Proclus: Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Vol. II (1903) - Page 16

CAPVT PRIMVM Chapter One

Wherefore, wherever I cite the readings of the codex, I will not note mere trifles.

The Marcian 190, the second hand of the Marcian 195, fragments of codex R, and the supplements added to the Chisian codex by an alien hand all agree with the Borbonicus in many readings: I will explain each in the description of the individual codices.

I took specimens in Naples in 1900 and collated them in Munich in 1901, where either C or M or P is missing.

R FLORENTINVS RICCARDIANVS 24, parchment, of the largest format, 31.5 x 22.5 cm. Vitelli (in Studi italiani di filol. class. II, 1894, p. 488) attributes this book, about which I consulted F. Boll, to the beginning of the 14th century. 22 quires and two quaternions (quaternion 4, fol. 31–38; quaternion 24, fol. 229–236) provide 236 folios, the pages of which are filled with thirty-two lines. At the bottom of folio 236u, the Riccardianus fails in the middle of the third book of the commentary (p. 191 E "on the bodies").

One scribe produced the entire codex. Yet the context does not enjoy the same consistency of form. For it descends from an exemplar compiled in a strange way, which I managed to restore in some measure from the books still preserved.

We must begin from the grandfather, so to speak, of codex M, which displayed the same quaternions as M:

2–4, 6–8, 10–12, 15–23, 25–29.

e From the Riccardian recension, it is possible today to circumscribe the beginning of the second quaternion, the end of the fourth and twelfth, the beginning and end of the twenty-third, and finally the beginning of the twenty-fifth. The book R ends in about the middle of the twenty-sixth quaternion of codex M. Furthermore, whole quaternions flowed into R from the same archetype—the 3rd, 7th, 11th—and almost half of the 6th quaternion (p. 123, 30 "knowledge" NR: "knowledge" CMP, against p. 124, 27 "guarding" M1, R: "guarding" M1, CP), the largest part of the 8th (p. 181, 27 "it therefore to be whole" only MR, but p. 183, 15 "power" omitted by NR), and almost the whole...