186 reviel netz
Heiberg’s ordering has been adopted in all subsequent editions and translations,
notably those by T. L. Heath, P. Ver Eecke, E. J. Dijksterhuis and C. Mugler. Indeed,
Ver Eecke pronounced it to be of all possible orderings “le plus rationnel”. What
began as merely a philological concern to keep strictly to the sequence of the
manuscript sources has thus given rise to the astonishing view that this ordering
has intrinsic rational merit, despite such patent incongruities as the placing of
the Sand Reckoner and the Quadrature of the Parabola and others to be discussed
below.
Th is may, fi rst of all, serve as a nice reminder of the pre-eminent position
of Heiberg in our contemporary reading of Archimedes. Further, I am not
quite clear as to what ‘patent incongruities’ Knorr meant. Clearly his inter-
est lay with the chronological sequence, and as such the order of the Opera
Omnia makes no sense. It is not a random order, though, and its signifi -
cance should be pondered.
Here is the order of Heiberg’s second edition:SC i – SC ii – DC – CS – SL – PE i – PE ii – Aren. – QP – FB i – FB ii – Stom. –
Meth. – Book of Lemmas – Bov. – Fragments (in reality, Testimonia).Up to QP, inclusive, this follows (as explained by Knorr) the order of
codex A (which was the only order available to Heiberg, on manuscript
authority, for his fi rst edition). Th e works extant on the Palimpsest follow
in the order FB – Stom. – Meth. (perhaps designed to keep the Method
till later?), and then follow several works from diverse sources: the Book
of Lemmas from the Arabic, the Cattle Problem from a diff erent line of
transmission altogether, and then of course the Testimonia from sources
other than Archimedes himself. One should note the outcome, that Heiberg
foregrounded the works in which he detected most interpolations. Th is is
not a paradox: the works foregrounded by Heiberg were the elementary
works in pure geometry, and the detection of many interpolations could
have meant to Heiberg an indication of the signifi cance such works had for
Archimedes’ ancient and medieval readers.
While Heiberg’s principle was purely philological, he followed manu-
scripts that, themselves, made rational choices (so that Ver Eecke’s judge-
ment is not necessarily false). Th e system underlying A is quite clear.
A sequence of fi ve works in pure geometry (SC i , SC ii , DC, CS, SL) is
followed by a sequence of four works that refer in some way or another to
the physical order (PE i – PE ii – Aren. – QP; this is followed in codex A
by Eutocius’ commentaries, and then by a treatise by Hero on Measures).
Such an arrangement is suggestive of a previous ‘canonical’ selection of