Commentaries of Pappus and Theon of Alexandria on the Almagest – A. Rome (1931)

Towards the end of $2021$ , I got stuck on a particular calculation and it took me over a month and a half to resolve. Frustratingly, Ptolemy showed no work, Neugebauer made no comment (which generally indicates he found no fault in the calculation), and Pedersen skipped the chapter entirely. It seemed there was little to no help available save a footnote in the Toomer translation I’m using which stated

a somewhat unsatisfactory numerical verification of [the calculation] (using the Handy Tables) is in Pappus’ commentary (Rome[ $1$ ] $232 - 4$ ).

The citation here is to a text entitled Commentaires de Pappus et de Theon d’Alexandrie sur l’Almageste(Commentaries of Pappus and Theon of Alexandria) by Adolphe Rome.

Pappus was a $4^{t h}$ century astronomer/mathematician so my hope was that the source by Rome that Toomer was citing was a translation. As was obvious from the title, the work was written in French and I’d taken enough French that I hoped I would be able to muddle through a translation and so I requested the text through an interlibrary loan.

Sadly, the text does not include an actual translation. It provides an authoritative Greek text, compiled from several copies that were extant in Rome’s time. The only French is Rome’s commentary. While I was able to take a few pictures and extract the Greek text using Google Lens’ translate feature, but evidently ancient Greek is sufficiently different from modern Greek that it wasn’t able to parse a single word¹. Thus, I wasn’t able to get any information out of the text I loaned.

That being said, it is quite frustrating that this text is so difficult to obtain in the first place. I couldn’t find a single copy available for sale and all copies were locked up in university libraries. As such, I sought to ensure that this text would be more easily available for anyone who seeks to use it in the future (assuming they read ancient Greek). Thus, I have scanned the entirety of the text using Adobe Scan.

As a quick note, there are actually three works with this title and author. Each was published in a journal called Studi e Testi which, best I can tell, was produced by the Vatican Library. The text in question appeared as Tome I and was published in volume $54$ in $1931$ . I also received vol $72$ ( $1936$ ) and vol $106$ ( $1943$ ) which I will be scanning as time permits.

But for now, here is the entirety of the first tome in the series. When frustrated with other things, I’ve slowly been working on translating the French and will make that available if/when completed.

From what I was told in Reddit’s ancient Greek sub, is that the AI algorithms that learn to do the translation need texts on which to train and there simply aren’t enough ancient texts for them to do so on.