The Conics of Apollonius

at the beginning of his commentary on the Conics of Apollonius. And, in the judgment of Aristaeus, the intention of Pappus was the same.

The first to translate the four prior books was Joan. Baptista Memmius; but he did so unhappily, because he did not understand the subject matter of the work: hence, he did not see the manifest errors of the Greek codex, and he often hallucinates like a child: as was noted by Francisco Maurolyco in the preface to his Cosmography. Therefore, Federicus Commandinus undertook the work; he translated it into Latin anew and published it at Bologna in the year 1566. And yet, Commandinus could not achieve everything in that translation. The Greek codex was so corrupted that he was forced to follow a flawed codex in the Latin; as he himself admits.

Other works of this Apollonius are also cited by Proclus on Euclid, where he praises the Apollonius of Perga in the Ocybous original: "Ἀπολλώνιος ὁ Περγαῖος ἐν τῷ Ὠκυτοϐόῳ". Perhaps it should be written as in the Ocybous original: "τῷ Ὠκυϐόῳ". This word derived from boē, meaning battle: as is often found in Homer: Swift in battle, fast-fighters original: "Ὠκυϐόῳ, ταχυμάχαι". And Eutocius of Ascalon enumerates certain things in his book on the measurement of the Circle; this Eutocius also wrote a commentary on the Conics of Apollonius. Commandinus also translated that commentary into Latin. However, although we now *In the year 1650, before the three subsequent books were published by Borelli. possess only four books of Conics, the most distinguished Jacobus Golius, formerly a most close colleague at the Academy of Leiden, obtained three more from the East. To him, Arabic letters and all of Mathematics owe much: and they were to owe even more shortly; especially when those three books of Conics see the light. Someone might ask what happened to the eighth book. We know of this from the Golius Codex: where it was added at the bottom that it had not been translated into Arabic; because that book was also missing in the Greek Codices, from which the Arabs would have translated the rest. But the most learned Mersennius, in the preface to the Conics of Apollonius, which are in his Mathematical Synopsis original: "Συνόψῃ", says that it exists in Arabic: indeed, that all the books of Apollonius are read in that language; certainly even more than those enumerated by Pappus. And he cites Aben Nedin as a witness to these; who composed a book on the Arab Philosophers, and recorded the writings of all those who were [active] from the four-hundredth year after Muhammad. Meanwhile (as the same Mersennius adds), it is the suspicion of Claudius Mydorgius, a Parisian patrician, that those three books of Conics, which are believed by the Arabs to be Apollonius's, are not genuine, but were supposed by someone who wished to deceive under the name of Apollonius. And he gathers this from the fact that in the fifth book, the first Proposition in the sixth of Apollonius demonstrates what is possible not only in a right cone, but also in any scalene one, and in any portions whatsoever. Vitruvius also mentions the author in book 1, chapter 1. Cardanus, in his 16th [book] On Subtlety, assigns him the seventh place among the subtle geniuses of the world.