Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 1: Prolegomena

THRICE-GREATEST HERMES

Reitzenstein treats very briefly of the development of this later Hermetic literature on pages 188–200 of his Poimandres.¹

THE ORIGINAL MS. OF OUR CORPUS

From the fragmentary nature of the remains of the Trismegistic literature that have come down to us, it will be at once seen that a critical text of them is a complicated undertaking; for, apart from the Corpus, the texts have to be collected from the works of many authors. This, however, has never yet been done in any critical fashion; so that a translator has first of all to find the best existing critical texts of these authors from which to make his version. This, I hope, I have succeeded in doing; but even so, numerous obscurities still remain in the texts of the excerpts, fragments, and quotations, and it is highly desirable that some scholar specially acquainted with our literature should collect all these together in one volume, and work over the labors of specialists on the texts of Stobæus and the Fathers, with the added equipment of his own special knowledge.

Even the text of our Corpus is still without a thoroughly critical edition; for though Reitzenstein has done this work most admirably for C. H., i., xiii. (xiv.), and (xvi.)–(xviii.), basing himself on five MSS. and the printed texts of the earlier editions, he has not thought fit to give us a complete text.

A list of the then known MSS. is given in Harles’ edition of Fabricius’ Bibliotheca Græca (pp. 51, 52); while Parthey gives notes on the only two MSS. he used in his edition of fourteen of the Sermons of

¹ For the Hermetic writing in Pitra, Analecta Sacra et Classica Sacred and Classical Analecta, pt. ii., see R., pp. 16, n. 4, and 259, n. 1; and for reference to the Arabic literature, pp. 23, n. 5, and 172, n. 3.