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

IX
PREFACE

Before we speak about the age of the recensions, it remains for us to add a few things about the order of the context, which is disturbed in some manuscripts and the Basle edition:
p. 88, 11 "and of the first paradigm" | "but the night-day" original: "τὸ δὲ νυχθήμερον" to p. 110, 5 "these gods" | "but concerning the following" are handed down in D in this order:
Codex D p. 527 adds after "paradigm" (p. 88, 11): "Seek the following after five leaves where +" (i.e., at the beginning of p. 534). Then, with a window of four letters opened, it continues:
| "and the third through the" (p. 99, 3) to p. 534 "these gods" | (p. 110, 5). There follow p. 534 | "but the night-day" (p. 88, 12) to p. 540 "begetting the paradigm" (p. 99, 3).
That two volumes of leaves of the same size were interchanged while ordering the quaternions gatherings of four sheets or quinions gatherings of five sheets, as it seems, is obvious to everyone.
The matter is somewhat different in the Oxford and Vienna codices, and perhaps in other books of the Vulgate recension:
p. 88, 11 | "but the night-day" to p. 90, 5 "the Nights came to be" | (the beginning of the statement that follows, "for together with that third Night" original: "ἅμα γὰρ αὐτῇ τῇ τρίτῃ Νυκτί", is missing in A and b, but exists in Q, D, and the Vienna codex) are handed down in their proper place.
Conversely, p. 90, 6 | "but thus" to p. 99, 3 "begetting the paradigm" | and p. 99, 3 | "and the third" to p. 110, 5 "these gods" | have been transposed.

We have learned that the most ancient witness to Proclus’s commentaries, which far exceeds the manuscripts in age, is the scholiast of Plato in the first book, when the age of that anonymous Christian who is the author of Hermippus’s Dialogue on Astrology was not sufficiently certain. We have already mentioned above that the memory of the best codices is revealed in the Platonic scholia, and that it is perhaps more excellent than any book still extant; however, the fragments of the Anonymous are too small to allow us to establish anything certain about the recension of the context (cf. vol. I p. XLIX s).
Those most extensive parts of the third book of the commentaries, which the Byzantine Michael Psellus brought into the 11th century in the small commentary which he wrote, or rather transcribed, "On the psychogony of Plato" original: "εἰς τὴν ψυχογονίαν τοῦ Πλάτωνος"...