PROLEGOMENA Introduction.

How much is missing from the beginning, and what matters were treated there, cannot be concluded from what we read on page 82, line 8: "The book, full of all necessary things, could now seem to have reached its end." Only this follows from it: that certain things are missing.

Regarding the author of this fragment and his time, I cannot even form a conjecture, nor do I have a certain judgment on the matter of what the author intended in this book, or what those "necessary things" are, with which he declares his book to be filled. It is also strange that, although the writer promised that he would only say a few things about numbers and measures (p. 82, 11), after completing these, he also deals with music and metrics without warning the reader. Furthermore, this fragment, which is read in the codices in a miserably corrupted state, contains not a few things unknown from elsewhere, alongside many common and silly ones, which sufficiently prove that the writer used older sources. And here, one immediately notices the consensus that we observe between certain parts of this booklet and the scholia grammatical or explanatory notes of Germanicus (p. 76, 10; 80, 4). This consensus is such that, unless one was copied from the other, both certainly used the same source. That I consider this more likely is because the author of the scholia and of this fragment combine, with the things that are common to both, other and different things, which seems to lead to the conclusion that both should be thought to have turned to their own use [material] from the same, richer source.