The Bekker Edition (1831) & the Oxford Translation

Textual Provenance, Canonical Pagination & Digital Verification

Universal Bekker Coordinates (1831)

Modern scholarship cites every treatise of Aristotle according to the two-volume Greek critical edition prepared by August Immanuel Bekker for the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin (Aristotelis Opera, 1831; Oxford 11-volume reprint, 1837). Each page of Volumes I and II (pages 1 through 1462) is printed in two columns—left column a and right column b—of roughly forty-five lines each.

A Bekker coordinate such as 1051a21 uniquely identifies:

  • Page 1051 (in Metaphysics Book Θ, Chapter 9),

  • Column a (left-hand column),

  • Line 21 (τὰ δὲ διαγράμματα εὑρίσκεται ἐνεργείᾳ — “geometrical constructions are discovered in actuality”).

Across the sister repositories of GEOMETOR, Bekker citations appear in heterogeneous typographic conventions: compact 71a11 in geometor/euclid, spaced scholastic Latin I, 10 76 b 39 or III, 7, 431 b 2 in geometor/hoenen, and medieval book-chapter titles (Secundo Posteriorum, Primo Coeli) in geometor/pacioli. The concordance engine in geometor.aristotle.concordance normalizes all 246 sister-corpus citations into canonical Bekker records and anchors every covered locus to #bekker-<id> in the Codex.

Primary Source Provenance & SHA-256 Integrity

All eighteen primary Greek and English source files staged under resources/aristotle/sources/ derive exclusively from authoritative public-domain scholarly editions and are verified on every build via resources/aristotle/sources_manifest.json:

  • Greek Critical Text (10 files): * Categories, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and De Anima: TEI-epidoc XML editions from the Scaife / First1KGreek Digital Library (tlg0086), preserving Bekker 1831/1837 milestone tags. * Physics (Books II, III, IV, VI) and De Caelo (Book I): Bekker 1831 polytonic Greek normalized to Unicode NFC. * Metaphysics: Sir William David Ross's landmark Clarendon Press critical text (Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1924) via Perseus / First1KGreek.

  • Oxford English Translation (8 files): * Complete public-domain Clarendon Press Works of Aristotle Translated into English (ed. J. A. Smith & W. D. Ross): E. M. Edghill (Categories), A. J. Jenkinson (Prior Analytics), G. R. G. Mure (Posterior Analytics), W. A. Pickard-Cambridge (Topics), R. P. Hardie & R. K. Gaye (Physics), J. L. Stocks (De Caelo), J. A. Smith (De Anima), and W. D. Ross (Metaphysics).