a famous geometrician of Syracuse, who invented a machine
of glass that faithfully represented the motion of all the heavenly
bodies. When Marcellus the Roman consul besieged Syracuse Archimedes
constructed machines which suddenly raised up in the air the ships
of the enemy from the bay before the city, and let them fall with
such violence into the water that they sunk. He set them also on
fire with his burning glasses. When the town was taken, the Roman
general gave strict orders to his soldiers not to hurt Archimedes,
and he even offered a reward to him who should bring him alive and
safe into his presence. All these precautions were useless; the
philosopher was so deeply engaged in solving a problem, that he was
even ignorant that the enemy were in possession of the town; and a
soldier, without knowing who he was, killed him, because he refused
to follow him, B.C. 212. Marcellus raised a monument over him,
and placed upon it a cylinder and a sphere; but the place remained
long unknown, till Cicero, during his questorship in Sicily, found
it near one of the gates of Syracuse, surrounded with thorns and
brambles. Some suppose that Archimedes raised the site of the towns
and villages of Egypt, and began those mounds of earth by means of
which communication is kept from town to town during the inundations
of the Nile. The story of his burning glasses had always appeared
fabulous to some of the moderns, till the experiments of Buffon
demonstrated it beyond contradiction. These celebrated glasses were
supposed to be reflectors made of metal, and capable of producing
their effect at the distance of a bowshot. The manner in which
he discovered how much brass a goldsmith had mixed with gold in
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