The notebook lay largely unnoticed until the 1930s, when the expert French codicologist Alphonse Dain realized its importance as one of only seven surviving copies of an essay written in Greek around AD 135 by the Roman senator Lucius Flavius Arrian. The essay, entitled Ektaxis kat’ Alanôn (“Deployment against the Alans”), only survived from antiquity in a tenth-century codex preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence.
The codex, or parts of it, were periodically copied throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, one copy, made by Lukas Holste, was subsequently reworked into a fair copy and written out again in an unfinished bilingual Latin and Greek facing-page edition; all three of these now reside in the Vatican Library.
The Parisinus grec 2539 notebook is fascinating for its marginal comments, surely made by Saumaise himself, where he has attempted to correct mistakes in the grammar and spelling of the archetype.
The Ektaxis kat’ Alanôn is now the subject of a full-length book, in which the corrected Greek text is presented with a facing-page English translation. Some of Saumaise's corrections have been incorporated into this new text.
