In the last few years of his life, [Karel] Čapek confronted a world that seemed to belie his faith in human goodness. Witnessing the rise of Nazism, he marvelled at the way "one whole nation, one whole empire has spiritually acceded to a belief in animality, race and nonsense like that". The success of such "nonsense" could only be due to a failure to uphold the principles of intellectual life: "nothing less than colossal treason has been committed here by intellectuals …. In every place where violence against cultural humanness is perpetrated we find intellectuals who join in performing it en masse, and what's more, brandishing ideological justifications". Confronted with such perfidy, there was only one conscionable response: "not to betray one's spiritual discipline; not to deny in oneself, under any circumstances, under any pressure, the untrammelled and knowing spirit". As the crisis in Europe worsened, he wrote the last of his "apocryphal tales" — stories in which he reworked historical or biblical scenes. Contemplating the "treason" of the intellectuals, he imagined Alexander the Great writing to Aristotle, explaining that "it would be in the interest of peace and order, and entirely within reason given our political interests, if I were recognized as a god", and asking Aristotle "to philosophically prepare the way and to justify to my Greeks and Macedonians, on logical grounds, my proclamation as a god". In the last of his apocryphal tales, composed not long before his death, he imagined a conversation between Archimedes and one of the Roman soldiers who has conquered his city, Syracuse. The soldier tries to entice Archimedes into using his scientific knowledge to help the Romans conquer the world. "'Hm, the world', Archimedes said, engrossed in his drawing. 'Please don't take offence but I'm doing something more important here. Something more lasting, you see…. It's a method for calculating the area of a sector of a circle.'" The next, and last, sentence of the story: "it was reported that the learned Archimedes had met his death through an accident".