>>12281324But yes, the nets that you posted are neat, and a at a cursory comparision I'm satisfied that Heath's rendering of 14 is equivalent to Billingsley's, just different translations, natch. That thing could be read as representing 16.5 or 17-ish books if I'm not mistaken (I'm referring to little format changes I noticed through the back matter).
The treatment of ancient bodies of work usually entails the distinction between works definitely attributable to an author, and inferior "spuriosa" which crop up and become attached to the tradition around the author's work. This happens with Plato, Aristotle and others, where a big brain gets a reputation then some other midwit jots down some inferior work which gets confused with the real deal, and it's irreversibly attached in the historical record/tradition. You seem to be catching on to this idea in Euclid's case. I was reading a Presocratics reader some months ago and it had some amusing but philosophically un-interesting numerology which is here. You want T30, ctrl+f "ogdoad" to get in the right neighborhood:
https://erenow.net/ancient/the-first-philosophers-the-presocratics-and-sophists/12.phpIt's a piece on the 'theology of arithmetic", and various properties are ascribed to the numbers 1 through 9. Notions of equality and arithmetic invariance are considered in a protean way. The point is that you get funny but autistic dead-ends like these from the literal pseuds in ancient accretions.
