Archimedes was born in 287 BC in Syracuse, a port city in the southeastern corner of Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. The year of his birth is based on the year of his death and the presumed length of his life, which was given by the poet and scholar John Tzetzes of Constantinople (now Istanbul), an interesting figure in his own right, who was regarded as the model of a perfect pedant. Tzetzes was the son of an Iberian (Georgian) mother and served in his youth as secretary to a provincial governor before earning his living in later life as a teacher and writer. In his most influential work, usually referred to as the Chiliades (Thousands) but originally entitled Book of Histories, consisting of more than 12,000 lines of verse and quoting more than 400 authors, Tzetzes writes that “Archimedes the Wise was a Syracusan, a famous builder of machines, who spent his life studying geometry, and lived to the age of seventy-five years.”