88 bernard vitrac
translations. Th is hypothetical archetype represented the state of the text
prior to the re-edition of Th eon, a re-edition from which he believed any
of the preserved Greek manuscripts stemmed. Th e adoption of this point,
one suspects, would overturn the entire ancient history of the text and
have grave consequences for the establishment of the text, not only at the
structural level, but also for the redaction of each proof as is shown in the
example of xii .17 analysed in detail by Knorr.
In order to present my results (and my doubts), I must fi rst give the
reader some idea of the size and nature of the collection of textual diver-
gences found by the comparison of the direct Greek tradition with the
indirect medieval tradition.Extent and nature of the textual divergences between versions
of the Elements
Typology of deliberate structural alterations
It is obviously not possible either to give an exhaustive list of deliberate
alterations which the text of the Elements has undergone or to detail the
relatively complex methods of detection and identifi cation of specifi c
divergences. I am not interested in the variants that the philologists use:
variant spellings, small additions and/or microlacunae, saut du même au
même , and dittographies (that is, reduplications of lines of text). Th e errors
shared between copies of the same text make it possible to establish the
genealogy of manuscripts. Th ey constitute textual markers, all the more
interesting because they are reproduced by generations of copyists who did
not notice them because they could not understand the text or did not try
to understand it.
I have tried to determine the variants which are connected with the
deliberate modifi cations made by those responsible for the re-edition of
the Greek text or the possible revisers of the Arabic translations, such
as Th âbit ibn Qurra, not those related to the ‘mechanical’ errors directly
associated with the process of copying. Th is concern goes particularly for
the global modifi cations of proofs. 51 When such variations existed among
the Greek manuscripts, they had a good chance of surviving the process
of translation. Even the structure of the text of the Elements , composed(^51) For the local variants of the Greek text, another phenomenon must be taken into account: the
multiple uses of the margins of manuscripts aft er the adoption of the codex. See Euclid/Vitrac
2001: iv 44–5.