Plato by Carol Atack; Archimedes by Nicholas Nicastro

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Plato by Carol Atack; Archimedes by Nicholas Nicastro

Since antiquity, we have weighed up our intellectual progress – as individuals, as “civilizations” and as a species – by measuring the contributions of a handful of famous knowledge producers: philosophers, mathematicians, scientists and inventors. Biographies of Plato, for example, were being written within years of his death. Both of the books under review here (the first in a new series of ancient biographies) sit in a long tradition that tes…