Book Description

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, the Book of the Science of Government, on the Good Ordering of Statecraft. The origins of the treatise are uncertain. No Greek original exists, though there are claims in the Arabic treatise that it was translated from the Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic by a well-known 9th century translator, Yahya ibn al-Bitriq. It appears, however, that the treatise was actually composed originally in Arabic. The treatise also contains supposed letters from Aristotle to Alexander the Great, and this may be related to Alexander the Great in the Qur'an and the wider range of Middle Eastern Alexander romance literature. The Arabic version was translated into Persian (at least twice), Ottoman-Turkish (twice), Hebrew (and from Hebrew into Russian), Castilian and Latin. There are two Latin translations from the Arabic, the first one dating from around 1120 by John of Seville for the a Portuguese queen (preserved today in some 150 copies), the second one from circa 1232 by Philippus Tripolitanus (preserved in more than 350 copies), made in the Near East (Antiochia). It is this second Latin version that was translated into English by Robert Copland and printed in 1528.