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

VII

CAPVT PRIMVM

Chapter One

...copied out, 396 folios: 47 gatherings of four, 2 gatherings of five (ε fols. 27–36, ια fols. 77–86), which are numbered in the middle of the lower margin of the first folio of each. The gatherings of four (the gathering of five is ια) of filed paper were written most elegantly by the first hand:

Thirty-five lines were written on each page of these gatherings, which were once connected in a single volume, as shown by traces of humidity that are more characteristic of these gatherings than others. I will explain below (p. XIs) that many gatherings never existed in this codex, nor in the copy from which it was transcribed, nor in the source of that copy itself.

The margins are adorned with very rich and learned scholia marginal commentaries, the greatest part of which agrees with the scholia of codices C or R.

Missing gatherings were supplied in the 15th century by two scribes, of whom the former wrote the last two folios of gathering α (codex fols. 1 and 2), the gathering of five ε, and fols. 61 and 62^r of gathering θ very carelessly. Or perhaps it was one and the same person, who, having undertaken the task, performed it with the utmost negligence at the beginning, as is rightly judged, since the task of completing folios 1 and 2, 27–36 (for the gathering of five ε) provided a sample unworthy of even the slightest diligence. However, the gatherings θ (entire), ιγ, ιδ flowed from a sufficiently good source, very similar to codex N, I think from the Marcian codex 190, about which cf. p. XVII s. Perhaps the gatherings κδ (fols. 183–190) and λ – μθ (fols. 231–387^r, followed by blank folios 387^u–390) return to the same book, where signs of the common recension occur.

The interpolated codex exhibits five books of the commentary; but the pages of the good recension, which I judge to be most precious on account of the scribe's utmost diligence, end at