The Archimedes Codex: Revealing The Secrets Of The World's Greatest Palimpsest

by Reviel Netz

Today most manuscripts are held by a different kind of public institution–the state or its universities. Almost all the important manuscripts of the world can now be found in such institutions and, at first, everyone’s feeling was that the manuscript should belong to the public. We were proved wrong. In retrospect, it was a stroke of luck that the manuscript found itself in private hands. No public institution could have acted so flexibly, with such generous and well-thought application of resources.