THE TEXT OF ARCHIMEDES 
27 
rgius Valla, who 
his posthumous 
, and intended to 
fcocius’s commen- 
ight by Albertus 
sphew, Rodolphus 
1544. At some 
ired, leaving no 
bo Latin in 1269 
at Viterbo. This 
5 at Rome (Cod. 
me of our prime 
hastily done and 
Ireek, he followed 
, for purposes of 
Villiam used also, 
the same library 
This manuscript 
i optics; William 
ing Bodies, and it 
;1 the Quadrature 
used both manu- 
anuscripts (except 
id in 1906) were 
r enice manuscript 
m the years 1449 
nuscript (Laurent. 
Angelo Poliziano, 
i difficulty in con- 
arded his treasure, 
•om A after it had 
1) copied in 1544 
Armagnac, Bishop 
the translation of 
dings of A to be 
instance of Pope 
ffius Cremonensis. 
It was made from A, which was therefore accessible to Pope 
Nicholas though it does not seem to have belonged to him. 
Regiomontanus made a copy of this translation about 1468 
and revised it with the help of E (the Venice manuscript of 
the Greek text) and a copy of the same translation belonging 
to Cardinal Bessarion, as well as another ‘ old copy ’ which 
seems to have been B. 
The editio princeps was published at Basel (apud Herva- 
gium) by Thomas Gechauff Venatorius in 1544. The Greek 
text was based on a Nürnberg MS. (Norimberg. Cent. V, 
app, 12) which was copied in the sixteenth century from A 
but with interpolations derived from B; the Latin transla 
tion was Regiomontanus’s revision of Jacobus Cremonensis 
(Norimb. Cent. V, 15). 
A translation by F. Commandinus published at Venice in 
1558 contained the Measurement of a Circle, On Spirals, the 
Quadrature of the Parabola, On Conoids and Spheroids, and 
the Sand-reckoner. This translation was based-on the Basel 
edition, but Commandinus also consulted E and other Greek 
manuscripts. 
Torelli’s edition (Oxford, 1792) also followed the editio 
princeps in the main, but Torelli also collated E. The book 
was brought out after Torelli’s death by Abram Robertson, 
who also collated five more manuscripts, including D, G 
and H. The collation, however, was not well done, and the 
edition was not properly corrected when in the press. 
The second edition of Heiberg’s text of all the works of 
Archimedes with Eutocius’s commentaries, Latin translation, 
apparatus criticus, &c., is now available (1910-15) and, of 
course, supersedes the first edition (1880-1) and all others. 
It naturally includes The Method, the fragment of the Stoma- 
chion, and so much of the Greek text of the two Books On 
Floating Bodies as could be restored from the newly dis 
covered Constantinople manuscript. 1 
Contents of The Method. 
Our description of the extant works of Archimedes 
may suitably begin with The Method (the full title is On 
1 The Works of Archimedes, edited in modern notation by the present 
writer in 1897, was based on Heiberg’s first edition, and the Supplement