INTRODUCTION
gather from the letter to Demetrius, and from notes made by the learned Archbishop of Caesarea in others of his books,[1] where he refers to passages in Marcus' Treatise to Himself, the title which the book bore in the manuscript from which the first edition was printed by Gesner in a.d. 1558–9.
Some fifty years later (circa a.d. 950) Suidas published his Lexicon. There he refers to the Emperor's Conduct of his own Life, in xii Books,[2] the first mention of the now familiar division into twelve Books. The Lexicon has preserved many passages of our author and, as Suidas clearly used earlier collections, we have important evidence as to the text from an older tradition than that of our manuscripts, if these, as some scholars suppose, are all to be traced to Arethas' recension.
Two hundred years later Tzetzes (a.d. 1110–85) cites Marcus by name in his Chiliades,[3] but as that work is in verse, what he quotes cannot be used to correct the actual words of our text.
That the reputation of the philosophic Emperor persisted in the Byzantine period, and perhaps some knowledge of his sayings, is shown by four notes in the Bodleian manuscript of Arrian's Discourses of Epictetus.[4] The
- ↑ Testimonia M. Ant. ii. 3; iv. 3.1; vi. 47; οὖ Μᾶρκος ἐφ τοῖς Ἠθικοῖς αὑτοῡ μέμνηται Test. viii. 25; ἦς καὶ Μᾶρκος ὁ καῖσαρ ἐφ τοῖς εἰς ἑαυτὸν Ἠθικοῖς αὑτοῡ μέμνηται Test. viii. 37.
- ↑ Μάρκος, ὁ καὶ Ἀντωνῖνος . . . οὖτος ἔγραψε τοῡ ἰδίου βίου ἀγωγὴν ἐν βιβλίοις ιβʹ Suid. s.v. Μάρκος.
- ↑ Testimonia, M. Ant. iv. 21; v. 33; vi. 13.
- ↑ This is the one manuscript upon which our knowledge of Epictetus' Discourses depends. The notes have been displaced in the margin, which shows that they have been copied from an earlier source. They belong to Epict. i. 17. 27; ii. 19. 20; iii. 22, 80; iv. 5. 17. See Schenkl, Epict. (1894), pp. lxxii (Schenkl, M. Ant. p. v), lxxvi, lxxix, lxxxiii. The MS. actually has Ἀντώνινος for Ἀντωνῖνος in each case, a scribal error which occurs, e.g. in the title of the Marcus Excerpts, X vat. 6, μάρκου ἀντωνίου αὐτοκράτορος ἐκ τῶν εἰς ἐαυτόν (Weyland, Berlin, pb. W. 1914, col. 1181); in a note in the excerpts D, fol. 161r: ζητεῖ τὸ ἐξῆς ὄπισθε εἰς τὸ τέλος τοῡ ἀντωνίου. The error appears venial; at least it abounds in modern books and catalogues, e.g. in Lilius Giraldus, cited at p. xxii, note 3, in the xvith, and in Hobein's Maximus Tyrius (p. xl) in the xxth cent.
