Sid asked:

Could you please tell me where (in which museum/ library) the originals of Plato's and Aristotle's
writings are kept? What I am interested in is to know the original text on which the current English
translation is based.

If the available English translation of the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers are based on their
Latin/ Arabic translation, then could you please tell me where those Arabic translations are held at
present?

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I was leaving this one for someone else, because I don't really know the answer. But since no one
replied, I'll say that as I recall, the museum in which the originals of Plato and Aristotle were kept, if
there was such a collection, was in the library at Alexandria, established by Alexander of Macedon,
and totally destroyed by fire over 1000 years ago. One of the most barbaric acts, and irreparable
losses, in Western history. Thousandsof original manuscripts from antiquity were destroyed in that
fire. The only other place that those manuscripts might possibly reside are in the Vatican library, but I
doubt that they do. The English translations of those writers, then, are based on both Greek and Latin
revisions and translations, and those latter, I believe, arein the Vatican library (remember Thomas
Aquinas). But there are, I'm sure, copies of them available pretty much anywhere (take a look, for
example, at the Hippias site on the web for the Greek)... you might ask the British Museum, for
example. I have no idea whatsoever about Arabic translations.

Steven Ravett Brown