As discussed in Chapter 7, the measured locations of the musical notes on the Symposium's musical scale are surprisingly accurate, despite the changes the text may have undergone during its transmission. The Stephanus pages have significantly variable lengths but, in the Symposium and not generally in other dialogues, the interval between quarternotes is coincidentally about one Stephanus page.

This accident does, however, make it clear that the Stephanus numbers prevented rather then helped the detection of the musical structure of the dialogues. Here, the distance between quarternotes in the range from 0.1 to 1.2 is very nearly one Stephanus page (see below). Suppose a reader had noticed the repeated pattern of motions and agreements in the frame, and began examining other passages at similar intervals, using the Stephanus page numbers as a measure (and so looking for symbols around c3–8 on succeeding pages). Already by notes 2.0 and 2.1, the error between the actual location of the notes and the location found using the Stephanus numbers would be about half a page. Using the Stephanus page numbers as a measure would thus obliterate any trace of symbols repeated at equal intervals.

As mentioned above, files containing the Greek texts of some of Plato's dialogues (with all the significant points marked) are available online.