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The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6) cover

The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6)

Chapter 80: CHAP. 38.—GEOMETRY AND ARCHITECTURE.
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The volume assembles an encyclopedic survey of the known world and its living inhabitants, moving from detailed regional geography and descriptions of seas, rivers, islands, and peoples to extended treatments of humanity, its generation, anatomy, and the origins and inventions of arts. Subsequent books catalog terrestrial animals—their habits, capture, and uses—followed by comprehensive observations on fish and marine creatures, their sizes and behaviors. Accounts mix naturalistic description, reported marvels, medicinal uses derived from animals, and travel and secondhand reports, organized as topical chapters intended as a practical compendium of natural and human phenomena.

CHAP. 38.—GEOMETRY AND ARCHITECTURE.

M. Marcellus, too, at the taking of Syracuse, offered a remarkable homage to the sciences of geometry and mechanics, by giving orders that Archimedes was to be the only person who should not be molested; his commands, however, were disregarded, in consequence of the imprudence of one of the soldiers.1171 Chersiphron, also, the Cnossian,1172 was rendered famous by the admirable construction of the temple of Diana at Ephesus; Philon, by the construction of the basin at Athens, which was capable of containing one thousand vessels;1173 Ctesibius, by the invention of pneumatics and hydraulic machines; and Dinochares,1174 by the plan which he made of the city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander in Egypt. The same monarch, too, by public edict, declared that no one should paint his portrait except Apelles, and that no one should make a marble statue of him except Pyrgoteles, or a bronze one except Lysippus.1175 These arts have all been rendered glorious by many illustrious examples.