454 
DIOPHANTUS OF ALEXANDRIA 
Greek. In an 0ratio delivered at the end of 1463 as an 
introduction to a course of lectures on astronomy which he 
gave at Padua in 1463-4 he observed: ‘No one« has yet 
translated from the Greek into Latin the fine thirteen Books 
of Diophantus, in which the very flower of the whole of 
arithmetic lies hid, the ars rei et census which to-day they 
call by the Arabic name of Algebra.’ Again, in a letter dated 
February 5, 1464, to Bianchini, he writes that he has found at 
Venice ‘Diofantus, a Greek arithmetician who has not yet 
been translated into Latin ’. Rafael Bombelli was the first to 
find a manuscript in the Vatican and to conceive the idea of 
publishing the work; this was towards 1570, and, with 
Antonio Maria Pazzi, he translated five Books out of the 
seven into which the manuscript was divided. The translation 
was not published, but Bombelli took all the problems of the 
first four Books and some of those of the fifth and embodied 
them in his Algebra (1572), interspersing them with his own 
problems. 
The next writer on Diophantus was Wilhelm Holzmann, 
who called himself Xylander, and who with extraordinary 
industry and care produced a very meritorious Latin trans 
lation with commentary (1575). Xylander was an enthusiast 
for Diophantus, and his preface and notes are often delightful 
reading. Unfortunately the book is now very rare. The 
standard edition of Diophantus till recent years was that of 
Bachet, who in 1621 published for the first time the Greek 
text with Latin translation and notes. A second edition 
(1670) was carelessly printed and is untrustworthy as regards 
the text; on the other hand it contained the epoch-making 
notes of Fermat; the editor was S. Fermat, his son. The 
great blot on the work of Bachet is his attitude to Xylander, 
to whose translation he owed more than he was willing to 
avow. Unfortunately neither Bachet nor Xylander was able 
to use the best manuscripts; that used by Bachet was Parisinus 
2379 (of the middle of the sixteenth century), with the help 
of a transcription of part of a Vatican MS. (Vat. gr. 304 of 
the sixteenth century), while Xylander’s manuscript was the 
Wolfenbiittel MS. Guelferbytanus Gudianus 1 (fifteenth cen 
tury). The best and most ancient manuscript is that of 
Madrid (Matritensis 48 of the thirteenth century) which was