Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements

I have described the condition in which I found it as diligently as I could, since it is easy to confuse distinct things, but no one can distinguish confused things unless he inspects the codex himself.

I wish it had been my lot to examine more codices; since that could not be done, I studied to compare whatever others drew from other codices. For this purpose, I judged that not only the edition of Grynaeus and the fragments of August and Hultsch should be used, but also the translations of Zamberti and Barocius; for it is such that you may divine the Greek words even from the Latin words. I regretted greatly that the most learned man, Wachsmuth, in the 18th volume of the Rheinisches Museum Rhenish Museum, did not bring forth more regarding the commentaries of Proclus on the first book of Euclid. So much the more pleasant for me was the supreme generosity and kindness of the prince Boncompagni, who, asked by me, took care at no small price to have collected the variations of doubtful or lacunose places—seven from codex 101 and more than 240 from codex 145—from two codices preserved in Rome in the Barberini library, and gifted them to me, for which I offer him my greatest thanks.

Many places could be corrected by this method; others were corrected by Nesselmann, Knoche, and Hultsch—Taylor relies entirely on Barocius—and I seem to have corrected some myself; I have, however, enclosed in brackets those things which, since they seemed necessary to me, I added on my own in the text.

I have rendered the forms of individual words and terms according to the Munich codex; whence it happened that the spelling ττ appears more often, where Grynaeus used σσ. That the form γίνεσθαι is to be preferred over γίγνεσθαι, Hultsch already noted on page 454 of the 19th volume of the Rheinisches Museum; yet I would deny that gin should be written for gign in all places. The accents of words and the punctuation of sentences, for the most part neglected in those times, had to be placed according to our usage; on the contrary, the movable ν or ephelkystikon the addition of a letter at the end of a word for euphony is not everywhere placed according to the rules of common