The Texts

Secretum Secretorum
(The Secret of Secrets)

On this page: what it is · where to read it · which translation · what it contains · the Emerald Tablet · the Latin and Roger Bacon · the two Castilian versions · reception

What the Secretum secretorum is

The Secretum secretorum, or Secret of Secrets, is a tenth-century Arabic treatise falsely attributed to Aristotle, on how a king should be, how to govern, how to keep healthy and how to judge men. It presents itself as the aged Aristotle’s reply to a letter in which Alexander the Great asked him for a book to guide him. Robert Steele, who edited it in 1920, found no Greek origin: Greek ideas and treatises have been worked in, but “the texture itself of the original work is oriental, not western”; he traced it to the meeting of Persian and Syriac ideas in the seventh to ninth centuries and allowed that a Syriac version may have existed (introduction, pp. x-xi). The original is Arabic, the Kitab sirr al-asrar, and its first form is lost; Hugo O. Bizzarri, from a notice by Ibn Juljul of about 975, places it between 950 and 975 (2010, p. 14 and p. 103, n. 8).

The book tells its own origin story, and the story is part of the fiction. In the prologue the translator, Yahya ibn al-Bitriq (“Yahye abn Aluitac” in the Castilian), says he searched the temples until, in one that Hermes had built for himself, he found the book written in letters of gold (Poridat, ed. Bizzarri, pp. 102-103). Bizzarri identifies him as the son of al-Bitriq, a translator of the time of the caliph al-Mansur (p. 102, n. 6); Steele, who calls him Yuhanna ibn al-Batrik, makes him physician to the caliph al-Ma’mun, dying in 815 (1920, p. xi). It spread widely: more than six hundred manuscripts survive (Bizzarri, p. 13).

Where to read the Secret of Secrets

The best free starting point in English is Steele’s 1920 volume: the Latin text and, in the same book, a literal English translation of the Arabic. Links checked on 6 November 2026; full details under Sources.

For more free scans of Hermetic and related texts, see our list of scans.

Which translation to choose

• To read the whole book in modern English: the literal translation of the Arabic made for Steele by Ismail Ali and edited by A. S. Fulton (1920, pp. 176-266). Steele meant it to “serve as a key to the Latin” (p. vii). It is free.
• For the shorter eight-book form: Moses Gaster’s English translation of the Hebrew version, made, as Steele thought, by Judah al-Harizi, who flourished 1190-1218 (Steele 1920, p. xvi). Steele called it the easiest way to study the core of the work (p. x). Free on the Internet Archive.
• For the Latin that medieval Europe read: Steele 1920, or its transcription in the Würzburg corpus. This is Bacon’s edition: he split the text into four parts of his own and rewrote the chapter headings (p. xxiii).
• For the English of the Middle Ages: Manzalaoui’s Nine English Versions (Early English Text Society, 1977) collects them. Free alternatives are Steele’s editions of 1898, three prose versions, and 1894, the verse Secrees of old Philisoffres.
• For the first printed English: Robert Copland’s The Secrete of Secretes of Arystotle, 1528 (Steele 1920, p. xxxiv), free in the EEBO-TCP transcription, a plain text without notes; the copy it follows lacks its title page.
• For a modern English rendering of a medieval version: Linda K. Kerns, Secret of Secrets (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), from James Yonge’s Gouernaunce of prynces (LC record). For the East Slavic branch, W. F. Ryan and Moshe Taube, Secret of Secrets: The East Slavic Version (London: Warburg Institute, 2019), with an annotated English translation (LC record).
• For its history: Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets (2003), on how scholars read it from its Latin translation to about 1550; and for the Arabic and Castilian side, Bizzarri’s study (2010, pp. 11-62).

What it contains

The long version, the one Philip of Tripoli translated, has ten discourses. In Steele’s translation from the Arabic they are: the kinds of kings; the conduct proper to the king, which takes in a regimen of health (the seasons, diet, waters, wine, the bath) and a physiognomy; justice; ministers; the writers of royal warrants; ambassadors; superintendents; officers and soldiers; the conduct of wars; and talismans and astrology (1920, contents, pp. v-vi). In the Latin the theory of talismans travels with a section on alchemy and the properties of stones and plants (p. xxiii); Bacon called the whole the Liber decem scienciarum, “book of the ten sciences” (p. xxiii).

The shorter form is eight books. Its Castilian version, the Poridat de las poridades, announces them in Aristotle’s letter: the kinds of kings; the king’s state and conduct; justice; officials, scribes and knights; messengers; soldiers; battles; and “saberes ascondidos”, hidden sciences: the properties of stones, plants and animals (ed. Bizzarri, p. 105).

The Secretum secretorum and the Emerald Tablet

The long version includes the Emerald Tablet in its final discourse, and Steele wrote that it “includes the oldest known text” of it (1920, p. xv). In the Latin the speaker is “pater noster Hermogenes qui triplex est in philosophia”, our father Hermogenes, threefold in philosophy (pp. 115-117), and Albertus Magnus quoted the Tablet from this text in his De mineralibus (p. xix). In the English translation of the Arabic, it is “our ancestor Hermes Trismegistus” (p. 262), at the end of a set of alchemical instructions.

Against Steele’s “oldest”, Paul Kraus (1942, p. 272, note), following Julius Ruska, gave priority to the Sirr al-khaliqa, from which the Secretum probably borrowed the Tablet, as set out on our page on Balinas. The Castilian Poridat does not contain it; its eighth book is a lapidary (Bizzarri, p. 158). In the Castilian Secreto, a saying of the “doctor resplandeçiente, Hermogenes” comes, in Bizzarri’s view, from the Tabula smaragdina (p. 75, n. 47).

The Latin translations and Roger Bacon

There were two Latin translations. John of Seville (Johannes Hispalensis) translated only the regimen of health in the first half of the twelfth century, for a queen “T.” of Spain; Steele suggested Teresa, daughter of Alfonso VI and mother of the first king of Portugal (1920, pp. xvi-xvii), while Bizzarri gives 1109-1130 and leaves the queen unidentified (pp. 15-16). This partial version had many copies and translations of its own (Steele, p. xvii). Philip of Tripoli translated the whole book “in the first half of the thirteenth century” for a churchman named Guido, and says in his dedication that it was found at Antioch (Steele, pp. xvii-xix). Little is known of either man, and Bizzarri takes Philip’s prologue for literary fiction (pp. 16-17).

Roger Bacon was its most persistent reader. “From his first work to his last he quotes it as an authority”, wrote Steele, adding that it “fortified, if it did not create, his belief in astrology and natural magic” (p. viii). The earliest known quotations from Philip’s version are Bacon’s, from between 1243 and 1254 (p. xviii). Bacon prepared his own edition with glosses, finished by Steele’s dating before 1257, and wrote an introductory treatise around 1270 (pp. vii-viii). That edition, from Bodleian MS Tanner 116, is the one Steele printed (p. vii); it had no influence on the rest of the manuscript tradition (pp. xi, xxiii).

The two Castilian versions: Poridat and Secreto

There are two different medieval Castilian versions. The Poridat de las poridades (“poridat” means secret; Bizzarri, glossary, p. 331) was translated straight from the Arabic in the mid-thirteenth century, a date proposed by Lloyd A. Kasten (Bizzarri, pp. 14-15, 19); Steele linked it to the shorter Arabic form (p. xiv). The Secreto de los secretos is a Castilian translation of Philip’s Latin, surviving in a single fifteenth-century manuscript in Madrid, BNE Mss/9428 (Bizzarri, pp. 33-34). The Poridat survives in five manuscripts; the base of Bizzarri’s edition is at the Escorial (L.III.2), of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century; the Secreto covers government and health in 31 chapters (Bizzarri, pp. 34, 37, 53-54). Both are free in Bizzarri’s edition, and the Secreto also on the Filosofía en español site.

Reception

In Castile the Partida II of Alfonso X’s law code quotes Aristotle’s advice to Alexander from a version other than the Castilian Secreto, and Juan Gil de Zamora used the work in his De preconiis Hispaniae (Bizzarri, pp. 18-21). Bizzarri connects the interest in the Poridat with Alfonso X’s circle (p. 31), the king who also had the Picatrix translated from Arabic.

Steele 1920 lists the English versions (pp. xxxiii-xxxiv):

• Prose: from a shortened French text; from the Latin vulgate; Young’s of 1422, from the French of Jofroi of Waterford, in the English of the Pale in Ireland; John Shirley’s, unfinished; Gilbert Haye’s, from the French (Scottish Text Society, 1914). Steele 1898 prints the first three (prefatory note).
• Verse: John Lydgate’s Secrees of old Philisoffres, completed by Benedict Burgh after Lydgate’s death (Steele 1894, § xiii).
• Print: Robert Copland’s translation of 1528, and an abridged Aristotle’s Secret of Secrets contracted in 1702.

In Latin, the edition of 1501 by Alessandro Achillini of Bologna mixed Philip’s text with passages from the Hebrew version; it became the text most often met with and, Steele says, a source of confusion (pp. xi, xxiii).

Key facts

Arabic title	Kitab sirr al-asrar; Latin Secretum secretorum
Form	Letter of Aristotle to Alexander the Great; attribution false
Original	Arabic, first form lost; about 950-975 according to Bizzarri (2010)
Latin	John of Seville, partial (12th century); Philip of Tripoli, complete (first half of the 13th century)
Castilian	Poridat de las poridades, from Arabic (13th century); Secreto de los secretos, from Latin (one 15th-century manuscript)
Manuscripts	More than six hundred (Bizzarri 2010, p. 13)
Read free	Steele 1920 (Latin and English translation of the Arabic); Steele 1894 and 1898 (Middle English)
Checked	6 November 2026

Fair questions

Is there an English translation of the Secretum secretorum?

Yes. Robert Steele’s 1920 edition includes a literal English translation of the Arabic by Ismail Ali, free on the Internet Archive. The medieval English versions are collected in M. A. Manzalaoui’s Secretum secretorum: Nine English Versions (1977).

Where can I read the Secret of Secrets online for free?

Steele’s 1920 volume (Latin plus English from the Arabic) and his editions of 1894 and 1898 (Middle English) are free scans on the Internet Archive. The Latin is also transcribed in the Würzburg Arabic and Latin Corpus, and the two Castilian versions are in Bizzarri’s free PDF (2010).

Who wrote the Secretum secretorum?

Not Aristotle. It is an anonymous Arabic work, the Sirr al-asrar, whose prologue claims a translation by Yahya ibn al-Bitriq; Bizzarri places the original around 950-975.

What did Roger Bacon do with the Secretum secretorum?

He quoted it throughout his career and prepared his own edition with glosses, before 1257 according to Steele, plus an introductory treatise around 1270. Steele published that edition at Oxford in 1920.

Does the Secretum secretorum contain the Emerald Tablet?

The long version translated by Philip of Tripoli does: in the Arabic it stands in the last discourse, and in the Latin it is spoken by “Hermogenes” (Steele 1920, pp. xv, 115-117). The Castilian Poridat does not.

Sources & further reading

• Robert Steele (ed.), Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), with a translation from the Arabic by Ismail Ali, ed. A. S. Fulton: introduction, pp. vii-xxxvi; Emerald Tablet in Latin, pp. 115-117, in English, p. 262; translation from the Arabic, pp. 176-266; scan on the Internet Archive.
• Secret of Secrets (transl. Philip of Tripoli), Latin text of Steele 1920 in the Arabic and Latin Corpus, ed. Dag Nikolaus Hasse (University of Würzburg), transcription.
• Moses Gaster, The Hebrew Version of the Secretum Secretorum: A Mediaeval Treatise Ascribed to Aristotle (London, 1907-1908; reprinted from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society), Hebrew text with English translation; scan on the Internet Archive.
• Robert Steele (ed.), Early English Text Society, London: Three Prose Versions of the Secreta Secretorum, vol. I (1898; Extra Series 74), prefatory note, scan; Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of old Philisoffres (1894; Extra Series 66), introduction, § xiii, scan.
• M. A. Manzalaoui (ed.), Secretum secretorum: Nine English Versions, vol. I: Text (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1977; Original Series 276), CiNii catalogue record.
• Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), publisher’s page.
• Hugo O. Bizzarri (ed.), Secreto de los secretos. Poridat de las poridades: versiones castellanas del Pseudo-Aristóteles Secretum secretorum (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2010; Parnaseo 12), free PDF at Parnaseo: study, pp. 11-62; Poridat, pp. 97-164 (prologue, pp. 99-105; lapidary, p. 158); glossary, p. 331; BNE record.
• Robert Copland (transl.), The Secrete of Secretes of Arystotle (London, 1528; STC 770), EEBO-TCP Phase I transcription, CC0; text.
• Paul Kraus, Jâbir ibn Hayyân: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, vol. II, Jâbir et la science grecque (Cairo, 1942; Mémoires de l’Institut d’Égypte 45), p. 272, note; scan on the Internet Archive.
• Biblioteca Nacional de España, record of Mss/9428 (15th century, with the Secreto de los secretos), consulted 6 November 2026.