Today, when all over the world the interest in history of science and the research in this field have grown, the methodological questions of the historical studies have become especially sharp and actual. Around the problem of the advantages and admissibility of interpretations, of the "translatability" of older texts into modern language, whole parties, who hold diametrically opposite views have appeared; let us agree to call them antiquarists and modernists. The modernists boldly translate the classical texts into the language of modern mathematics, appealing to far finer and more complicated parts of it than the simple language of notations usually used by the authors of the past. The antiquarists, on the contrary, declare that such interpretations are illegitimate, distort the meaning of the text, bring in it concepts and methods alien to it.¹ Who is right?