Ah, the joys of working at a humanities library - a patron came down from the stacks with a couple of volumes of Euclid's Elementa, in the original Ancient Greek. I struck up a conversation, talked a little about Greek (both Ancient and Modern), and gave him my card. Euclid is one of my favorite authors to teach grammar from, incidentally, as he tends to use the same vocabulary over and over again while employing the full depth of Attic grammar to get his theorems across. He's also fond of the 3rd person perfect imperative, a form which I only thought existed in the imagination of grammarians until I found it used all over the place in Euclid's work. I guess the odd phrase "Let there have been constructed a line from point A to point B" is not so odd in the context of mathematics! I find it fascinating how much Euclid depends on the structure of Greek to make his point, much more so than I'd imagined, having only read him briefly in translation before. I wonder how much the very idea of mathematics itself is indebted to the more obscure grammatical and syntactic rules of Ancient Greek? A question to ponder.