Euclid’s Elements was a standard mathematical textbook for more than two thousand years. This manuscript of the Elements was finished in September 888 by the scribe Stephanos Clericus, and was bought by Arethas of Patrae, Bishop of Caesarea. It is the oldest manuscript of a classical Greek author to bear a date, and the oldest surviving manuscript of the most widely studied version of Euclid – by Theon of Alexandria. It is a product of the great revival of scholarship in ninth-century Byzantium, in which many classical Greek texts were copied and thereby preserved for future generations. The text is beautifully written in a newly introduced cursive minuscule and accompanied by precise line drawings. In the margins Arethas has written substantial annotations. 

MS. D’Orville 301, fols. 306v–307r