Euclid, Elements
Thomas L. Heath, Sir Thomas Little Heath, Ed.

arrangement, of Euclid with the propositions in different order¹. The MS. was evidently the translator's own copy, because some words are struck out and replaced by synonyms. We do not know whether the translator completed the translation of the whole, or in what relation his version stood to our other sources.

Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (b. about 475 A.D.) in the geometrical part of his encyclopaedia De artibus ac disciplinis liberalium literarum says that geometry was represented among the Greeks by Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes, and others, “of whom Euclid was given us translated into the Latin language by the same great man Boethius” ; also in his collection of letters² is a letter from Theodoric to Boethius containing the words, “for in your translations...Nicomachus the arithmetician, and Euclid the geometer, are heard in the Ausonian tongue.” The so-called Geometry of Boethius which has come down to us by no means constitutes a translation of Euclid. The MSS. variously give five, four, three or two Books, but they represent only two distinct compilations, one normally in five Books and the other in two. Even the latter, which was edited by Friedlein, is not genuine³,but appears to have been put together in the 11th c., from various sources. It begins with the definitions of Eucl. I., and in these are traces of perfectly correct readings which are not found even in the MSS. of the 10th c., but which can be traced in Proclus and other ancient sources; then come the Postulates (five only), the Axioms (three only), and after these some definitions of Eucl. II., III., IV. Next come the enunciations of Eucl. I., of ten propositions of Book II., and of some from Books III., IV., but always without proofs; there follows an extraordinary passage which indicates that the author will now give something of his own in elucidation of Euclid, though what follows is a literal translation of the proofs of Eucl. I. 1-3. This latter passage, although it affords a strong argument against the genuineness of this part of the work, shows that the Pseudoboethius had a Latin translation of Euclid from which he extracted the three propositions.

Curtze has reproduced, in the preface to his edition of the translation by Gherard of Cremona of an-Nairĩzĩ's Arabic commentary on Euclid, some interesting fragments of a translation of Euclid taken from a Munich MS. of the 10th c. They are on two leaves used for the cover of the MS. (Bibliothecae Regiae Universitatis Monacensis 2^{o} 757) and consist of portions of Eucl. I. 37, 38 and II. 8, translated literally word for word from the Greek text. The translator seems to have been an Italian (cf. the words “capitolo nono” used for the ninth prop. of Book II.) who knew very little Greek and had moreover little mathematical knowledge. For example, he translates the capital letters denoting points in figures as if they were numerals: thus τὰ ΑΒΓ,