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

CHAPTER VIII.

PRINCIPAL TRANSLATIONS AND EDITIONS OF THE ELEMENTS.

Cicero is the first Latin author to mention Euclid¹; but it is not likely that in Cicero's time Euclid had been translated into Latin or was studied to any considerable extent by the Romans; for, as Cicero says in another place², while geometry was held in high honour among the Greeks, so that nothing was more brilliant than their mathematicians, the Romans limited its scope by having regard only to its utility for measurements and calculations. How very little theoretical geometry satisfied the Roman agrimensores is evidenced by the work of Balbus de mensuris³, where some of the definitions of Eucl. Book I. are given. Again, the extracts from the Elements found in the fragment attributed to Censorinus (fl. 238 A.D)⁴ are confined to the definitions, postulates, and common notions. But by degrees the Elements passed even among the Romans into the curriculum of a liberal education; for Martianus Capella speaks of the effect of the enunciation of the proposition “how to construct an equilateral triangle on a given straight line” among a company of philosophers, who, recognising the first proposition of the Elements, straightway break out into encomiums on Euclid⁵. But the Elements were then (c. 470 A.D.) doubtless read in Greek; for what Martianus Capella gives⁶ was drawn from a Greek source, as is shown by the occurrence of Greek words and by the wrong translation of I. def. 1 (“punctum vero est cuius pars nihil est” ). Martianus may, it is true, have quoted, not from Euclid himself, but from Heron or some other ancient source.

But it is clear from a certain palimpsest at Verona that some scholar had already attempted to translate the Elements into Latin. This palimpsest⁷ has part of the “Moral reflections on the Book of Job” by Pope Gregory the Great written in a hand of the 9th c. above certain fragments which in the opinion of the best judges date from the 4th c. Among these are fragments of Vergil and of Livy, as well as a geometrical fragment which purports to be taken from the 14th and 15th Books of Euclid. As a matter of fact it is from Books XII. and XIII. and is of the nature of a free rendering, or rather a new