Chapter Five: The Recovery of Ancient Mechanics

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, Italian humanists recovered and printed the Greek texts of the Aristotelian Mechanical Problems and Pappus of Alexandria’s excerpts from Hero’s Mechanics, and translated them into Latin. Archimedes had already been translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, some of which translations were printed in the early sixteenth. In the fifteenth century they were translated again from the Greek and the new translations were printed with the Greek text in 1544. Francesco Maurolico and Federico Commandino also contributed Archimedean translations and commentaries in the sixteenth century. The Mechanical Problems, which was printed in Greek at the end of the fifteenth century, set the program for mechanics in the first half of the sixteenth century through the translations and commentaries of Vittore Fausto, Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, and Alessandro Piccolomini. Although his Mechanics was unknown in the Latin west, Hero’s other mechanical works were edited and translated in the course of the sixteenth century. Pappus of Alexandria’s Collection, book eight of which concerns mechanics and contains excerpts from Hero’s Mechanics, was translated by Commandino and printed in 1588.