Archimedes’ writings: through Heiberg’s veil 191
form he would speak anyway, since he would not even think about which
language to use: the contents matter, and not their verbal form. Such is the
image projected by Heiberg’s editorial choice to minimize the question
of dialect and to assume a purely Doric Archimedes. I am not sure this
is true, and so I suspect that there is an open question as to the cultural
signifi cance of Archimedes’ choice of dialect. Th is question is elided by
Heiberg’s editorial choices. 25
Once again: I do not condemn Heiberg. I point, instead, to the sig-
nifi cance of Heiberg’s move away from the manuscripts, regardless of how
close this may or may not have brought him to the ‘original text’. Th e main
consequence of Heiberg’s move was to make the verbal texture of the text
appear much more consistent than it was in the manuscript evidence. Th e
main implication of that would be to minimize the very signifi cance of
verbal texture: to make Archimedes, once again, into a pure geometer – one
who cares about his mathematics and not at all about his style.
Th e format of Archimedes’ works
If Heiberg’s Archimedes ignores questions of verbal shape, this Archimedes
certainly pays attention to mathematical shape or format. In the criti-
cal edition, the text is articulated throughout by a systematic arrange-
ment based on two dualities: that of the introductory text as against the
sequence of propositions; and, inside the propositions, that of the general
statement as against the particular proof. Both are determined by the
major feature of the format, namely the sequence of numbers of proposi-
tions inside each work. Th e fi rst numeral, preceding the fi rst proposition,
marks the transition from introduction to the sequence of propositions;
from then onwards, each numeral is followed by a single paragraph written
out without diagrammatic labels, which is the general statement preceding
the main proof.
Th is format has basis in the manuscripts’ authority and may to some
extent refl ect Archimedes himself. In some ways, however, Heiberg tends
to emphasize the regularity of this format and even to insert it against the
manuscripts’ authority.
Th e layout itself is signifi cant. Heiberg has the proposition numerals
written inside the block of printed text with clear spaces preceding and
25 All of this is closely parallel to the question of dialect in Th eocritus – another third-century
Syracusan extant, mostly, in some form of Doric, poetic in this case – and even though the
analogous problem has been researched for the case of Th eocritus, scholars are far from
consensus (see Abbenes 1996 ).