The Complete Works of Archimedes, Vol. 2

[...of] the late Giorgio Valla, let us imagine. Without a doubt, it was written in the ninth or tenth century, as Charles Graux¹) conjectured from the traces of the primitive letter forms preserved in F, and it was very similar to the Oxford Euclid codex (Bodleian, d'Orville ms. X, 1. Inf. 2. 30; examples of it have been published in the Palaeographical Society, plates 65—66), both in its general appearance and in the use of compendia. It was copied with sufficient diligence from the exemplar of a man not unskilled in mathematics; for those scholia written in the margin and the additions, which occur in almost all the books, but especially in the books On the Sphere and Cylinder²), cannot have originated from the very scribe of the codex, since they show a greater knowledge of mathematics than was prevalent in those times. It was for the most part furnished with figures described in a most excellent and diligent manner, but there were often errors in the letters assigned to those figures and in the words of Archimedes himself, as the scribe of codex B noted (p. IX); I have collected examples from F in Quaest. Archim. p. 125 sq., and more could be added. Furthermore, the nature of the matter caused not a few words to be dropped quite often, because, as in mathematical demonstration, the same words were repeated frequently and thus homoioteleuta arose (see I p. 74, 7; 144, 28; 184, 12; 200, 1; 206, 14; 226, 1; 230, 17; 246, 24; 250, 8; 254, 4; 360, 11; 370, 10; 380, 15; 390, 26; 432, 3; 458, 6; 462, 18; 472, 19; 476, 10; 496, 22; II p. 20, 21; 30, 6; 48, 12; 48, 20; 98, 21; 254, 21). Much more rarely, it happened for the same reason that some things were written twice by mistake (I p. 288, 9; 376, 23; 496, 13; II p. 224, 24; 254, 15). Sometimes, on account of the compendia, words that were in themselves quite dissimilar were interchanged,

1. Only then is Valla's codex rightly called palaiotatos by the scribe of codex B (see above p. IX), which he could not have claimed of the Florentine codex itself.
2. Nevertheless, it seems likely to me that these additions do not all originate from the same man. I consider those to be older which, in the books On Conoids and Spheroids and On Spirals, are mostly inserted in the Doric dialect; only in a more recent age do the books On the Sphere and Cylinder and On the Measurement of a Circle seem to have been translated into the common language and at the same time corrupted by numerous additions.