Kitap 8
4.81
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.
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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.
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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.Cf. T. L. Heath, History of Greek Mathematics, i. 246-249. In geometry, too, he was the first to discover the cube, as Plato says in the Republic.528 b.
Chapter 5. ALCMAEON
