Translation of Heiberg’s Prolegomena

In this chapter, we present the translation of the main excerpts of Heiberg’s Prolegomena to his Archimedes Edition. This text was originally written in Latin [Heiberg, J. L. (1910). Archimedis Opera omnia cum commentariis Eutocii: Vol. 1-3. In aedibus BG Teubneri.] and contains the evidence of interesting phenomena in the transmission of ancient scientific texts. Considering the nature of the present work, which is rather interested in problems concerning the transmission and degradation of scientific knowledge through the centuries, the following translation concerns mainly the pages in which issues related to this type of problem are addressed. We have, however, omitted the translation of extremely technical parts of the philologist's work, which are beyond the scope of the present work.