PREFACE.

upon which no one can rely, and health which grows worse by the day, should grant me the opportunity to rescue that great and venerable monument from oblivion and offer it to the public gaze, then perhaps I shall have deserved something for antiquity and for philosophy. Meanwhile, this prior part of the commentary on the Alcibiades is handed over to public judgment and commended to the meditation of my students.

But if philosophers are to find many things here which they may take with them and meditate upon, there will certainly not be lacking things which may please those skilled in the Greek language: both the various readings of Plato, which are very numerous and often praiseworthy, and certain more unusual words, and not a few things similar to these which any Greek codex necessarily provides as soon as it comes from the bookshelves into the familiarity of scholars. For that codex has long languished unpublished in the libraries of Europe, and seeks in vain the aid of a skilled and diligent hand. From it, only a few verses of Orpheus a legendary musician and poet of Greek myth were extracted by Richard Bentley (1) and

(1) In Epistola ad Millium Letter to Mill, p. 3.