Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato

PREFACE.

I arranged to have a copy transcribed for me in Vienna. I found the first words just as Lambecius original: "Lambecio" described them. However, I was very surprised to find that the version contained only half of the commentary itself, about which Lambecius gave no warning. Therefore, I wrote back to Vienna to inquire whether that codex had always been in this same state. Mr. P. Budick, one of the custodians of the Vienna Library, who personally studied the codex with great effort and dictated it to a scribe, as well as Mr. Copita, the chief director of the Library, informed me that no other codex had ever existed in the Library, and that it had always been as it is now. This was also observed and confirmed by one of my students, Aug. Viguier, who was in Vienna at that time. But the difficulty of the Belgian handwriting and the minuteness of the characters, which often deceived Mr. Budick, did not even allow it to be edited as a complete and entirely accurate text. Indeed, the translation into the Latin language original: "Latinum sermonem" was composed with such a servile imitation of the Greek original: "Græcum" that it seems entirely barbaric.