Plato of Tivoli

Plato of Tivoli (Plato Tiburtinus) was a translator from Tivoli who flourished at Barcelona in the first half of the twelfth century; his is the surviving Latin translation of al-Battani's Zij. ^{1 2}

The year he finished it is unknown; Nallino holds it was certainly in the first half of the twelfth century, when Plato was at Barcelona. ² In his preface Plato says he found al-Battani among the Arabs to be a perfect follower of Ptolemy, compressing his prolixity and correcting his errors — which are very rare and which al-Battani imputes not to Ptolemy but to Hipparchus' root. ³ His translation was first printed at Nuremberg in 1537. ¹

Halley judged that Plato was neither skilled enough in the languages nor trained in astronomy, so that his version is obscure, in barbarous Latin, and senseless in many places; Nallino adds that this holds for nearly all medieval translations. ² Like other translators of his age, Plato kept the Arabic article in proper and geographical names — hence the very form "Albategnius". ⁴ Even so, Nallino finds that Plato's exemplar and the Escorial manuscript derive from one archetype, and that Plato has a few words missing from the Escorial text. ⁵

Boncompagni credits him with the Spherics of Theodosius from Arabic; the Propositions of Almansor, which he says he completed at Barcelona on 18 Dhu al-Hijja 530, mid-September 1136; Abu al-Qasim ibn al-Saffar's book on the use of the astrolabe; and Savasorda's Liber embadorum from Hebrew. ² Steinschneider also gave him the version of Ahmad ibn Yusuf ibn al-Daya's commentary on the pseudo-Ptolemaic Centiloquium, which Nallino restores to Plato's friend John of Seville. ⁶