WILLIAM OF MOERBEKE, THE PAPAL GREEK MANUSCRIPTS, AND THE COLLECTION OF PAPPUS OF ALEXANDRIA

IN VAT. GR. 218

The Collection of Pappus of Alexandria (fl. A.D. 320) is an assemblage of independent mathematical writings, manifesting little original thought, but extremely valuable to the historian of the exact sciences. The text has an unusual history of transmission : for more than a millenium it was scarcely known at all, but in the sixteenth and centuries Pappus came to be one of the most influential authorities on Greek geometry, — still a subject of living interest to the mathematicians of that time — following only Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius. In a valuable paper, A. P. Tre- week has proved that the forty or so manuscripts of Pappus in Greek are all Renaissance descendants, sixteenth-century or later, of a much older, still extant, archetype, the tenth-century Vaticanus gr. 218. However, although Treweek's investigation cast much light on the eventual dissemination of Pappus in western Europe, he was to trace the history of the manuscript before its first appearance in Vatican in 1533 (1). In particular, there was need for an explanation of why no tradition of Pappus had developed in the Greek world, despite the considerable interest in mathematics and astronomy there during the fourteenth century, and how the manuscript came to Rome.

The answer seems to rest on the identification of Vat. gr. 218 with one of the entries in an inventory of the papal library made in 1311. The inventories of 1295 and 1311, since their publication towards the end of the last century by Ehrle, have become well known, because they include notices of about thirty Greek manuscripts, the only such collection in the West, or perhaps anywhere, at that time for which we have such detailed documentation (2). But although interesting things have been learned over the years about these manuscripts, the information has remained dispersed, and some have begun to be repeated. My intention here is first to review the progress made so far in the form of a commentary on the inventories, and secondly to establish more firmly the presence of Vat. gr. 218 in the collection, and its subsequent history.

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