Secretum secretorum of pseudo-Aristotle

The Secret of secrets, or in Latin Secretum or Secreta secretorum is a translation of the Arabic Kitab sirr al-asrar, fully the Book of the science of government, on the good ordering of statecraft. It takes the form of a letter supposedly from Aristotle (and considered as such by medieval readers) to Alexander during his campaign in Persia. This text is taken from Robert Copland's printed edition of 1528, a copy of which resides in Cambridge University Library.

For this edition all spellings have been left as in the original with the following changes made for easier reading:

1) y, where it represents 'thorn', has been transcribed as 'th';

2) the letters u, v, and j have been deployed according to modern usage. (The original text uses v as a variant of u wherever it occurs at the beginning of a word, and does not use j save as a flourish at the end of Roman numerals such as .viij.)

A few obvious typographical errors have also been corrected.

For a scholarly edition of this text, as well as eight other versions of the Kitab sirr al-asrar, see M. A. Manzalaoui, Secretum secretorum: nine English versions, Vol. 1, Early English Text Society No. 276, Oxford University Press (1977).

This text is in the public domain.





tashid 2001-09-09