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Updated: May 26, 2025
From the few fragments that remain to us we should be inclined to form a different opinion, and to suspect that national partiality in contrasting them with the Graecized form of the Mimi kept itself blind to their more glaring faults. The characters that oftenest reappear in them are Maccus, Bucco, and Pappus; the first of these is prefixed to the special title, e.g. Maccus miles, Maccus virgo.
The Greek tongue was extraordinarily well adapted as a vehicle of scientific thought. The language of the Greek geometers is also wonderfully concise, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary. And, to say nothing of the perfect finish of Archimedes's treatises, we shall find in Heron, Ptolemy and Pappus veritable models of concise statement.
Analysis and its correlative synthesis are defined by Pappus: 'in analysis we assume that which is sought as if it were already done, and we inquire what it is from which this results, and again what is the antecedent cause of the latter, and so on, until by so retracing our steps we come upon something already known or belonging to the class of principles.
He seems to have been a personage with an immense head, who, corresponding to our clown or harlequin, came in for many hard knocks, but was a general favourite. Pappus took the place of pantaloon, and was the general butt. Several fragments remain, but for many centuries they were taken for those of Naevius, whence great confusion ensued.
He sat down to oppose Macheras; but Herod, when he had taken five cities, took such as were left in them, being about two thousand, and slew them, and burnt the cities themselves, and then returned to go against Pappus, who was encamped at a village called Isanas; and there ran in to him many out of Jericho and Judea, near to which places he was, and the enemy fell upon his men, so stout were they at this time, and joined battle with them, but he beat them in the fight; and in order to be revenged on them for the slaughter of his brother, he pursued them sharply, and killed them as they ran away; and as the houses were full of armed men, and many of them ran as far as the tops of the houses, he got them under his power, and pulled down the roofs of the houses, and saw the lower rooms full of soldiers that were caught, and lay all on a heap; so they threw stones down upon them as they lay piled one upon another, and thereby killed them; nor was there a more frightful spectacle in all the war than this, where beyond the walls an immense multitude of dead men lay heaped one upon another.
In Cicero's day two kinds of farces were in vogue. They were doubtless very comic, but it was possible to get tired of them, for the number of stock characters was limited, and the masks were always the same for each character the old man Pappus, the glutton Bucco, Dossennus the sharper, etc.
From the way in which, in his great Collection, Pappus thinks it necessary to describe in detail the contents of the classical works belonging to the 'Treasury of Analysis' we gather that by his time many of them had been lost or forgotten, and that he aimed at nothing less than re-establishing geometry at its former level. No one could have been better qualified for the task.
With Pappus and Diophantus the list of original writers on mathematics comes to an end. After them came the commentators whose names only can be mentioned here.
I have come down from the roof.... "Father! Where is my father?" At this news the company started up in fresh alarm, Pappus, the mathematician, cried out: "The conflagration has begun! Flame and fire are falling from the skies!"
Stem globose, 3 in. to 5 in. high, thickly clothed with long, narrow, pointed tubercles, the bases of which are set in white wool, whilst the apices are crowned with tiny stars of white silky spines; more like the pappus of a Composite than the spines usually found on Cactuses. A healthy plant has a very pretty and silky appearance which cannot well be described.
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