***SPOILERS for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny***
Although it might not seem like it – one is a fictional Nazi physicist and the other is an actual Sicilian Greek mathematician, their eras separated by some 2,200 years, and, you know, the non-existence of one compared to the actual historicity of the other, but there is an interesting parallel between the character of Jürgen Voller (played by Mads Mikkelsen) and Archimedes himself (played here by Nasser Memarzia).
Jürgen Voller is a creation of the filmmakers, but he represents an important factual consequence of the Second World War – an American intelligence programme known as Operation Paperclip that saw to the transfer of 1,600 scientists, engineers and technicians from Germany to the USA. Voller himself is a physicist who, despite being a deeply committed Nazi, helped NASA birth the space programme and land men on the moon in 1969.
The potential connection of the historical figures behind Voller to the actual Archimedes would be the supposed orders given by the Roman general who led the siege and capture of Syracuse in 213-212BC, Marcus Claudius Marcellus.
“At the capture of Syracuse Marcellus had been aware that his victory had been held up much and long by Archimedes’ machines. However, pleased with the man’s exceptional skill, he gave out that his life was to be spared, putting almost as much glory in saving Archimedes as in crushing Syracuse.”
Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings VIII.7.7
Marcellus “is said to have sought diligently for the great Archimedes, a man of the highest genius and skill, and to have been greatly concerned when he heard that he had been killed”
Cicero, In Verrem II.4.131
What exactly Marcellus planned to do with Archimedes we will never truly know, but while it is not explicitly stated, we can presume that the Roman general would have taken Archimedes back to Rome to use his skills in the service to the Republic.
You might ask why would Rome need such service, but in 212BC, the Roman Republic was not yet the Mediterranean superpower it would become. The Roman state of this period ‘only’ encompassed Italy, the islands of Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia and the coastal regions of the Adriatic and southern Gaul. The entire eastern Mediterranean was still ruled by the various Macedonian successor states of Alexander the Great. Indeed, Rome was embroiled in a conflict for supremacy in the western Mediterranean with the Carthaginians – the Second Punic War, a conflict that she was not guaranteed to win with the Carthaginian general Hannibal having spent the previous 6 years rampaging up and down Italy, inflicting major defeats on the Roman army.
The sheer fact that Marcellus was having to besiege Syracuse at all, a city that had been a staunch Roman ally for the previous half-century shows that things were certainly not going all the Romans’ way.
Therefore, even in the recapture of Syracuse, Marcellus will have seen the harnessing of the science and applications of Archimedes’ various discoveries and inventions – Archimedes’ principle, Archimedes’ screw, the law of levers, Archimedes’ claw, the heat ray and various astronomical instruments – as a potentially vital addition to the Roman war effort going forward: something of an ancient version Operation Paperclip.
And even with Archimedes’ untimely demise at the hands of an overzealous Roman soldier, Marcellus will likely have tried to gather up any of Archimedes’ students and collaborators, along with many of his inventions during the plundering of the city that the general allowed upon its recapture.
Certainly, the fall of Syracuse in 212BC was seen as having a considerable influence on Roman culture with all the Greek art that was plundered from the city. Indeed, one of the versions of Archimedes’ death, different from the more famous version of him refusing to leave his calculations and therefore being slain by an impatient Roman soldier, has him…
“carrying to Marcellus mathematical instruments, dials, spheres, and angles, by which the magnitude of the sun might be measured to the sight, some soldiers seeing him, and thinking that he carried gold in a vessel, slew him.”
Plutarch, Marcellus 19.6
In such a scenario, some of those instruments likely still made it to Rome and influenced her science and military technology even without Archimedes there to explain it.
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