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

Furthermore, if we were to disregard the close connection—which, as mentioned above, appeared evident from the common corruptions of codex D and the recensio vulgata common/vulgate edition—and if we had to conclude, since only the beginnings of the losses had reached the zeta a designated manuscript family/grouping, that the oldest exemplar of the vulgate edition was copied at an age—which it certainly could have been—when the archetype of codices Q, D, and zeta had not yet suffered those most grievous losses: since this cannot be the case, did it truly happen by some unheard-of chance that someone, having corrected the most severely damaged archetype of the zeta recension from an excellent codex, drew from a common source of Q, D, and zeta that was still intact?

For the fact that codices Q, D, and zeta flowed from one and the same source is demonstrated both by the errors common to all these books (as opposed to C, M, P) and by the windows editorial term for lacunae or gaps in the manuscript text which are preserved at the beginning of the fifth book of the commentaries. The verses of pages 163, 17—21; 164, 21—165, 3; 169, 26—170, 2; 172, 23—173, 2; 181, 5—12; and 182, 9—17 are still read as mutilated. The beginnings of two gaps are separated from one another by an interval of twenty-five or twenty-six verses of this edition (p. 163, 17—164, 21 and 181, 5—182, 9). Therefore, I would deny that it happened by chance that there are 151 verses from p. 164, 21 to p. 169, 25; 79 verses from p. 169, 26 to p. 172, 22; and 257 verses from p. 172, 23 to p. 181, 4; in such a way that those three windows are separated from each other by an interval of six, three, and ten pages, each of which contained 25 or 26 verses of this edition. But if two pairs of gaps are separated from one another by the space of only one page, I do not know if it could be explained by the fact that p. 163, 17—164, 20 and p. 181, 5—182, 8 filled the first (or last) leaf of two quiniones gatherings of five sheets, both of which were mutilated at the top on both the recto and verso.

The very faint traces of letters that precede the windows are reported more fully in D and zeta than in Q, in which book individual letters are more often omitted, especially when entire words are accepted. They are reported more fully in A than in the Basiliensis Basle edition (b), for which reason we have written out the testimony of both witnesses separately in those places.