Euclid’s Elements, Book I: definitions, postulates and common notions

Edition

Excerpt of the Greek text of Elements I as edited by J. L. Heiberg, Euclidis Elementa, vol. I (Euclidis Opera omnia, vol. I, Leipzig, Teubner, 1883), pp. 2-10. Kept: the heading and the 23 definitions (Ὅροι), the five postulates (Αἰτήματα) and the nine common notions (Κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι), complete, with Heiberg’s square brackets; left out: the Latin translation on the facing pages, the critical apparatus and testimonia under the text, the line numbers, and the 48 propositions that follow. The text comes from Greek Wikisource (raw wikitext of Στοιχεία/α, which names its source as the site Στοιχεῖα Εὐκλείδου of physics.ntua.gr), compared word by word with the Greek OCR of the Internet Archive item euclidisoperaomn01eucluoft (Gerstein Library, University of Toronto), every difference and every word read, accent by accent, on the scan of that item, and the line ends cut off in it on the scan of a second copy, euclidisoperaomn01eucl (Boston College). Differences from Wikisource, all back to the print: the headings “Ὅροι.”, “Αἰτήματα.” and “Κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι.” (Wikisource adds the counts κγ΄, ε΄ and θ΄ and writes “Κοιναί Ἒνοιαι”); the raised dot in definition κβ΄ (Wikisource a colon); the bracket of common notion δ΄ before its numeral; “μεῖζόν” in η΄; common notion θ΄ in square brackets, as Heiberg prints it. The elision mark is set as an apostrophe; the sixth numeral is set with a stigma (ϛ), as Wikisource does, where the print’s glyph looks like a final sigma.

Rights

Euclid’s text is ancient; the editor, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, died on 4 January 1928 (Wikidata Q936503), and the edition was published in 1883: it is in the public domain in France, where its author and editor died before 1 January 1956, and in the United States, where it was published before 1 January 1931. The Internet Archive gives the Toronto scan the possible-copyright-status NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT.

Greek Wikisource serves as the transcription only: its text is Heiberg’s public domain text, every word of which was checked on the 1883 scan, and no editorial matter of Wikisource is kept. The Perseus Digital Library text of Heiberg (CC BY-SA) was not used.