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Abstract

Selected fragments of Euclid of Megara concentrate on the testimonies that modern historians consider important for our efforts to reconstruct the early phase of the so-called Megarian Socratic school. Three of the fragments in this selection come from the doxographer Diogenes Laertius, who takes them from earlier Peripatetic and Alexandrian sources (fragments SSR II A 30, SSR II A 32, and SSR II A 34, according to Giannantoni’s edition); the fourth fragment comes from Cicero (SSR II A 31). The main method in the interpretation of the fragments is a hermeneutical reading of the text and the context, based on linguistic analysis and comparison of the various theses attributed to Euclid with the corpus of Socratic literature as well as with Hellenistic philosophy. The purpose of this paper is not to provide an interpretation of the fragments, but to review the basic strategies of modern historians in interpreting these testimonies, so that the reader can get a comprehensive picture of how the fragments have been interpreted in the last two centuries.