THE GOLDEN CROWN: A DISCUSSION

摘要

Archimedes's fame is universally more connected to his extraordinary inventions and to the legendary events that have been ascribed to him rather than to a deep and real knowledge of the historical personage and of his works. Systems of levers and catapults, cochlea and other mechanical or hydraulic contraptions, water-clock, planetarium, heat rays. Among these and further inventions, real or supposed to be, there is the episode of Hiero's Crown, Fig. 1. The episode of the apparent fraud goes generally around in two different versions; the first one, which is based on the volumetric comparisons, mentioned by the roman architect Vitruvius, the second one is anonymous, it is related by Priscian and it's essentially based on the hydrostatic balance. In this paper, we compare and discuss the two reconstructions, both of them to be considered plausible.