After the rediscovery of the collection (ca. This suggests that the treatises missing in the Hellenistic catalogue formed part of a collection which was inaccessible in Hellenistic times and which, therefore, preserved the pre-Hellenistic system of book-labelling. Many writings of our Corpus are missing in the Hellenistic catalogue of Aristotle's works while they are listed in the later catalogue of Ptolemy al-GharĂ¯b furthermore, the single books of the transmitted treatises are labelled by means of the pre-Hellenistic system of 24 letter labels, whereas in the Hellenistic catalogue the single books are numbered by means of the Hellenistic system of 27 alphabetic numerals. The basic dilemma was pointed out by Dom Jean Liron in 1717: The existence of our Corpus Aristotelicum entails that Strabo must be exaggerating either in assuming that the manuscripts brought by Neleus to Scepsis were the only manuscripts of the Aristotelian and Theophrastean writings, or in asserting that these manuscripts were severely damaged. The purpose of the paper is to defend a modified version of the report given by Strabo about the transmission of the writings of Aristotle during the Hellenistic period.
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