Complete Extant Works of Hero of Alexandria, Vol. 3

...Inventory, Vol. III, p. 282; others have spoken of it more explicitly, including C. Wescher in his work on the military art of the Greeks, p. XV ff., C. Mueller in Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum Fragments of Greek Historians V, 1, p. VII ff., and R. Prinz in Fleckeisen's Annals, Vol. CI, pp. 193–210. What I thought I could add to their arguments, I set forth in the Rhenish Museum, Vol. LIII, pp. 432–447; now I shall content myself with a commemoration of those things which pertain to this instituted question.

The Parisian codex is therefore a miscellaneous book composed of parts of various codices of different subject matter and different origin. The procession is led by individual quaternions gatherings of four sheets torn from I know not which codices of Nicetas Choniates and John Chrysostom (fols. 1–7, 8–15), and it is closed by several quinternions gatherings of five sheets left over from some truncated codex of Lysias (fols. 104–129). The leaves 16–103, which are interspersed, since they are written by two different scribes of the 11th or 12th century, seem to refer to two different codices themselves. Indeed, fols. 16–17 and 88–103 belong to the other book, which displayed the sieges of various cities; fols. 18–88 must be referred to the other, in which, along with other mechanical writings, Hero's dioptric commentary is contained: Prinz demonstrated with unassailable arguments that both were once ordered into the appearance of quaternions, except that he expressed doubt regarding the membranes parchment sheets that present the beginning of the Dioptrica. I wish that most prudent and almost excessively cautious man had not done so; for I am either greatly mistaken, or the state of these is the same as the others. Indeed, that writing of Hero begins at fol. 62r, continues up to fol. 80v, and finishes on fol. 82r-v. Between fols. 61 and 62, the remains of some excised leaf are visible, which once cohered with the now-solitary fol. 64. Furthermore, not only is it necessary to swap the places of fols. 81 and 82, which still cohere today, but also, for the sake of the continuity of the subject matter, fols. 83–87 must be inserted; the fact that these three once formed pairs is clearly shown by the fragment of a leaf remaining at the beginning. Thus, this was the original binding of those membranes: