Cicero and Archimedes' Tomb

Abstract

In the Pro Archia Cicero writes that Alexander, looking upon the tomb of Achilles, cried out, ‘O happy youth, who found a Homer to sing your praises!’; words truly spoken, adds Cicero, since without Homer Achilles' tomb would have buried the great man's fame along with his body. And in the Tusculan Disputations he writes that the Athenian Themistocles, when asked why he spent his nights wandering about the city, replied that the trophies of Miltiades kept him awake. Juxtaposing one great man and the reminder of another, both anecdotes present vivid and memorable images of rivalry between the ambitious among the living and the high-achievers among the dead. A competition of this kind can be direct, between the man commemorated by a monument and the man viewing it, as are the rivalries of Alexander and Achilles, Themistocles and Miltiades, or it can be indirect, as in the Pro Archia, where with a sleight of hand Cicero replaces the rivalry between Achilles and Alexander with the competition between the Iliad and Achilles' physical monument. A great mound bears witness to Achilles' death at Troy, but the outburst of the competitive Alexander testifies that a poem is a better memorial than a tomb.