The texts

These editions are repaired. An edition here can be readable and not yet repaired, being repaired, or finished, and the tag beside its name says which. 2 are repaired — The Elements of Theology, On the Cave of the Nymphs: finished, every residue settled or deliberately left and recorded. The 37 held back are not served as editions yet, and none has been repaired: they are damaged — every transcription here carries the scanner's damage, and these have not been worked on. The tag is repeated on each text's own page, where the apparatus lists the corrections that edition carries in full.

What is served here now. The shelf names 39 texts. 2 of them are served here — The Elements of Theology, On the Cave of the Nymphs — and 37 are held back until its transcription is worth reading. A text is served when its own edition has been through the whole pipeline, not when the library as a whole is.

This is the catalogue: public-domain editions of the works of the Platonic tradition, each a transcription of a printed book — the scanner’s own characters, kept — and some carrying REPAIRS, applied by the reading view and never baked into the words served. A repaired edition reads cleanly where a reading could be determined from a witness — the transcription’s own context, or a parallel edition of the same translation — and shows its damage, marked, where none could be: it never silently says anything the print does not. Every repair is a rule with the words it changes, why, and how often it fires, listed in the reader, so the two views can be read against each other and the difference between them is that list.

The catalogue is ordered by author, then by title, and can be re-ordered by title or by year and narrowed to the editions in a given repair state. Every text page says which edition it is, what was done to it and what was not, and which essays are attached to that work — so a quotation can be checked against the edition it came from.

What is not here, and why. 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, they belong to the people who made them, and this shelf stops where their work begins. What the shelf can hold is what nobody owns any more.