In reading and translating Book IV of The Conics, Michael N. Fried gives Apollonius a fair chance to keep modern algebraic ideas about conics at a distance, and to view the text with eyes trained only on the mathematical and philosophical concerns of Apollonius’s contemporaries and on the geometrical character of the previous three books. Approaching the text this way allows one to see that Book IV, far from being dull, reveals fundamental difficulties in Apollonius’s treatment of conic sections.