PROLEGOMENA.

The text reads (folio 14): "Of Diophantus of Alexandria, the first of the thirteen books" original: "Διοφάντου ἀλεξανδρέως τῶν εἰς ιγ̄ τὸ πρῶτον" and "Scholia of the lord Maximus Planudes" original: "Σχόλια τοῦ Πλανούδη κυροῦ Μαξίμου". Scholia are historical marginal notes or commentaries written by teachers or students to explain a text..

I followed the oldest manuscript now preserved, Marcianus 308 (15th century), for the scholia of Planudes, which are now published in Greek for the first time. I have added various readings without using a special notation. Where I drew corrections from the Paris manuscripts (all of which were copied from the Marcianus manuscript or from its own copies), I have designated the Marcianus manuscript as B, Parisinus 2485 as K, Arsenaciensis 8406 as X, and the second hand of this last manuscript as X₂. Parisinus 2379, which I also compared, provided nothing worthy of mention.

3. I assigned the final place (pages 256 to 260) to the ancient scholia found in a different family of Diophantus manuscripts. I could have transcribed many other notes from Matritensis 43 (A), but they were of little importance and almost all were damaged. The margins of this manuscript were eaten away long ago. After inspecting them carefully, I believed very few should be collected and none published, except for the last one (page 260, lines 24 to 26). I included this for the sake of the most learned scholar Heiberg, who had already pointed out that cursed passage to me The editor uses the term "maledictum," which likely refers to a "scribal curse" often found in manuscripts to ward off thieves, or a particularly difficult and corrupted section of text..

Furthermore, if I have called those scholia "old," I did not mean to imply that they appear to me to be older than the paraphrase by Pachymeres or the commentary by Planudes. I simply wanted to distinguish them from the much more recent notes of the 16th or 17th centuries. These were sometimes added by scholars after the edition by Xylander. The Matritensis scholia were written by various hands that are not easily distinguished. I recognized none that I would believe belonged to the original 13th century scribes.

When the manuscript Vaticanus Greek 191 (V) was copied from the Matritensis manuscript around the middle of the 15th century, only those scholia for the first book were included, which even now