Let me confess at the outset that this will be a very speculative essay, about a work that appears to sort oddly with the rest of the Hobbes canon. While it seems a little unkind to blame the subject of my inquiry for the difficulty of the endeavor, the fact remains that Thomas Hobbes controlled with great care what he wished posterity to remember, not merely by means of the various versions of his autobiography but even in his conversations with his garrulous friend, John Aubrey. Hobbes was reluctant, as a matter of principle, to name intellectual ancestors, either directly or by way of citation. Like Francis Bacon, he castigated the use of authority; unlike Bacon, he acted on what he preached. Central to Hobbes's conception of himself, even though it was not an entirely accurate description of his philosophy, was the Euclidean metaphor, the notion that an entire, coherent, and true system could be built on the basis of a few axioms. Like Athena springing fully armed from the head of Zeus, the world of Leviathan and its associated works was to appear as if it had sprung in its entirety solely from the brain of Hobbes.