The most picturesque version of the story is that which represents him as saying to a Roman soldier who came too close, “Stand away, fellow, from my diagram,” whereat the man was so enraged that he killed him.
Archimedes is said to have requested his friends and relatives to place upon his tomb a representation of a cylinder circumscribing a sphere within it, together with an inscription giving the ratio (3/2) which the cylinder bears to the sphere; from which we may infer that he himself regarded the discovery of this ratio as his greatest achievement. Cicero, when quaestor in Sicily, found the tomb in a neglected state and restored it. In modern times not the slightest trace of it has been found.
Beyond the above particulars of the life of Archimedes, we have nothing but a number of stories which, if perhaps not literally accurate, yet help us to a conception of the personality of the man which we would not willingly have altered. Thus, in illustration of his entire preoccupation by his abstract studies, we are told that he would forget all about his food and such necessities of life, and would be drawing geometrical figures in the ashes of the fire, or, when anointing himself, in the oil on his body. Of the same kind is the story mentioned above, that, having discovered while in a bath the solution of the question referred to him by Hieron as to whether a certain crown supposed to have been made of gold did not
in fact contain a certain proportion of silver, he ran naked through the street to his home shouting εὕρηκα, εὕρηκα.
It was in connexion with his discovery of the solution of the problem To move a given weight by a given force that Archimedes uttered the famous saying, “Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth” (δός μοι ποῦ στῶ καὶ κινῶ τὴν γᾶν, or in his broad Doric, as one version has it, πᾶ βῶ καὶ κινῶ τὰν γᾶν). Plutarch represents him as declaring to Hieron that any given weight could be moved by a given force, and boasting, in reliance on the cogency of his demonstration, that, if he were given another earth, he would cross over to it and move this one.