SCHEMATIZING (21)

By: Joshua Glenn
November 30, 2023

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

Map of Piraeus, Greece, in 1908 — showing the ancient grid plan of the city

What follows is an excerpt from The Birds (414 B.C.), a comedy by Aristophanes, as translated in 1950 by George Gilbert Aimé Murray.

The plot revolves around Pisthetaerus (“Trustyfriend”) and Euelpides (“Goodhope”), Athenians who convince birds to create a great city in the sky (Νεφελοκοκκυγία — “cloud-cuckoo-land”) in order to regain their status as the original gods. Enter Meton of Athens, a famous mathematician, astronomer, geometer, and engineer — and a contemporary of Aristophanes. (The foundations of Meton’s observatory in Athens are still visible today.)

Contemporary readers seem to feel that the play appears to characterize Meton as a con artist of sorts… i.e., because he claims that he can square a circle. However… my impression of Meton’s proposal is that he wants to develop a floating city that originates in a spherical center but develops outwards — via straight roads radiating in all directions, like rays of light from the sun — into a vast cuboid. Which sounds awesome, actually.

[Exit Prophet. Enter from the other side Meton, the scientist, with rules, compasses and other geometrical instruments.]

METON

I have come in person…

PITHETAERUS

Here’s another pest.
Come to do what? What’s the first concept?
What
The subsequent review? And why on earth
Do you walk in buskins like a tragic actor?

METON

I purpose to subject the atmosphere
To geometrical measure, and divide it
In acre lots.

PITHETAERUS

In God’s name, who are
you?

METON

Who am I? Sir, I am Meton, a name known
In Hellas… and Colônus. ^*

PITHETAERUS

Tell me, though,
What are those things?

METON

Aerial measuring rods.
For instance, since the atmosphere in
shape
Is like a conical extinguisher,
I place this curvilinear measuring rod
Above, insert a pair of compasses…
You follow?

PITHETAERUS

Not a bit!

Sphere inscribed in a cube — from G.A. Wentworth’s *Plane And Solid Geometry* (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1899)

METON

                              Applying then
A straight rod, I proceed with
     measurements
Until your circle grows into a square;
The centre of the quadrilateral is
The market-place, and towards that centre
     run
Straight roads centripetal; just as a star,
Being itself by nature circular,
Has radiating from it rays of light
Quite straight in all directions.

[He hands Pithetaerus the large wooden compasses.]

^* Colônus was a suburb of Athens where Meton had recently designed an aqueduct.

Also see this paper on conic sections in ancient Greece.

***

SCHEMATIZING (21)

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