Complete Extant Works of Hero of Alexandria, Vol. 3

...believed that all mathematical and mechanical commentaries attributed to Hero in more recent codices were derived from that most extensive writing—as they supposed—as if from a source, and were corrupted in later times by constant subtraction, interpolation, and change. In truth, however, since all those writings differ from the newly discovered books in the order and selection of topics and in their style of speech, and since Hero's so-called geometry is found to be expanded by several chapters taken from his methods of measurement—which the one who interpolated it testifies to having found in another book of Hero (pp. 131 and 134, Hultsch)—we cannot believe that the geometry itself was excerpted from the books of measurement. A comparison of the individual chapters of each work also discourages us from doing so. But if almost all those booklets edited by Fr. Hultsch differ in more than one respect from that genuine mathematical writing of Hero which we have recovered, it must be determined by what right they are still attributed to him.

II

Five codices of the Dioptrica surveying treatise have become known to me: three in Paris, one in Vienna, and one in Strasbourg. By far the oldest of them is the Parisian codex among the Greek supplements, no. 607, found by Minoide Myna the Macedonian in an unknown location and brought to France, now a distinguished treasure of the National Library. This famous book, known to those who have applied themselves to either the military writers of the Greeks or the historian Aristodemus, could not be used by Venturi when he translated Hero's Dioptrica into Italian,^1) nor by Vincent, when he was the first to bring the booklet itself into the public sphere.^2) What is contained therein was briefly indicated by H. Omont in...

1) Commentary on the History and Theories of Optics by Cavaliere Giambattista Venturi, Vol. I (Bologna 1814) pp. 77–147.
2) Notices and Extracts from Manuscripts of the Imperial Library, Vol. XIX, 2nd part (Paris 1858) pp. 157–337.