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360 
EUCLID 
of Book II, and a few of Books III and IV, and lastly a 
passage indicating that the editor will now give something of 
his own, which turns out to be a literal translation of the 
proofs of Eucl. I. 1-3, This proves that the Pseudo-Boetius 
had a Latin translation of Euclid from which he extracted 
these proofs; moreover, the text of the definitions from 
Book I shows traces of perfectly correct readings which are 
not found even in the Greek manuscripts of the tenth century, 
but which appear in Proclus and other ancient sources. 
Fragments of such a Latin translation are also found in 
the Gromatici veteresd 
The text of the Elements. 
All our Greek texts of the Elements up to a century ago 
depended upon manuscripts containing Theon’s recension of the 
work; these manuscripts purport, in their titles, to be either 
‘ from the edition of Theon ’ (e/c rfjs ©ecoroy eicSoaem) or 
‘from the lectures of Theon’ {dnb a-vvovcncor rov ©ecovos). 
Sir Henry Savile in his Fraelectiones had drawn attention 
to the passage in Theon’s Commentary on Ptolemy 2 quoting 
the second part of VI. 33 about sectors as having been proved 
by himself in his edition of the Elements', but it was not 
till Peyrard discovered in the Vatican the great MS. 
gr. 190, containing neither the words from the titles of the 
other manuscripts quoted above nor the addition to VI. 33, 
that scholars could get back from Theon’s text to what thus 
represents, on the face of it, a more ancient edition than 
Theon’s. It is also clear that the copyist of P (as the manu 
script is called after Peyrard), or rather of its archetype, 
had before him the two recensions and systematically gave 
the preference to the earlier one ; for at XIII. 6 in P the first 
hand has a marginal note, ‘ This theorem is not given in most 
copies of the new edition, but is found in those of the old ’. 
The editio prlnceps (Basel, 1533) edited by Simon Grynaeus 
was based on two manuscripts (Venetus Marcianus 301 and 
Paris, gr. 2343) of the sixteenth century, which are among 
the worst. The Basel edition was again the foundation 
of the text of Gregory (Oxford, 1703), who only consulted the 
1 Ed. Lachmann, pp. 877 sqq. 
I, p. 201, ed. Halma.