Ancient and Mediaeval Science 23 



There are special difficulties for each of them, obscure passages, con- 

 tradictions, gaps, the head or the tail may be missing, etc. This is not 

 true only of scientific texts, but also of Biblical and literary ones. The 

 mechanism of tradition is exceedingly complex and capricious, involving 

 many media — word of mouth, parchment, papyrus, ostraca, paper — 

 and generally more than one language; every accident of history may 

 modify the tradition or suppress it altogether. Each case must be 

 judged on its own merits and the conclusions may vary all the way from 

 discredit to reasonable certainty. 



The authorship of an ancient (or mediaeval) book may be difiicult 

 to ascertain because of the not-uncommon habit of ascribing it to a 

 famous author or to the master of a popular school. There was a great 

 deal of ghostwriting then as now but the principles underlying it were 

 extremely difiFerent. At present "important" people have books written 

 under their name by paid underlings in order to obtain credit for them 

 without pains. In the past modest authors would try to pass off their 

 own compositions under the name of an illustrious master of an earlier 

 time; or else editors would ascribe anonymous books to "plausible" 

 authors, a medical book to Hippocrates or Galen, an astronomical one 

 to Ptolemy, etc. Hence, the modern critic must always be on his guard; 

 the author named in a MS. may be the real one or not; a true authorship 

 is proved by convergent traditions (as in the Archimedian examples 

 dealt with above ) ; a false authorship is generally proved by chronolog- 

 ical inconsistencies. For example, a book which internal criticism shows 

 could have been written only in the late Roman period, could not be 

 ascribed to Archimedes ( unless the references to a later time are interpo- 

 lations, an eventuality which must be considered). The Hippocratic 

 corpus, e.g., is not the production of a man but of a school which was 

 active for centuries; it even includes books written by outsiders, some 

 of them very late ones. It was gradually established by editors and 

 librarians who were tempted to lump together all the items which 

 seemed to them suflBciently alike; such a corpus has a way of growing 

 by deliberate or furtive additions. It owes its existence to the same im- 

 pulses which cause the publication today of so many collections of books 

 devoted to this or that subject; each item shares to some extent the credit 

 of the other items and of the whole; each item helps to sell the others. 

 When the time came when knowledge had to be decanted into another 

 linguistic vehicle for further transmission, those collections or bodies 

 drew the attention of translators; each corpus provided a sufficiently 

 large task which could be directed and divided. It was natural enough 

 for the master of a school of translators wishing to transmit, say, the 

 Hippocratic corpus, or the Galenic one, or the "middle books," ^° to dis- 

 tribute various parts to a number of collaborators. Each of them would 

 do his own share under his own name or under the name of his director; 



^ The middle books between geometry and astronomy ( Kitab al-mutawassitat 

 bain al-handasa wal-hai'a), collection of mathematical and astronomical books to 

 be studied in addition to the Elements and the Almagest. Introd. (2, lOOlf. ). 

 W. H. Worrell: An interesting collection (Scripta mathematica, 9, 195-96, 1943). 



