Legomenon for one of the Scholar's successors UNKNOWN CURATOR

The Author of the fragment {archive under threat} has often been identified with the Supplanter addressed in the Writing {Scholar's Farewell}. If this supposition is viable, then the 'conversion' there predicted would seem already to have taken place: this later Curator has evidently lost whatever illusions he might have entertained about the 'benignity of [his] sponsors,' and is bending all his efforts towards shielding his precious charge from the attentions of such men, as the Scholar advised him to do.

The Writing itself not only details the ad-hoc methodology of curation more than one transmitter of the Archives was required to adopt, but also evokes the environment of furtiveness and peril that necessitated such tortuous practice. We can easily see why so many Writings are incomplete, given the rough treatment they must have undergone as they passed from curator to curator — not to mention the neglect they would have suffered during periods when they had to be abandoned, as may have occurred in this instance.

For some time it has been generally accepted that it was this Unknown Curator who built the INVENTORY — which lists the Writings by Author in descending order — thus creating the first true arrangement of these documents. It has also been proposed, seemingly on the basis of the remark about inserting notae (observe the old spelling), that this person is the Scholiast who provided the commentary scattered throughout the archives. If true, this would mean that it was this copy of the Writings that survived, not the original, the latter of which may have been seized by authorities, who then destroyed it — or else the original followed a different trajectory altogether in its journey to us.