"All those who have written histories [of geometry] bring to this point their account of the development of this science. Not long after these men [pupils of Plato] came Euclid… Not much younger than these [pupils of Plato] is Euclid, who put together the Elements ,…bringing to irrefragable demonstration the things which had been only loosely proved by his predecessors. This man [must have] lived in the time of the first Ptolemy; for Archimedes, who followed closely the first [Ptolemy? book?] makes mention of Euclid, and further they say that Ptolemy once asked him if there were a shorter way to study geometry…to which he replied that there was no royal road to geometry. He is therefore younger than Plato’s circle, but older than Eratosthenes and Archimedes; for these were contemporaries, as Eratosthenes somewhere says."