From the late 3rd century CE, the Roman Empire was administratively divided into the Western Roman Empire (which finally collapsed in 476) and the Eastern Roman Empire (later known as the Byzantine Empire). Greek was spoken in the East, while Latin predominated in the West—to such an extent that even the Roman elite, once perfectly fluent in Greek, eventually abandoned it. Two writers therefore set out to translate and adapt Greek philosophical and mathematical works.
Latin translations
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Little is known about the first, Martianus Capella, except that he is thought to have come from Carthage and lived in the first half of the 5th century. His work, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, was enormously successful: in poetic and allegorical form, it recounts the lives of the principal intellectual disciplines. In particular, he devotes a book to each scientific field: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and harmony (the mathematical theory of music). It includes many results from Euclid—both geometric and arithmetic—presented in highly literary terms. By linking mathematics with mythology and philosophy in delightful poetic prose, Capella helped popularize these results.
Much more is known about the second writer. Boethius, born around 480 as the Western Roman Empire was collapsing, became an adviser to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. He hoped to persuade the king to support a revival of Greek learning—a millennium before what we now call the Renaissance—and this led him to translate several Greek scientific works into Latin to promote them more effectively. He translated works by Euclid and Ptolemy (those translations are now lost), as well as Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic, which remained the standard textbook on the science of numbers throughout the Western Middle Ages.
