70 § 18 The Domain of Analysis

Loci as coming from it. 1 6 9 Of the works that it comprised, all those by
Apollonius (except Book 8 of the Conics), as well as the Data, apparently
were translated into Arabic around the ninth century. 1 70 However,
Euclid's Porisms and Loci on Surfaces, and the treatises of Aristaeus and
Eratosthenes probably were not known to Arabic mathematicians, and
there is no evidence that the other works had a common mode of
transmission. Perhaps the manuscript or manuscripts of the six minor
works of Apollonius that gave the Arabic translators their Greek text were
the last in the world, for after Eutocius no Byzantine ever alludes to them.

§19. The purpose and plan of Book 7. Book 7 is not a

commentary to the works of the 'Domain of Analysis', at least in the
conventional sense. It comprises three parts: a general introduction to the
'Domain', a series of introductions or 'epitomes' (11' E P , 0 xa L) of nine of the
treatises (omitting Aristaeus's Solid Loci, Euclid's Loci on Surfaces, and
Eratosthenes's On Means), and a corpus of lemmas to these treatises
(omitting the Data, but including a fragmentary section for the Loci on
Surfaces). Where possible Pappus follows a constant formula for the
epitomes: he states the problem or problems solved in the work in as
general a form as he can, and then recites various statistics about the
numbers of problems, cases, propositions, diorisms, and lemmas belonging
to it. For the Porisms and Conics, which were to long and varied in content
for such a summarization, Pappus abbreviated the account, in the one case
by classifying the propositions according to a rather arbitrary scheme, in
the other by quoting Apollonius's own introduction. Occasional digressions
sometimes contain interesting matter; the most remarkable is in 7.33-42, in
which we are given Pappi an portraits of Euclid and Apollonius, the
enunciation of an important locus theorem (the 'locus on three and four
lines') and its unsolved generalization, a tirade against the incompetence of
Pappus's contemporaries, and an unproved proposition concerning the
volumes of solids of revolution. These epitomes must have been meant to
be read before the treatises, and as a guide to their contents.
The lemmas, on the other hand, were to accompany the actual
working through of each treatise. Pappus claims (7.3) to have identified
every passage that required a lemma, that is, every passage in the
geometrical reasoning that assumed steps that a reader would not be able
to justify immediately from what had preceded and his elementary
knowledge. Unfortunately, when Pappus included a lemma in Book 7, he

1 69 See pages 21, 24.

17 0 See the references in Essay A, and the notes to 7.4.

 § 19 Purpose and Plan of Book 7 71

did not invariably indicate the place in the treatise to which it referred.
Moreover, he often included additional theorems and problems that were
not true lemmas, but rather supplements and alternative proofs.
Consequently it is often difficult for us to correlate the lemmas with the
treatises, even in the case of the extant parts of Apollonius's Conics.

§ 20. Mathematics in Book 7. The lemmas for the most part make
dreary reading. As one might expect, the steps that Apollonius chose not to
fill out in his minor works and the Conics are not the -most advanced and
interesting innovations, but usually certain frequently encountered
theorems of an easily recognizable kind that the author preferred to leave
to his reader to confirm. The lemmas (7.132-156) to the Neuses are typical:
except for 7.142 and .146 they are all variations of the same moderately
easy proposition, adapted to different relative dispositions of the given
objects. This class of lemmas, though tedious to work through, are
historically valuable as clues to confirming the identification of the actual
solutions used in the lost works, either reconstructed by conjecture or
recovered from second-hand sources. Moreover, the pattern of variations in
a series of similar lemmas is an indication of the plan of the original work
that assumed them.
A few of Pappus's lemmas surpass this level of interest. In
particular, those to Euclid's Porisms and Loci on Surfaces are our best
evidence for the content of those works. Many of the lemmas to the
Porisms are either demonstrably or probably syntheses of theorems that
Euclid proved by analysis; they are themselves much more sophisticated
than Pappus's usual fare. 1 7 1 In the fragmentary section on the Loci on
Surfaces Pappus presents a proof of the focus-directrix property for the
general conic (the earliest preserved), which seems to have had a three-
dimensional analogue in Euclid's work. 1 7 2
Among the more humble lemmas to Apollonius's treatises, a large
and homogeneous group are related to what is conventionally called
'geometrical algebra'. These propositions (which include many of the
lemmas to the Cutting off of a Ratio, the Determinate Section, and the
Conics) prove various identities concerning sums of products of (or in Greek
terms, rectangles contained by) line segments along a single straight. line.
For example, 7.117 to the Determinate Section demonstrates that, if points
A, B, C, D, E are distributed in that order along a line, and segment AB
equals segment CD, then

17 1 See Essay B.

17 2 See Essay C, section §6.