Proclus: Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Vol. I

The two lacunae of codex D (p. 18 ss and 228 ss, cf. p. IV), which are of the same size, would have filled about 70 lines of this edition.

From p. 320, 27 to p. 356, in both Paris books, gaps appear at equal intervals of about sixty-five or seventy lines of the printed edition, increasing more and more, yet in such a way that the losses of codex D are both more frequent and always greater from the beginning than the gaps of codex Q. From this, one might rightly conjecture that, toward the end of the exemplar, the bottom pages of the leaves were more shredded than the top ones. The smaller gaps that appear in the earlier parts of the commentaries, now in D, now in Q (p. 231, 6 s 234, 30. 255, 13. 270, 9. 274, 7. 276, 3. 302, 17 s 304, 30 ss), can be bounded by the same approximate extent of pages on the damaged outer leaves. Indeed, the aforementioned lacunae of codex D would have filled individual pages of the same size, which we contend arose from the scribe omitting a page of the largest format of the exemplar twice.

The fragment Μελέσσης εἰς τὸν ἐν Πολιτείᾳ λόγον τῶν Μουσῶν Melissus on the Discourse of the Muses in the Republic (cf. Proclus in Republic, ed. Kroll II 1 ss), which codex D exhibits on p. 685 s, had already been known by Usener and me (cf. Mus. Rhen. vol. 54, 196 ss). It is divided into two parts by three or four empty lines, of which the former, which is greater, would embrace more than 60 lines of this edition together with the lacuna. It follows that the leaf which we established to have been appended to the exemplar of codices D, Chigi, and Escorial, was added to protect the last leaf of the archetype of books Q and D (with the German ones), on whose verso page only a few things were written (p. 356, 26—28).

But, so that we may not be silent about anything, even the slightest traces of those gaps do not seem to be absent from the recensio uulgata. For even gaps of one or two words appeared (p. 320, 27. 334, 25. 352, 1) either in ς or in one of the other books, and the common writing is corrupt in those places where empty spaces occur in Q D (p. 326, 23. 349, 17. 21), a matter which, given the nature of the ς recension, should not be pressed too hard.