Pseudo-Boethius: Ars Geometriae et Arithmeticae

This compilation on geometry and arithmetic, printed among the works of Boethius (c. 477–524), is not his work but a later medieval composition that draws on texts of the Roman land surveyors (agrimensores) and on Boethian material. It opens with a definition of geometry as the discipline of unmoving magnitude and the contemplative description of forms, recalling that it began in Egypt when the boundaries of fields had to be restored after the floods of the Nile, and citing Varro on the origin of the name. Sections follow on the usefulness of geometry, boundary disputes and the names of surveyors.

Compilations of this kind preserved the practical knowledge of Roman surveying in the early Middle Ages and attached it to the authority of Boethius, whose genuine geometry was largely lost. The work also contains philosophical reflections on number and the good drawn from the Platonic tradition. It is a valuable witness to the transmission of Roman technical writing and to how mathematics was taught in the monastic schools, though the precise date and place of compilation are uncertain.