The editions
What an edition is here, and what was done to it.
Policy and standards
An edition here is a transcription of a printed book, kept whole. Nothing is modernised and nothing is silently corrected: the scanner’s own characters stand, and what was done to them is a RECORDED SET OF REPAIRS — a list of rules, each with the words it changes, why, and how many times it fires. The reading view applies them; the transcription view shows the pages with none applied. The difference between the two views is the repair list itself, which is why the list is served beside the text.
What a repair may rest on. A repair is made only where a witness decides it: the transcription’s own context, a parallel edition of the same translation, or the printed page image. Where no witness settles a place, no repair is invented — the damage stays, visible and marked, and a rule may record the decision to leave it. So a repaired edition reads cleanly where the print could be recovered and shows its damage where it could not, and it never says anything the print does not.
The repair classes. Every rule carries one of four types, and the type is a claim about the kind of thing it is:
| type | what it is |
|---|---|
OCR | a character or word the scanner misread; the print is recovered |
punctuation | a mark of punctuation added, removed or changed |
transliteration | Greek or other script restored from the page image |
conjectural | no witness; an editor’s reading, stated as such |
A rule also carries its PIPELINE class (opener, digit, reading, review), which is a different question: it is the order the rules must run in, and it is not the same taxonomy. Both are stored, because a text cannot be re-rendered from the type alone.
The versioning promise. An edition is served as an immutable VERSION: its transcription is frozen bytes, pinned by a checksum recorded with the version, and cited by version number. A citation to v1.0.0 keeps resolving to v1.0.0 forever — shipping v1.1.0 writes a new directory and moves the bare edition address, and leaves the old one standing. The anchors a passage links to are pinned too: a passage that resolved once keeps resolving, and the library refuses to move one.
The licence. The transcriptions are public-domain works. The editorial work — repairs, page models, apparatus, notes — is released under CC BY 4.0.
The modern scholarly editions are not here: Majercik’s the Chaldean Oracles; Athanassakis & Wolkow’s the Orphic Hymns; Dodds’s the Elements of Theology; Clarke, Dillon & Hersh’s Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, and the current occult presses’ editions. They are not absent by oversight — they carry a living translator’s or publisher’s rights and belong to the people who made them. What the library can hold is what nobody owns any more.
Provenance, edition by edition
The Elements of Theology — Proclus, tr. Thomas Taylor
Source. Proclus: The Elements of Theology, translated by Thomas Taylor; printed as the second work of The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, vol. II (London, 1816). This edition serves the Elements alone, over the pages the volume gives it (301–441).
Scanned from. Internet Archive identifier: thomastaylor. The whole import record (the line range, the checksums, the page arithmetic) is in the data export.
The source page images. The 85 leaves this edition was read against are stored with it and served, one image per leaf, at /texts/proclus-elements-of-theology-taylor-1816/scans/ — so the leaf a repair cites resolves to the image itself. They are the Internet Archive's scan of this volume (item thomastaylor), a public-domain work like the transcription; the editorial layer over them — the repairs and their rationales, the page models, the apparatus — is CC BY 4.0.
The state. repaired — finished: every damaged word and every standalone marker the scanner left has been cleared against the printed page. The reading view shows no damage character at all — every repair the print called for is applied against the 1816 print, its Greek restored from the page images where the letters had been read as Latin lookalikes. One note stands as the transcription has it, the footnote to Proposition XXVII on printed page 321, because the page itself will not read: repeated reads of that one line disagree, so it is left VISIBLE rather than guessed. A second whole-text read has been run over the whole volume.
What it carries. 415 repair rules (211 OCR, 105 punctuation, 99 transliteration), 0 of them awaiting human review (see errata). The base policy is substitute-if-known-else-leave, and the damage characters a rule may reach are "^" "_" "~" "/" "£" ">" "\\" "|" "#" "™" "±" "»" "«" "}" "{". Version 1.0.0, 2026-10-03, transcription checksum 949790929d1913d6….
Cite it. Proclus, The Elements of Theology, trans. Thomas Taylor (London, 1816). The Neoplatonic Library, version 1.0.0. https://neoplatonic-library.org/texts/proclus-elements-of-theology-taylor-1816/
On the Cave of the Nymphs — Porphyry, tr. Thomas Taylor
Source. Porphyry: On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey, translated by Thomas Taylor (London: John M. Watkins, 1917).
Scanned from. Internet Archive identifier: onthecaveoftheny00porpuoft. The whole import record (the line range, the checksums, the page arithmetic) is in the data export.
The source page images. The 23 leaves this edition was read against are stored with it and served, one image per leaf, at /texts/porphyry-on-the-cave-of-the-nymphs-taylor-1917/scans/ — so the leaf a repair cites resolves to the image itself. They are the Internet Archive's scan of this volume (item onthecaveoftheny00porpuoft), a public-domain work like the transcription; the editorial layer over them — the repairs and their rationales, the page models, the apparatus — is CC BY 4.0.
The state. repaired — every damaged place a witness could settle has been settled — against the transcription’s own context, the 1823 parallel of the same translation, or the printed page itself, read one page at a time. What remains is not the book’s text: the page furniture at one page break (a recorded decision to leave it visible) and this copy’s own marks. A second whole-text read has not been run, so the claim is that the found damage is settled, not that nothing further is findable.
What it carries. 384 repair rules (355 OCR, 28 punctuation, 1 conjectural), 1 of them awaiting human review (see errata). The base policy is substitute-if-known-else-leave, and the damage characters a rule may reach are "^" "_" "~" "*" "/" "£" ">" "\\" "|" "#" "™" "±" "»" "«" "}" "{" "&". Version 1.0.0, 2026-10-02, transcription checksum 5b565a958fca3e9c….
Cite it. Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs, trans. Thomas Taylor (London: John M. Watkins, 1917). The Neoplatonic Library, version 1.0.0. https://neoplatonic-library.org/texts/porphyry-on-the-cave-of-the-nymphs-taylor-1917/