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Hermeas would have replied to Zopyrion, but we desired him to hold; and Maximus the rhetorician proposed to him this far-fetched question out of Homer, Which of Venus's hands Diomedes wounded. And Zopyrion presently asking him again, of which leg was Philip lame? Maximus replied, It is a different case, for Demosthenes hath left us no foundation upon which we may build our conjecture.

First, therefore, Hermeas the geometrician demanded of Protogenes the grammarian a reason why Alpha was the first letter of the alphabet. And he returned the common answer of the schools, that it was fit the vowels should be set before the mutes and semi-vowels. And of the vowels, some being long, some short, some both long and short, it is just that the latter should be most esteemed.

In accomplishing this great object, I have presented the reader in my notes with nearly the substance in English of all the following manuscript Greek Commentaries and Scholia on Plato; viz. of the Commentaries of Proclus on the Parmenides and First Alcibiades; and of his Scholia on the Cratylus; of the Scholia of Olympiodorus on the Phaedo, Gorgias, and Philebus; and of Hermeas on the Phoedrus.

And Hermeas replied: It is said that Mercury was the first god that discovered letters in Egypt; and therefore the Egyptians make the figure of an Ibis, a bird dedicated to Mercury, for the first letter. But it is not fit, in my opinion, to place an animal that makes no noise at the head of the letters.

Of the four first of these manuscripts, three of which are folio volumes, I have complete copies taken with my own hand; and of the copious extracts from the others, those from Olympiodorus on the Gorgias were taken by me from the copy preserved in the British Museum; those from the same philosopher on the Philebus, and those from Hermeas on the Phaedrus, and Damascius Peri Archon, from the copies in the Bodleian library.