What is it about?
This is the first study of a fragment of an illustrated Latin text preserved among a collection of treatises written by Ancient Roman land surveyors. Created in late antiquity, the so-called Catalogus Geometrarum is actually a very bad (!) translation of a much earlier Greek commentary on a famous astronomical poem by Aratus, who lived in the second century BC; this poem later became an important school text.
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Why is it important?
This text and its accompanying illustration provides new evidence for the way in which this important scientific poem was studied in the ancient world. The text also mentions 'Euclid the Sicilian': this may be a new, previously unknown author, or a reference to the famous geometer, whose birthplace is otherwise not recorded.
Perspectives
I hope this article demonstrates that even the smallest scraps of information from antiquity can tell us a surprising amount about the way people lived, learned, and thought, and the way in which information and ideas were transmitted.
Richard Marshall
University College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Catalogus geometrarum from the Corpus Agrimensorum, Mnemosyne, November 2022, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/1568525x-bja10144.
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