MENELAUS OF ALEXANDRIA

The following additions and corrections are offered to the article in volume IX, pages 296–302.

There is no reason to discount (note 7) the statement in the Fihrist that Menelaus composed his work on specific gravities at the commission of Domitian. It would be compatible with the fact that he made observations in the first year of Trajan: and the name of Domitian is associated with Menelaus in several Arabic sources besides the Fihrist, notably al-B?r?n?¹ and al-Kh?zin?. Although N. Khanikoff did not translate the whole of the passage by al-Kh?zin? relating to Menelaus (see note 28), he excerpted a good deal of the introduction.²

It is not made clear in the main article that the work of Menelaus on specific gravities actually exists in Arabic translation; it is extant in the Escorial Arabic MS 960, formerly numbered 955. The Latin title given in note 27 is that of Michael Casiri’s eighteenth-century catalog, Bibliothecae arabico-hispana Escurialensis, I (Madrid, 1760), 386; but G. J. Toomer states that a more literal translation would be “The book of Menelaus to the Emperor Domitian [name unrecognizable in the MS] on the mechanism by means of which one can know the amount of each of a number of bodies [or ‘substances’] which are mixed together.”³

It may be taken as certain that Menelaus did not, in fact, draw up a catalog of the fixed stars (page 297 and note 8). A. A. Bjørnbo’s conjecture that he did so was based on his misreading of al-Batt?n?’s misunderstanding of Ptolemy’s account in the Almagest, as was shown by C. A. Nallino and, after him, by J. L. E. Dreyer and H. Vogt.⁴

NOTES

1. In his work “Maq?la f’l-nisabi ’llati bayna ’l-filizz?t wa ’l-jaw?hir”(unpublished), extant only in MS Beirut, Université Saint Joseph, 223(6), which has now disintegrated, but of which photocopies exist, for instance, at the American University of Beirut.

2.Journal of the American Oriental Society,6 (1859), 12–13.

3. The text has never been edited, but there is a German trans. by J. Würschmidt. in Philologus,80 (1925), 377–409. There is an extensive discussion of the content in the dissertation by T . Ihel, Dic Wage im Altertunt and Mate/alter (Erlangen .1908) . 182- 187, with a trans. of the intro. to the Escorial MS.

4. C. A. Nallino, Al-Batt?ni sive Albatenii Opus astronomicum. 1 (Milan, 1903), 124–126, and II (Milan, 1907), 269–270; J. L. E. Dreyer, in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 77 (1917), 534–535; H. Vogt,“Versuch einer Wiederherstellung von Hipparchs Fixsternverzeichnis,” in Astronomische Nachrichten,224 (1925), cols. 37–38.

Ivor Bulmer-Thomas