Complete Works of Diophantus of Alexandria, Vol. 1

As will be shown below, the author had attained such celebrity among the learned that it was an easy fraud to attach his name to anonymous mathematical writings. This was done with the Introductory Remarks to the Syntaxis original: "syntaxin." This refers to Ptolemy’s "Mathematical Treatise," commonly known by its Arabic title, the Almagest. in the Marcian manuscript, and similarly, the name was added to fragments of Heron in our Paris manuscript, just as the name of Euclid was attached to others.

I will now state what is especially noteworthy regarding this false attribution pseudepigraphon: a work falsely attributed to a specific author. A scribe of the 13th century, as it seems, added various materials to the work known as Heron’s Geometry which he had found "in another book of Heron" original: "ἐν ἄλλῳ βιβλίῳ τοῦ Ἥρωνος" (en allo biblio tou Heronos) (edited by Hultsch, pages 131, 14; 134, 8. 15). The most distinguished Moritz Cantor believed that a second, now lost edition of Heron himself was meant by this description, and he argued many points very ingeniously in his usual style according to this conjecture ¹). However, anyone who carefully compares our new fragment with those of Heron published long ago may feel differently. It seems more probable to me, at least, that this "other book" is nothing more than a certain Byzantine collection of geometric problems. It may have been distinguished by Heron's name, like those other collections compiled into a single body by Hultsch, or perhaps it was anonymous but very similar to Heron’s style. Furthermore, I will refrain from demonstrating at greater length that the work falsely attributed to Diophantus was taken from that collection or from that other book of Heron. The reader who wishes to pronounce a judgment on that matter will find the passages to be compared in my notes.

II.

Since I have collected all the testimonies of the ancient writers regarding Diophantus that have come to my notice, though they are certainly very few,

1. Lectures on the History of Mathematics original title: "Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik", Leipzig, at the publishing house of Teubner, 1880, pages 330 and following.