It underwent significant additions and subtractions of text during later periods leading to the inclusion of many words which have nothing to do with Plato or his philosophy.
He dedicates the work to a friend, an otherwise unknown Roman, for whom the Greek name forms Gaiatianos and Gaitianos have been handed down; he may have been called Caietanus, Gentianus or Gratianus.
As Timaeus states in the letter of dedication, he is concerned with clarifying words and phrases with unusual meanings and dialectal peculiarities of Plato's Attic language, which not only the Romans but also most Greeks of his time are not familiar with.
[4] Around the middle of the 9th century, the famous Byzantine scholar Photios consulted the lexicon, which he considered to be of relatively little value, and made notes about it in his Bibliotheca.
The manuscript reached France in the 17th century,[6] where the scholar Bernard de Montfaucon discovered it in a French private library and published a partial edition in 1715.