HISTORICAL NOTE.¶
I have already given, in the note to IV. 10, the evidence upon which the construction of the five regular solids is attributed to the Pythagoreans. Some of them, the cube, the tetrahedron (which is nothing but a pyramid), and the octahedron (which is only a double pyramid with a square base), cannot but have been known to the Egyptians. And it appears that dodecahedra have been found, of bronze or other material, which may belong to periods earlier than Pythagoras’ time by some centuries (for references see Cantor’s Geschichte der Mathematik I3, pp. 175—6).
It is true that the author of the scholium No. 1 to Eucl. XIII. says that the Book is about “the five so-called Platonic figures, which however do not belong to Plato, three of the aforesaid five figures being due to the Pythagoreans, namely the cube, the pyramid and the dodecahedron, while the octahedron and the icosahedron are due to Theaetetus.” This statement (taken probably from Geminus) may perhaps rest on the fact that Theaetetus was the first to write at any length about the two last-mentioned solids. We are told indeed by Suidas (s. v. Θεαίτητος) that Theaetetus “first wrote on the ‘five solids’ as they are called.” This no doubt means that Theaetetus was the first to write a complete and systematic treatise on all the regular solids; it does not exclude the possibility that Hippasus or others had already written on the dodecahedron. The fact that Theaetetus wrote upon the regular solids agrees very well with the evidence which we possess of his contributions to the theory of irrationals, the connexion between which and the investigation of the regular solids is seen in Euclid’s Book XIII.
Theaetetus flourished about 380 B.C., and his work on the regular solids was soon followed by another, that of Aristaeus, an elder contemporary of Euclid, who also wrote an important book on Solid Loci, i.e. on conics treated as loci. This Aristaeus (known as “the elder”) wrote in the period about 320 B.C. We hear of his Comparison of the five regular solids from Hypsicles (2nd cent. B.C.), the writer of the short book commonly included in the editions of the Elements as Book XIV. Hypsicles gives in this Book some six propositions supplementing Eucl. XIII.; and he introduces the second of the propositions (Heiberg’s Euclid, Vol. V. p. 6) as follows:
“The same circle circumscribes both the pentagon of the dodecahedron and the triangle of the icosahedron when both are inscribed in the same sphere. This is proved by Aristaeus in the book entitled Comparison of the five figures.”
Hypsicles proceeds (pp. 7 sqq.) to give a proof of this theorem. Allman pointed out (Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid, 1889, pp. 201—2) that this proof depends on eight theorems, six of which appear in Euclid’s Book XIII. (in Propositions 8, 10, 12, 15, 16 with Por., 17); two other propositions not mentioned by Allman are also used, namely XIII. 4 and 9. This seems, as Allman says, to confirm the inference of Bretschneider (p. 171) that, as Aristaeus’ work was the newest and latest in which, before Euclid’s time, this subject was treated, we have in Eucl. XIII. at least a partial recapitulation of the contents of the treatise of Aristaeus.
After Euclid, Apollonius wrote on the comparison of the dodecahedron and the icosahedron inscribed in one and the same sphere. This we also learn from Hypsicles, who says in the next words following those about Aristaeus above quoted: “But it is proved by Apollonius in the second edition of his Comparison of the dodecahedron with the icosahedron that, as the surface of the dodecahedron is to the surface of the icosahedron [inscribed in the same sphere], so is the dodecahedron itself [i.e. its volume] to the icosahedron, because the perpendicular is the same from the centre of the sphere to the pentagon of the dodecahedron and to the triangle of the icosahedron.”