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

VIII
PREFACE

Furthermore, if we were to disregard the connection that appeared above to shine forth from the common corruptions of codex D and the Vulgate recension, we would have to establish—since the beginnings of the losses had only reached varsigma the symbol for the fifth manuscript family—that the most ancient exemplar of the Vulgate recension was written at a time—which is certainly possible—when the archetype of codices Q, D, and varsigma had not yet suffered those most serious losses. Since this cannot be the case, did it truly happen by some unheard-of chance that one who supplemented the archetype of the varsigma recension—which had been most severely damaged, as it should have been—from an excellent codex, drew from a common source of Q, D, and varsigma while it was still intact?

For that codices Q, D, and varsigma flowed from one and the same source is shown both by the errors common to all these books against (C), M, and P, and by the "windows" lacunae or gaps in the text that were preserved at the beginning of the fifth book of the commentaries. Verses 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 each other by an interval of twenty-five or twenty-six verses of this edition (p. 163.17–164.21, 181.5–182.9). Therefore, I would deny that it happened by chance that from p. 164.21 to p. 169.25 there are 151 verses, from p. 169.26 to p. 172.22 there are 79 verses, and from p. 172.23 to p. 181.4 there are 257 verses, 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 lacunae are separated from each other by the space of only one page, I do not know if it can 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 quinions gatherings of five sheets, both of which were mutilated above on both the recto and verso.

The very light traces of letters that precede the windows are handed down more fully in D and varsigma than in Q, in which book individual letters are more often omitted while whole words are mostly accepted, and in A more fully than in the Basle edition (b); for which reason we have in the critical apparatus written down the testimony of both witnesses separately in those places.