The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
I. Marcus Aurelius as a Man of Letters
TO the ancient world Marcus Aurelius was best known not as a wise ruler and conqueror of German and Sarmatian barbarians but as philosopher and patron of learning. His Latin biographer[1] opens with the words: 'Marcus Antoninus, who was a lifelong philosopher, excelling all chiefs of the state in holiness'; so in the tenth century, in Suidas' Lexicon,[2] he is 'Marcus Antoninus, King of the Romans, the entirely laudable philosopher.' In his lifetime the advocates of Christian liberty so address him. Thus Justin Martyr in his first Apology[3] terms him Verissimus, the philosopher; and Athenagoras, an Athenian philosopher, begins with the address: 'To the Emperors M. Aurelius Antoninus and L. Aurelius Commodus, conquerors of Armenia and Sarmatia, but more than all else philosophers.'[4]
Though professing philosophy as his guide in life and following her rule, Marcus makes no pretence to learning or wisdom for himself. Indeed, in the account of his education in his own first Book, he dwells on the variety and excellence of the teaching he had enjoyed, theoretical and practical alike, but expresses satisfaction more than once[5] that the admonition of his confidential teacher Rusticus, a sense of his own inability, and the urgent claims of his imperial station had diverted him from his boyish ambitions as student and author to the endeavour to act justly and to speak the truth, not to converse and write about goodness.
Again, on the very threshold of his second Book, he interrupts himself to say: 'Put away your books, remember that you are an old man, do not suffer your real self to be any longer a bond-servant.'[6] That by his books he means not his library merely but actual composition is evident from a later passage: 'Do not wander from your path any longer; you are not likely to read your Notebooks, your Deeds of ancient worthies of Rome and Greece, the Extracts you made from literature and put by against old age.'[7]
Clearly he had, at some time, devoted himself to a variety of composition, some of it original, some derived from his reading and reflection in history and literature. Here he resembles his successor Julian, our own King Alfred, and Frederick the Great of Prussia. His aspirations had been postponed to his public duty, his writing put on one side and never completed.
That we possess a considerable and, in form at least, most original work from his pen contradicts this depreciation of literary ambition and his repeatedly expressed diffidence of his own gift for philosophy.
Besides the present work, written in Greek, there survive the fragments of a correspondence with his Latin and rhetoric master, the famous orator, M. Cornelius Fronto.[8] The letters cover the years a.d. 138–circ. 165. This collection of familiar letters and original compositions was recovered by Cardinal Angelo Mai from the palimpsest pages of a Christian manuscript, in the Ambrosian and Vatican libraries, in the early nineteenth century.
Sadly fragmentary and partly ruined by chemical reagents, it consists partly of notes exchanged by Fronto and his royal pupils, Marcus and Lucius, and their adoptive father, the Emperor Pius; partly of more studied compositions in epistolary form by the correspondents, models of the new or revived Latin style, the elocutio novella, which Hadrian himself encouraged and practised. Mainly written in this archaizing Latin, the collection includes a few Greek epistles as well as a speech in which Fronto attempts an erotic discourse in imitation of those in Plato's Phaedrus. This and another Greek essay were designed in compliment to Domitia Lucilla, the mother of Marcus, herself a patroness of Greek letters, in whose father's house Herodes Atticus had stayed in his youth. Fronto encloses it under cover to Marcus, begging him to remove any blunders in the unfamiliar tongue before submitting it to Domitia.[9]
This correspondence, evidently in part written for publication, proves that Marcus had, at this period, literary aims which went beyond the official oratory which Fronto had been engaged to teach him. We read of hexameter verses[10] by Marcus, the subject of playful secrecy between him and his tutor, and Fronto devotes two long letters to the outlines of Latin eloquence and historical composition. Marcus once writes: 'I prefer now to write in Greek. You ask me why! Because I want to experiment, to see whether what I have not been taught will be more obedient than what I have, for indeed what I have endeavoured to learn plays truant.'[11] Marcus had been used from his boyhood to speak and write in Greek; it was as familiar to him, no doubt, as French was to Frederick the Great.
There followed in Marcus' life a momentous breach with mere rhetoric. He had been reading Aristo, the Stoic philosopher. He tells Fronto that he cannot argue on both sides of a question any longer; he is indeed turning from his old tutor to follow Rusticus and philosophy. Fronto rallies him upon the contorted and crabbed stock-in-trade of his new Stoic models, warns him shrewdly of the danger he runs in deserting Latin eloquence, but to no purpose. The young Caesar had made up his mind; for him oratory becomes henceforth a dead letter.[12]
Here and there, in the subsequent centuries, we meet references to a collection of private letters by Marcus, in Greek, which survived, whether genuine or not, to the ninth or the tenth century, the period of the Byzantine renaissance. Thus Philostratus remarks of this correspondence, in distinction from imperial constitutions and rescripts, that: 'besides precision of thought, the strength of Marcus' character is stamped on his words',[13] a summary of the Emperor's style not inapt to parts of his authentic Book. Again in the ninth century, the learned Patriarch Photius,[14] writing to Amphilochius, Bishop of Cyzicus, commends to his attention certain epistolary models, Plato's letters, the epistles ascribed to Phalaris, and those of the 'royal philosopher'. Since many of these ancient collections consist of brief apophthegms, addressed to fictitious recipients, and are indeed in no sense genuine private letters, it is possible that the Letters of Marcus were issued by an enterprising bookseller and consisted, among other matter, of pieces from the genuine work of the 'royal philosopher'. This might help to explain the curiously diverse forms in which Marcus is quoted by Suidas.
II. The History of the Book in the Early Centuries
Of the publication of the Meditations we know as little as we do of that of most ancient and some modern masterpieces. There have been advocates of the view that Marcus gave his thoughts to the public before his death in a.d. 180. Their intimate and unpremeditated character, and a certain disorder in them as they have survived, seem decisive against such a theory. Who the editor was, when they did come out, is equally unknown. Chryseros, a freedman of Marcus, author of a chronicle to the date of Commodus, has been suggested, but by pure hypothesis. We can but surmise that the work was done, under the direction of a relative or friend, by a subordinate, perhaps by Marcus' Greek secretary, Alexander.[15] The present state of the work suggests that the author's notes were already in some order, though left unfinished, and that they were treated scrupulously.[16]
Remarkably little evidence has survived from the troubled period which followed upon the accession of Commodus in a.d. 180 and from the still darker years of anarchy which followed. There are, however, a few doubtful indications that a philosophic treatise by Marcus Aurelius was known to the world, something a little more definite than the loose phrases of his biographer, writing so many years later, indicate.
Thus Herodian, a writer of the third century, who opens his history[17] with the accession of Commodus, notices the old-fashioned mannerism of Marcus,[18] and in the epitome of the history of Dio Cassius, who wrote under the Severi, we meet an occasional phrase in the speeches put into Marcus' mouth, which attempts to give verisimilitude by the use of words which recall the Emperor's writings. For example, in a speech read to the troops, a kind of Order of the Day, on the occasion of the ill-timed revolt of Avidius Cassius, Marcus is made to say: 'how has faith perished, how have expectations of honour perished'.[19] This seems an echo of 'Faith and Reverence and Justice and Truth have gone to Olympus from the wide-paved earth'.[20] The oration ends: 'if only I might make this gain out of the present evils, if I might but settle the matter happily and show to all the world that a right use may be made even of civil wars.'[21] Here the proverbial saying, 'to settle the matter happily', is an echo from the Meditations. There are other touches of this kind, but the ground is difficult and doubtful, and opinions will vary about the value of such evidence.
In Julian, who was Emperor a.d. 361–63, I can find no certain verbal reminiscence of Marcus' work, such as you would expect from so ardent an admirer.[22] Even in that curious vision of judgement, the Symposium or Kronia, where Marcus is made to speak in his own behalf, the language, though faithful to his habitual manner of life and thought, does not reflect the style we know so well. There is no attempt at verbal representation. The nearest suggestion is in the passage where Marcus is summoned before the divine conclave. He enters shining in bodily form with the 'purest and clearest light'.[23] This looks like a reference to two passages in the Meditations. Julian's own style is rhetorical to excess and atticizing, he is full of reminiscences of Homer and the Attic tragedians and Plato, his linguistic affinity is to the Neoplatonist writers and not to Stoicism; thus he may have instinctively avoided any verbal imitation of Marcus. Indeed his own work belongs to an epoch which had absorbed the practical truths of Stoicism and Christianity, but which had submerged the distinctive reflective attitude of the Porch under a flood of orientalism and mystical writing.[24]
The first direct mention of the Meditations as a book known to his hearers is made by the friend of Julian, the orator Themistius, in a.d. 364, the year after Julian's death. He is addressing Valens, the feeble colleague of Valentinian I, on Brotherly Love, and says: 'You have no need of the Admonitions of a Marcus or the excellent words of this or that ruler of days gone by; you have your Phoenix in your own house.'[25] The title Admonitions recalls a word used by the biographer of Avidius Cassius,[26] whose work belongs to about this date. He says: 'Antoninus, on the eve of his departure for the Marcomannic war, was invited not from flattery but seriously to publish his philosophic precepts. Accordingly, for three successive days, the emperor disputed publicly in a series of Exhortations.' If it is true that this biography and others in the Historia Augusta were composed under the influence of Julian, to justify his political ideals, we see that the writer states here the view which contemporaries had adopted of the Meditations, viz. that they were admonitions intended for the world. Many years later the fiction has altered, and they are thought to be Offices written for the behoof of Commodus, as Cicero wrote his famous Offices for his son Marcus. Still later we find them described in a manuscript of extracts from the Meditations as the Second Manual of Epictetus! After Themistius, darkness falls again. There is no extract, such as we might well have expected, in the ample store of prose and poetry in the Eclogues of Johannes Stobaeus circa a.d. 450. We have to wait more than four centuries for the next notice of the book.
III. The Meditations from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Century
Arethas, the deacon of Patras who was afterwards Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, a follower of Photius and fellow worker in the revival of Greek literature at the end of the ninth century (circa a.d. 850–935), was a great collector of manuscripts. Writing at some date before 907, when he was a bishop, to Demetrius, Archbishop of Heracleia, he sends him an ancient volume of the Meditations: 'I have had for some time an old copy of the Emperor Marcus' most profitable book, so old indeed that it is altogether falling to pieces. . . . This I have had copied and am able to hand down to posterity in its new dress. . . . Thinking accordingly that it would be a sign of a grudging disposition to retain what is a duplicate, I designed to make your Holiness the inheritor of my former possession.'[27] So he sends the Archbishop the old copy and puts the new one on his shelves. Arethas writes with the enthusiasm of a lover of learning and wise doctrine, as well as with the ardour of a bibliophile. He does not say, however, that Marcus' book is a rarity, only that its teaching is most profitable and that he has obtained an old and tattered copy. He writes as of a volume with which his correspondent will be already acquainted.
We know what the restored and perhaps emended text would have been like from the many beautiful manuscripts from Arethas' collection in our libraries, the Euclid, for instance, in the Bodleian, the Plato, which Clarke brought to Oxford from Patmos, the Clement of Alexandria in Paris, and the Aristotle's Categories at Rome.[28] But alas! the inestimable Meditations has vanished, and we can only surmise that the learned deacon edited this copy with the same care that he lavished upon his Plato. Many scholars suppose that this Arethas volume is the ancestor of our present late versions. All that is certain is what we can gather from the letter to Demetrius, and from notes made by the learned Archbishop of Caesarea in others of his books,[29] 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,[30] 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,[31] 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.[32] The manuscript is of the late eleventh or early twelfth century and these scholia may, so Schenkl thought, be copied from an earlier manuscript. On the words of Epictetus: 'the individual part, which God has torn from himself and given to us', the marginal note says: 'presumably what flows from above'. Schenkl derives this from Arethas himself, linking it with a marginal note in Dio Chrysostom,[33] where Arethas quotes from Marcus: 'all flows from that other world' or, as he cites it, 'from above'.
Where Epictetus writes: 'So watch yourselves in what you do and you will discover of what calling (or "sect") you are', there is a note: 'It is proper to say the same also of us, that few are of the sect of Antoninus.' Again in the chapter on the Cynic's life and profession, where Epictetus says: 'perhaps we do not perceive his greatness, do not worthily imagine Diogenes' character', the note is: 'nor we the character of Antoninus.' So, on the text: 'What is the character of his doctrines? On these we accept or reject him', the annotator has: 'carry this out in regard to monks who appear to be somewhat: if these have the character of those who formerly ruled in this sect, Antoninus and his followers, I mean, let them be Fathers.'[34] The passages show that there was still an interest in the Stoic school and a recognition that Marcus Antoninus professed its tenets.
IV. The Knowledge of the Book at the Opening of the Italian Renaissance
That the Meditations were in the hands of the learned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is attested by the number of manuscripts of excerpts which have survived from that period. The extracts in the Munich MS. Graec. 323 (Mo 81) are indeed thought to be as late as the early sixteenth century, and the New College MS. Coll: Nov: 270, of the C class (Cv), which was written for Richard Pace, since 1519 Dean of St. Paul's, London, by Zacharias Callierges, is dated 8 December 1523, in Rome. Some scholars[35] are of opinion that the excerpts of the X group, which in most examples are mixed with extracts from Aelian's De Animalibus, are derived from an anthology made by Maximus Planudes (a.d. 1260–1310). In his Ecclesiastical History Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulos, a.d. 1295–1360, states[36] that 'Marcus Antoninus composed a book for the education of his son Marcus, full of all worldly experience and instruction', meaning by Marcus the Emperor Commodus, who in his inscriptions often usurped his father's name.
This false description of the Meditations has induced some writers to imagine a lost work of this character by Marcus, for which there is no evidence. It may have had another result—it perhaps suggested to Antonio Guevara his extravagant romance, commonly known as the Golden Book of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.[37] This may well be described as 'full of worldly wisdom'. It was a favourite book of Montaigne's father,[38] though he himself disliked the euphuistic style of Guevara, as well probably as his absurd matter. The Golden Book and the Diall had so great a vogue in the sixteenth century (being more often translated than any book except the Holy Scriptures) that they created in the reading public an entirely erroneous judgement of Marcus' character and especially of his relations with Faustina. Only gradually, in the seventeenth century, as the Meditations became known, and the public taste altered, was this romantic judgement corrected. A curious problem is suggested by Guevara's two books. When he says that he had translated a Greek original in Florence, had he some hazy knowledge of the existence in the Laurentian library of a manuscript of extracts from the Meditations? It is impossible to know, but apparently he was ignorant of Greek, on his own confession, and vehement protests were made, in his lifetime, against his romancing.[39]
It looks as if even the learned were, at this date, unfamiliar with the Meditations themselves, although they were aware of the existence of the book and some few possessed copies of extracts from the work. This comparative oblivion is also shown by five references to the actual book in the middle of the sixteenth century, just before the issue of the editio princeps. In his Bibliotheca Universalis, a.d. 1545, Conrad Gesner refers to the Meditations as the work of the author of the Itinerarium, and employs the title καθ᾽ ἑαυτόν.[40] The same title is used by Lilius Giraldus,[41] in the same year, and he speaks of Marcus' various learning almost as if he fancied that the extracts from Aelian's Natural History, which are interspersed with Marcus' own words in these manuscripts, were Marcus' own work, just as elsewhere he reports a work by the Emperor On Fishes.[42] Neither Petrarch[43] nor any of the writers of this period cited by Gataker in his Testimonia shows an acquaintance with what Marcus actually wrote.
V. The Editio Princeps, a.d. 1559
The recent history of the Meditations dates from the issue of the first printed edition by Andreas Gesner, filius, at Zürich in a.d. 1558–9. It was accompanied by Marinus' Proclus vel De Felicitate, also a first edition. Both books were translated into Latin, the former by Wm. Xylander of Augsburg (1532–76), and brief notes to each author were added.
The importance of this text of the Meditations is that the manuscript from which Conrad Gesner caused it to be printed is now lost, so that it is one of the two principal sources of all modern texts, there being only one complete manuscript, Vaticanus Gk. 1950 (referred to as A), with which to compare it. The other evidence for the text, besides these two, is of little independent value. The book was produced under the auspices of the learned naturalist and humanist, Conrad Gesner (a.d. 1516–65), who says in his dedicatory letter[44] that he 'received the books of Marcus from the gifted poet Michael Toxites[45] from the library of Otto Heinrich, Prince Palatine', that is from the famous collection at Heidelberg. Conrad Gesner, writing in 1562, states that he 'gave the books of M. Antoninus and Marinus to his cousin Andrew to print in 1558, with Latin translations, of Antoninus by William Xylander, of Marinus by a friend, a learned youth, who modestly desired to be anonymous'.[46]
Xylander dates his Latin dedication from Heidelberg in October 1558, whither he had recently gone from Basel to become professor of Greek and later librarian to the Prince Palatine. It looks as though the printers took the volume to pieces and sent the Marcus leaves to Xylander, for the latter says in the dedicatory introduction to his second edition (Basel, Guarinus 1568): 'the copy of Antoninus which I used was, so Gesner stated, taken from a volume belonging to the famous library of the late illustrious Elector Palatine, Otto Heinrich.'[47] He implies, that is, that the pages he worked with bore no evidence of their origin.
Xylander, as he states in his notes, made a few corrections of the manuscript text, and these were most, not quite all, adopted by Gesner in the printed text. Generally the text was left as he found it, his Latin translation indicating what he took to be the sense, and silently suggesting a good many emendations. This is the same scrupulous regard for the manuscript text which he observed in his edition of Plutarch (Vitae 1560, Moralia 1570). He explains his method in the introduction to this second edition: 'in case some ungenerous critic should fancy that I am serving him with a rechauffe, I have corrected my preface, the author's words in the Greek and Latin, and not only have I removed the misprints, I have also reviewed and corrected my own translation in several places and made some additions to the notes. . . . Some places[48] there are in the book which it appeared better not to touch rather than by conjecture to substitute possibly for Antoninus' own words diction that would be foreign to him.'
The translation is most elegant, and, on the whole, remarkably exact. Sometimes Xylander goes astray, and sometimes his fidelity to the words makes little sense, although it has the advantage of showing what text he had before him. Still we cannot use his work, like one of the old verbal Latin translations, as certain evidence of the words of his manuscript. He sometimes paraphrases and condenses, but we can detect words and sentences which the printers overlooked. He says in his first dedication: 'I neither desired nor indeed was I justified in attempting a faithful verbal translation. I have indeed followed the sense, but whether I have hit it always I leave to the judgement of others. There are many plain reasons why this was difficult, yet I confess that in some points I required the help either of divination or of a bold departure whether from the Greek manuscript or from normal Greek usage.'[49] We are reminded of Wyttenbach's tribute to the great scholar's memory: 'Xylander I love for his candour, his probity, his honesty, manifest proofs of which are conspicuous not only in his writings but in his whole life.'[50] We must remember that he was printing a plain text, without marginalia or footnotes, and be grateful to him for his fidelity.
So much of the editor. What is to be said of Gesner's compositors? Xylander writes in the second edition: 'as my lucubration . . . was vilely reproduced by the carelessness of the printers and so published that it might fairly be held not to have been edited at all, I have been thinking for some time of remedying this'.[51] The indictment is serious and the original editor's words have been repeated by subsequent editors. I am inclined to think it exaggerated. We must at least remember that Xylander made his corrections for the second edition without reference to the manuscript. That, it appears, had not been returned to Heidelberg; certainly Xylander makes no reference to it (except the above) in his second edition. Is it not possible that in reading the printed text he noticed and corrected many puerile mistakes which reproduced the original faithfully? Of the Gesner press very little has been written, so that its reputation is not known.[52]
A curious problem, of little importance for the criticism of our text, has lately been suggested by H. Schenkl. He argues that the manuscript of the Meditations, in distinction from that of Marinus' Proclus, did not come from the Palatine library, but was procured by Toxites from a source unknown, perhaps even copied by himself from the original, thus introducing a further stage in the manuscript tradition. Yet the Latin title-page to the Meditations bears the words: e bibliotheca illustrissimi principis Ottonis Henrici; and, as if to make assurance doubly sure, there are on the reverse to the Latin title of the Proclus the words 'The Printer to the Reader. Forasmuch as Marinus' Life of Proclus was contained in the same codex with the books of M. Antoninus, I thought I too ought to include it, especially as this work of Marinus is not a big one and has not, so far as I know, been previously published; in its argument too it is not far removed from the books of Antoninus.'[53] This agrees with what both Conrad Gesner and Xylander believed. Again Xylander in his second dedication gives as one reason for including the Meditations that it originally came from a library other treasures from which he is now printing for the first time with the permission of Prince Otto Heinrich's successor.[54]
Nothing would appear more certain than that the two books were in a single volume, brought to Gesner at Zürich by Toxites from Heidelberg. Schenkl, however, points out that Xylander, writing in 1568, says only that he was assured by Conrad Gesner that the Marcus came from the Palatine library, not that he knew that fact himself.[55] He suggests therefore that Gesner, in his dedication, confused the Marinus which did come from the Palatine library with the Marcus, which did not. He appears to overlook the fact that the printer says expressly that both books were in the same volume, a volume which Xylander presumably never saw in its entirety. Schenkl has a further point. He says: 'Inasmuch as the copy of Marinus' Proclus handed to Gesner by Toxites was certainly copied from a codex formerly in the Palatine library and now preserved in the Vatican at Rome, it might easily happen that Gesner should fancy that what he found noted about the origin of his apograph applied also to the Meditations, which he supposed were bound up in the same volume.'[56] It is strange that, if this were indeed the fact, Boissonade should have treated the first edition of Marinus' Proclus as evidence for the text instead of consulting the manuscript from which it is here presumed to be derived. Further, the Vatican MS. to which Schenkl is referring is dated.[57] It was written by Andreas Darmarius in Madrid for Julius Pacius de Beriga in a.d. 1579,[58] just twenty years after Gesner printed the Marcus and the Marinus. Again, the first edition stops with the opening words of ch. 22, the printer adding: 'pauca videntur deesse', whereas Pacius' manuscript, now in the Palatine library at Rome, contains the entire thirty-eight chapters.
The lamentable truth is that both parts of Gesner's MS. are at present lost. The precious codex may never have been reassembled and returned to Heidelberg, or it may have been lost in the journey to Rome or in the later passage of some of the Vatican treasures to Paris and back. It is no longer accessible to our inquiry.
VI. Description of the Editio Princeps and the Manuscript Sources
The first edition is a small 8vo volume, clearly printed on good paper and in an elegant Greek fount. It has none of the magnificence of some early classics and, like the small Elzevirs, is clearly intended for the pocket. A good copy, like Bywater's in the Bodleian Library, measures 6.5 in. by 3.9 in. The pagination is as follows:
Xylander's dedication follows, dated Heidelbergae Calendis Octobribus. Anno salutis 1558, and a translation of the Testimonia (6 leaves); Latin translation (pp. 1–200); Xylander's notes (13 leaves); title-page: Marini De Procli Vita etc.; verso, typographus lectori &c., Latin translation and notes (pp. 3–36), two blank leaves.
Greek title, verso blank: ΜΑΡΚΟΥ / ΑΝΤΩΝΙΝΟΥ ΑΥ/ΤΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΦΙΛΟΣΟ/ΦΟΥ ΤΩΝ ΕΙΣ ΕΑΥΤΟΝ / ΒΙΒΛΙΑ ΙΒ (Andrew Gesner's Device) TIGVRI APVD AN/dream Gesnerum F. (undated in some examples, in others, MDLIX).
Conrad's dedication in Greek follows and Greek Testimonia (pp. 3–13, p. 14 blank, 1 blank leaf); ΜΑΡΚΟΥ ΑΝΤΩΝΙΝΟΥ ΑΥΤΟΚΡΑΤΟ/ρος τῶν εἱς ἐαυτὸν Βιβλίον α, followed by the Greek text, the second book beginning at ii. 4 of our editions, each book with the same title, numerated β, γ, &c., pp. 1–156. ΜΑΡΙΝΠΟΥ ΝΕΑ/ΠΟΛΙΤΟΥ ΠΡΟΚΛΟΣ Η ΠΕ/ρὶ εὐδαιμονίας. Then the Greek text, pp. 157—81, which ends at ἐκ δὲ τῆς τοιαύτης viz. ch. 22, with a note: Pauca uidentur deesse. Page 182 blank, 1 blank leaf.
The existent manuscript sources are the following:
A. Vaticanus Graecus 1950, contained in a codex[59] which passed to the Vatican Library from Stefano Gradi's[60] collection in a.d. 1683. The codex contains the following manuscripts now bound up together, written by at least five different hands. The authors so combined are:
Xenophon, Cyropaedia and other works,[61] fols. 1–271v (272–9 blank).
Xenophon, Memorabilia Socratis, fols. 280–340v.
Marcus Antoninus (except viii. 61), fols. 341–392v. (incl. 389 and 389 a).
Epictetus, Manual (Christian paraphrase), fols. 392v-399.
Fragmenta rhetorica; Epicurus, Allocutio, [62] fols. 401–4v.
Maximus Tyrius, Philosophumena,[63] fols. 408–518v.
Alcinous, Dogmata Platonis, fols. 519–41.
Aristotle: De Motu Animalium,[64] fols. 542–5v.
Fols. 271–404v (except 337a) are in the third hand, dated late fourteenth or early fifteenth century.
Subsidiary evidence is derived from the many collections of excerpts from Marcus Antoninus, dating from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, contained in the following:
D. Codex Darmstadtinus 2773, misc. Gr., XIVth cent, fols. 348V-358V,[65] containing: i. 7–16 (om. parts of 15 and 16); ii. 1–17 (om. δῆλα . . . δέχται ch. 15); iii. 1–6; iv. 2–4, 7, 8, 19–21, 35, 36, 43, 46, (viii. 55, ii. 3 εἰ δόγματα . . . τῷ θεῷ), 47, 50 (part); v. 1–6, 9, 10, 14, 28, 31, 33; vi. 1–12, 15 (ὤσπερ εἴ τις to end), 16–19, 21, 22; vii. 28, 29 (part), 55, 59–61 (part), 63, 70, 71, 74; viii. 8–10, 12, 36, 50, 51, 54, 55 (iterum); ix. 2–7, 21–5, 29–31 δικαιότης δέ, where the manuscript breaks off, some folios having been lost.
There are a good many omissions of sentences, and the sense is sometimes paraphrased. The actual proportion of lines in D to the lines in the modern text (between i and ix. 31) is 2:5 (roughly 1,026 out of 2,621 lines).
In fol. 354, among the excerpts from Marcus, occur two fragments (24 and 33) of Epicuri Allocutio, which is contained in Vat. Gr. 1950. The codex has extracts from Maximus Tyrius and Alcinous, besides much else.
C. Excerpts, preserved wholly or in part, in codices which also contain Stobaei Eclogae, Theoctisti Sententiae, Aristoxenus, Fragment on Gyara.
Cα Cβ Vaticanus Graec. 955, 954
The C excerpts are from: i. 8, 15, 16; ii. 1–3, 9–14, 17; iii. 1, 3, 4; iv. 3, 5, 14–18, 20; iii. 5, 10, 13–14. These fragments bear the mark of derivation not directly from a manuscript of Marcus but from a Florilegium.
Mo 1 (M. Schenkl). Monacensis Gr. 323, XVth or XVIth cent. fol. 9r, 19–20V, repeated fol. 88v-90v. Brief extracts or single sentences from ii. 10, 13, 16, 17; iii. 1, 16; iv. 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 46; vii. 50.
X. Excerpts preserved, in whole or in part, in the following codices of the XIVth-XVth cent.
V 1–6 Vat. Gr. 953, 20, 98, 100, 926, 2231[67]
L 1–4 Laurentianus Gr. lv. 7, lix. 17, lxxiv. 13, lix. 44
M 1, 2 Venet. S. Marci App. Cl. xi. 1 and 15
a Athous Μονῆς Ἰβήρων 189
G Guelferbytanus Gudianus 77
B (b Schenkl) Barberinus ii. 99
Their order, with some exceptions, is: vii. 22, 18, 7; iv. 49 (part); v. 8, 18, 26; vi. 13, 31, 39, 40; vii. 53, 62–3, 66, 70, 71; viii. 15, 17 (part), 34, 48, 54, 57, 56; ix. 1, 40; xi. 19; ix. 42; x. 28, 29, 32, 34, 35; xi. 34, 35; xii. 2; xi. 9, 21; xii. 4 (part), 14, 15, 34.
Mo 2 (B Schenkl). Cod. Monacensis 529 (olim Augustanus). This XIVth cent, manuscript includes most of the X excerpts, with vii. 23, which precedes (22, 18, 7) and is followed by vi. 35, 43, 44; iv. 33; vi. 33, interpolated between (31 and 39); (vii. 63) precedes vii. 64; viii. 21 (part) precedes (viii. 34). The manuscript ends with xi. 16, 17, 18. 1, ἀλλήγων.
This is the Codex Hoeschelianus which M. Casaubon used. He says that Hoeschel consulted for his collation two manuscripts at Augsburg, one ending at τί γίνεται ix. 40, the other at τῶν κρειττόνων (ἔνεκεν) xi. 18. 1.
The X fragments are normally intermingled with excerpts from Aelian περὶ ζῴων. The order is given in tabular form by E. Miller, Mélanges de litt. grecque, Paris, 1868, p. 347, and in their editions by Stich, Leipsic, 1882, p. xiii, and Schenkl 1913, p. xxxv. There is no obvious connexion between the contents of the passages from the two authors, nor has any explanation been discovered for the strange disorder of the extracts from Marcus.
It will be noticed that the C extracts come from the earlier Books, the X from the later. Only vii. 63, 70 and 71, and viii. 54 are common to D and X.
The excerpts in Mo 2 and X together equal about one-ninth of the whole Meditations.
VII. Value of the Manuscripts and of the Editio Princeps for the text
The evidence to be derived from the existing manuscripts for the construction of the text of the Meditations is scanty enough in quantity, as will be seen from the last section. In quality it is also unsatisfactory, since all the manuscripts, as well as the lost original of the first edition, P cod., belong indisputably to a single tradition. This is now represented by evidence which is not older than the late fourteenth century; and there is some reason to believe that the archetype to which all our manuscripts point is a copy of the eleventh or twelfth century, which had already suffered by verbal corruption and by the loss of sentences which, unless new evidence be discovered, are indeterminable in meaning and extent.
The two complete, or nearly complete, sources are Vat. Graec. 1950, A, and Gesner's printed text, P, which depends upon a lost manuscript, P cod. The order of their chapters and, in general, their text correspond with our present printed text. In spite of minor discrepancies they agree remarkably in the places where they are corrupt or deficient, in many minor errors, and even in small points of orthography and accentuation.
The manuscripts of Excerpts follow closely the text of either A or P, or both A and P, but scholars are agreed that none of them is directly derived from A or P. Even D, which so closely resembles A, is not a transcript from A, but appears to be derived from a source which lies between (A and D) and the presumed archetype of A (D) and P. This follows not only from the fact that D often gives a condensed version of A, or a loose paraphrase of its presumed original, and not only from its agreement at places with P as against A (for these may all be conjectural corrections by its scribe), but from the fact that it has preserved a number of scholia, of which A retains no trace. The Excerpts C and X present a text which at one place in C certainly, at more than one place in X, appears to be derived from what we have called the archetype. This is and P. This follows not only from the fact that D often gives a condensed version of A, or a loose paraphrase of its presumed original, and not only from its agreement at places with P as against A (for these may all be conjectural corrections by its scribe), but from the fact that it has preserved a number of scholia, of which A retains no trace. The Excerpts C and X present a text which at one place in C certainly, at more than one place in X, appears to especially clear in Book V ch. 8, 5, where X preserves six words which are certainly genuine, although their omission from P had not been noticed because they are not essential to the argument.
Although the Excerpts are of little importance, if any, for the actual words of the text, since their occasional improvements of passages may well be due to ingenious emendation, they raise a general problem as to the integrity of the present disposition of the several chapters. The X Excerpts especially are not arranged in the order of the complete manuscripts; they begin, for example, with extracts from Book vii, but in the order ch. 22, ch. 18, ch. 7. The fact that our present text appears dislocated at more than one place, that the sequence of thought of the writer is often interrupted by what appears to be an intrusive aphorism, or series of aphorisms, suggests when coupled with this evidence that the order of the various sections has been at some time disturbed. This is discussed elsewhere (infra, pp. lxvii-lxxiv).
There is another remarkable feature in these Excerpts. The actual chapters excerpted differ in the various groups. Even D, which does follow our present order, has a collection of chapters which only at two places overlaps the other Excerpts. Thus, if we had only the Excerpts to go on, we could put together a considerable series of the actual Meditations, with practically no repetitions. It appears, therefore, possible that there was at an earlier date a single collection, a Florilegium of Marcus' thoughts, from which these have been derived. It will be noticed that, with very few exceptions, the extracts thus preserved would be of a general moral character; all the aphorisms which are of a personal nature would have disappeared.
To return to P and A. The resemblances between them point to a common original. But in externals they are remarkably different. P is arranged in twelve Books: A has no numerical marks of Books, although some of the Books are separated by an interval. The chapters in the several Books in P are distinguished, although they are not numbered, and the distinctions correspond generally with the sequence of thought; the chapters in A are marked by rubricated capitals, but the resultant divisions are frequently incoherent. Yet it is in the actual text that the difference is most remarkable. If we read P, we meet many small errors, such as are common in all manuscripts, but the general impression left is of a text with many idiosyncrasies but an intelligible text; if, on the other hand, we take up A at any point, not only do we find continual omissions of lines, parts of lines, even of longer passages of some two or three lines, but the amount of corruption of individual words is such that it is possible to make only an approach to the meaning of the author, sometimes not even that. Besides this, especially in the later Books, we meet forms of words which are corrupted according to no known rules of manuscript interpretation. The problem of the origin of all these difficulties is intensified by the fact that the hand of the scribe is quite a good one, although late, that he has often patched up a lapsus calami, and has occasionally written a correction of a form in the space above the line, without erasing his first attempt. He appears to have tried to be intelligent.
Clearly the principal problem of an editor is to determine what weight is to be attached to the evidence of P and A respectively in a case of difference between them, and what are the grounds for his decision. In regard to P there is one question to be answered first, viz. how widely does the printed text of Gesner, which Xylander edited, differ from the lost original P cod.? There are many obvious misprints in P, which Xylander remedied in the second or Basel edition; there are many other mistakes in the form of words, which Xylander did not correct, some of which certainly appear to be misprints, though others may have been errors of the scribe. Schenkl's estimate is that Xylander corrected thirty-six mistakes but overlooked forty-four, generally graver, errors, which he had silently amended in his original Latin version. It is certain that Xylander did not carry out his revision as carefully as we should expect and wish; but he was now working on the printed text and no longer had the manuscript to consult. Thus there is an at least plausible explanation of his apparent negligence, viz. that he was anxious to preserve, so far as possible, the text of the original manuscript. Certainly he did this in the first edition, leaving his version or his notes to show the reader the mistakes he detected. Moreover, this was his practice in his great edition of Plutarch. It may be argued then, I think, that it would be just the graver mistakes of his original that he would leave intact. My own conclusion is that most of these blunders were in the original manuscript, that at least it is safer to work on this hypothesis. There is no evidence that either Toxites, who brought the manuscript to Conrad Gesner's attention, Conrad himself, or Andrew the printer corrected the text as it passed through their hands. We may, as the earlier editors did, use the evidence of P, with the necessary reservations.
As to the weight to be attached to A, the history of the twentieth century text exhibits first the effort of successive editors, by scholarly conjecture, to make an intelligible text on the basis of Xylander's two editions and the Lyons text of 1626. Secondly, the vulgate, thus derived from Xylander's text, was emended by the use of the manuscripts (first of the Excerpts, later of A as well as of the Excerpts), and the tendency to prefer A to P grew more marked from the date of Coraes's text of 18 16 and Schultz's of 1820. This movement culminated in Schenkl's text of 1913. The editor speaks of the Vatican manuscript 'coming into its own'; and his own practice is evident from the fact that, apart from such minutiae as final nu and sigma before a closed syllable, the Leipsic text differs in some 180 places from Leopold's Oxford text of 1908. Yet Leopold himself had said that A, in spite of its many patent errors, 'has often preserved the genuine reading more faithfully than P or made at least a closer approach to the truth'. Most of Schenkl's differences from Leopold arise from a restoration of A's readings or of something supposed to be indicated by them, and there are many places besides (in his app. crit. and adnotationis suppl.) where he has shown great ingenuity in the attempt to find a possible lost reading which might plausibly explain A's idiosyncrasies.
The hypothesis underlying this restoration is that A, by its fidelity to its original, a fidelity not shared by P cod., has preserved an older and truer version of their common original: the illiterate witness is more likely to give an unvarnished statement of what he saw than one who is more educated. This hypothesis has, no doubt, been adopted the more readily because in the criticism of many texts (for instance, of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics) early manuscripts have, in spite of, or even because of, their unsophisticated crudity, been given greater weight than later and more ostensibly literate manuscripts of the same text. In the case of A, however, as evidence for what Marcus wrote, we are not dealing with an old but with a very late manuscript, we are presuming that A has preserved more closely than P cod. the text of their common archetype, not that an early manuscript is ceteris paribus likely to be nearer the original than a later one. Moreover, a close study of A's individual readings shows that many are deliberate, even if infelicitous, corrections of a text which P cod. has preserved, while a similar study of P shows traces of that very naïveté of report which has been ascribed to A. Again, the existence of D shows that A and D depend upon an original which is one step further from the archetype of A D and P cod. than P cod. is. Further, a noticeable feature of A is its steady deterioration in accuracy in the later Books. M. Trannoy gives the statistics: Book i, errors common to P A, 17 to 20, errors peculiar to P, 14, peculiar to A, 21; Book xii, common errors 17 to 20, individual to P, 21, to A, 80. Are we to suppose that A is a better witness in Book xii than in Book i, since this increase of error shows, by hypothesis, a greater simplicity and therefore a nearer correspondence with the truth? Finally, if A is to be considered analogous to certain manuscripts (Kb, Ac) of Aristotle, we ought to be able to point to some remarkable restorations of an old text which are derived from A's mistakes. But, so far as the modern editions go, there is not a single case of such restoration which is not based upon an error common to P and A.
A different explanation is clearly possible, viz. that A is the work of an inexact scribe reporting (perhaps at secondhand) an earlier state of the text, whereas P's report of the same earlier text is generally more correct. In short, that P is the more credible of the two witnesses. There is nothing here to prevent a critic from preferring on intrinsic grounds a reading he finds in A to one in P; only, if the readings are equally possible intrinsically, the balance of probability is on the side of P. A study of the text, even in Schenkl, shows that, in fact, the present revised vulgate is far closer to the editio princeps than it is to A. P is not only more complete, but is in details far more accurate than A.
As to the archetype of A, Polak,[69] who made a close study of this manuscript, concluded that it was probably copied from an eleventh- or twelfth-century manuscript, in which the words of the original scriptura continua were already separated, the breathings and accents supplied, and the sentences distinguished. If this view be adopted, then P cod. also must have been derived from a minuscule of that date; behind this our manuscripts do not point. Polak gives some instances of misreading, as he supposes, of an uncial text, but nearly all, if not all, of these can, I think, be explained on the hypothesis of a minuscule original. If there are any mistakes of an uncial origin, and this is not certain, they would, we must suppose, have already been in the presumed archetype of P and A.
Schenkl did not live to publish his proposed study of the text, but he appears to have thought that A, or perhaps its archetype of the eleventh or twelfth century, bears evidence of an editor of the text, who wrestled long and painfully with an old and mutilated original. He means, no doubt, Arethas. He goes further and suggests that the common source of all our manuscripts is the presumed edition of the learned deacon of Patras at the end of the ninth century. This is a suggestive and interesting hypothesis which other critics have adopted, but the evidence is too slight and conjectural to carry conviction.
There is, however, one source from which we can judge of this theory, the evidence of Suidas' Lexicon. He has preserved, very fortunately, passages of considerable length from the Meditations. Wherever the extracts he gives are actual extracts, their text is substantially our present text, and what he gives must represent citations from his original sources, which are older than the tenth century, how old we cannot determine. Thus whatever Arethas did to the text, the evidence we have from Suidas suggests that the manuscript he used was in its readings close to the tradition preserved to us. Unfortunately the majority of the passages in Suidas are paraphrases of the original text, and cannot therefore be used as evidence for the exact words of the original; indeed it looks as though the source of many of them was not the text of the complete original, but a Florilegium of some kind from the Meditations: they are so often introduced by ὄτι or a similar word, like the passages we have in the C excerpts. If this be true, the process of making selections from Marcus had already begun before the time of Suidas, as would indeed be probable on general grounds.
There is one other line of inquiry to be considered in reference to the transmission of the Meditations. This depends on the length of the known omissions in A. The commonest length is of sentences consisting of from 30 to 40 letters, say an average of 35 letters. Schenkl has compared this modulus with the length of lines in the papyrus of Hierocles and with that in some old codices. I presume that he means especially the length of line in some of the manuscripts which we know to have been transcribed for Arethas' library, the Bodleian Euclid, for example. Several of A's omissions, however, are of 23–5 letters in length, corresponding to the 24 (23) letters dropped by both P and A in Book v. 8. It is tempting to suppose that 23–5 was the length of line in an early stage of the text, since it is common in many papyrus rolls of the second century a.d. The fact, however, that the one omission common to A. and P (v. 8) is supplied from the X excerpts might be held to show that this oversight belongs to a later period of the transmission. We may perhaps safely use these two moduli in an estimate of a given conjectural emendation or supplement, like Gataker's in v. 16. To argue on the basis of either length to the original format of the Meditations is too hazardous, in view of the variety of lines even in early rolls, much more in the minuscule stage.
As to the sources of literal corruption in both P and A, and their presumed archetype, the ground here is familiar. The errors are such as are met with in the study of every Greek text, and are abundantly illustrated from the apparatus criticus of modern texts of Marcus. The fact that A rarely writes iota subscript proves that his original was of later date than the iota adscript period. P's occasional omission of iota (it is not always easy to read in the print) points in the same direction. More than one explanation might be suggested for the uncertainty about final nu in both P and A. It may be due partly to pronunciation, partly to the use of abbreviation in the original, sometimes it is clearly caused by a misunderstanding of the imperatival infinitive. The omission of rubricated capitals or the rubrication of erroneous capitals is very common in A, especially in the later Books. This need not deceive us; it is akin to our modern misprint. More important is the evidence of the existence in the archetype of marginal or interlinear variants. Here and there, these have crept into our manuscripts; there are also a few cases where glosses appear to have been embodied. These are, however, very few, I believe, though many more have been suspected by critics of the Cobet school. These presumed glosses were supposed by Nauck to be the work of a needy schoolmaster (iv. 30); Schenkl discovers occasionally the bowdlerism of a prudish scribe or the reverence of a Christian monk. More than one critic has detected the work of a physician, who doctored his copy with scraps of medical lore. Dr. Rendall has indicated many glosses which he presumes to have arisen in this way. He even suggests (no doubt half playfully) that the great Galen may sometimes have been at his imperial patient's elbow as he worked. One recent critic, presuming these to be glosses, traces the hand of the young doctor Toxites upon the manuscript which he brought to Conrad Gesner. He forgets that A contains the same additions, and that Toxites had no access to that manuscript.
I have spoken above of dislocations of certain places in the text. Gataker expressed the same suspicion in more than one of his notes. He and the great Saumaise in the seventeenth, and Morus in the eighteenth century, suggested transpositions of some shorter passages. Leopold and Schenkl, following Coraes, have made such a change in x. 1, and Dr. Kronenberg has lately proposed one such change, a change which had occurred to myself independently (vii. 66, 67). I have at a few places adopted the same kind of dangerous remedy.
The text which is here printed is frankly eclectic. I do not think it is scientific to restore A's text at the expense of P. I have been guided by intrinsic probability where the evidence differs, with a slight predisposition in favour of P. In certain small details of spelling certainty is quite impossible. The method I have followed may be seen in the course of the notes.
VIII. Printed Editions
Little of importance for the text or interpretation of the Meditations was published for seventy-five years (1559–1634), although the book was read widely and highly esteemed, as is shown by scholars' references to it in their works and correspondence. Casaubon uses it freely in his notes to Persius; both he and Saumaise cite it in their notes to the Historia Augusta; Canter made two emendations in his Novae Lectiones.[70] Barthius refers to the Meditations frequently in his Adversaria, and he it was who first expressed the view that what has been preserved is merely a collection of extracts from a lost original.[71]
Of close study of the doctrines of Marcus there is, however, no trace in this period, not even in Justus Lipsius' works on Stoicism.[72] Naturally he mentions Marcus more than once, but he nowhere manifests an intimacy with the Meditations, relying upon other sources for the substance of Stoic teaching. It is the same, I think, with Valla and other writers of Stoic-Christian books.[73]
That the Meditations had many readers is proved by its frequent republication, and by the fact that fifty years after issue copies of Xylander's two editions were already rare, not only in England but also abroad. At Lyons, in 1559, Tornaesius brought out Xylander's Latin translation, with the anonymous version of Marinus' Life of Proclus; in 1570, in the same city, appeared the first vernacular translation, a version into French, by the learned civilian Pardoux Duprat (1520–1569/70). Zetzner appears to have bought up the 'remainder' sheets of the Basel edition, and published them with a new title-page at Strassburg in 1590.[74] At Lyons, in 1626, de la Bottière issued what its title-page suggests to have been an editio princeps,[75] though it is in reality a reproduction of the 1559 edition (including many of the misprints already corrected by the Basel edition), with a few modifications of the Greek text and Latin translation. The novelty is that Xylander's Latin is printed vis-à-vis the Greek, and the Books are for the first time divided into numbered chapters, though Xylander had indicated the divisions, for the most part, without numbering them. Marcus was accompanied by Marinus, but the sub-title seems to indicate that the demand was for the Meditations, 'a work of importance to Morals, now first published with a Latin translation opposite to the Greek text'. This Lyons edition, with its handful of notes by Amadeus Saly, obstructed rather than cleared the path of scholars. Gataker pays the book much severe and ironical attention. The text of Casaubon's edition suffers, because he was obliged, faute de mieux, to use it as his copy for the press. Only here and there have editors adopted some obvious correction first made by its editor. Thus, besides the editio princeps, which Gataker did not possess, but first saw when Meric Casaubon called upon him, the Basel edition, which Gataker printed, with marginal corrections (sometimes based on fresh corruptions in the Basel text), and the Strassburg reissue, with which Saumaise worked, an editor has to take into consideration this Lyons text and translation, which rests on no fresh evidence and has no value, critical or evidential.
A fresh impetus to the study and interpretation of Marcus was given by Meric Casaubon's English translation, dedicated to Archbishop Laud, 1634.[76] The valuable introduction gives reasons, directed against Xylander (who considered the traditional text to be mutilated) and some unnamed critics (who held the theory of 'excerpts'), for believing that the Meditations has been preserved intact. By the latter, no doubt, Casaubon intended especially Barthius, who is referred to later on in the introduction with veiled censure: 'I know not any that hath had more to doe with Antoninus than Barthius in his Adversaria: I will not say to what purpose.' Casaubon also criticized Xylander's version, in many places, with vehemence.[77] At the end are detailed notes upon the Greek text of the first two Books, with cursory reflections upon the remainder.
The interpretation of Marcus is very much aided by the grouping together of chapters which Casaubon recognized to be closely related in argument, and by the paraphrases introduced between brackets, to assist a reader. It is to this translation that Gataker refers in his own notes, turning Casaubon's English version as exactly as he could into his own Latin.
In 1643 followed Casaubon's edition of the Greek text, with an amended form of Xylander's Latin version.[78] Casaubon based his text upon Xylander's two editions, the Lyons edition, and a collation of the Munich MS., Mo 2, prepared for him by the learned Hoeschel at Augsburg, where the manuscript or manuscripts then were. The editor states his disappointment, on looking through his father's papers and copy of Marcus, not to have found the learned notes he had expected. With modest candour he explains that he had postponed his own intended edition on hearing that Thomas Gataker (4 Sept. 1574–27 July 1654) was engaged in the same task. He waited some time, at last procured an introduction, and called on Gataker in May 1642. After some talk he was shown two stout manuscript volumes, the one with the Greek text, a Latin translation, and marginalia, the other a prolix commentary, both ready for the press. They had been completed some time past, but Gataker despaired, in those dark days, of finding printer or publisher. His generous host urged Casaubon to proceed with his proposed edition. Casaubon had already translated the book, was a facile writer, and did not project anything on a scale beyond his powers and his little leisure. His edition came out within twelve months. The work is slight but estimable, for the editor was well versed in pagan and Christian literature, and therefore interprets Marcus with a wide vision. He also made many emendations which have been adopted by successive editors. The book is still of interest, but has been obscured by Gataker's great work, so much so that even Hallam writes of Gataker's edition as the first English commentary upon Marcus Aurelius.
This train of events will explain how it is that Gataker, in his notes, refers to Casaubon's English translation, not to his Greek text, and is often in doubt as to what text Casaubon intended to adopt. It makes obvious too the reason why Gataker published as his own many emendations already, when his book came out, made by Casaubon and actually printed.
Casaubon, as a High Churchman, was deprived of his ecclesiastical preferments by the faction in power in 1644; but Gataker, though one of the Puritan clergy who signed the address (18 Jan. 1649) against the trial of King Charles, did not relinquish his benefice.[79] In 1652 the energy of his Cambridge friends procured the publication by the University of his master work.[80]
Of this judicious and masculine performance it is difficult to speak with sober moderation. It is a monument of vast and fastidious erudition in the four tongues, and (like his Cinnus, 1651, and posthumous Adversaria Miscellanea, 1659) a magazine of comprehensive and precise knowledge. Gataker wrote much besides, not least his balanced contribution to the vexed problem of the Style of the New Testament, 1648; and posterity has praised his commentaries on Isaiah, 1645, and Jeremiah and the Lamentations, 1651, his share in the puritan Notes upon the Bible. For ten years Preacher to Lincoln's Inn, he was Rector of Rotherhithe, near London, until his death, and was an active and moderate member, from 1643 to 1645, of the Westminster Assembly which drew up the Confession of Faith, 1647, Above all, he was a faithful minister of the Gospel. To quote a poet with whom he was clearly familiar:
But riche he was of holy thoght and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche;
His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.
Devoted as he was in his daily ministrations, his sermons are models of learning and exposition, enriched with wealth of marginal annotation. It is wonderful how he found the time to achieve, besides all this, an edition of Marcus Aurelius, so vast in its compass, so varied and exact in detail.
Readers familiar with the classical commentaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will recall the repeated reference to Tho. Gataker, the frequent illustrations drawn from his notes.[81] Ingram Bywater, inaugurating his tenure of the Greek Chair at Oxford, 1893–1908, said: 'the great Greek scholar of the Caroline age (i.e. in England) is, I think, beyond a doubt Gataker, whose Antoninus is to this day a book of unquestioned value and authority'. Bywater had just been speaking of Sir Henry Savile's Chrysostom and of Selden's Marmor Parium. Porson refers to 'our Cambridge Gataker, that scholar of vast erudition', touching characteristically, in passing, on a weak joint in the giant's harness, his defective sense of Greek prosody.
The edition offers a much improved text, conjecturally supplies some gaps in the traditional text, and makes an occasional transposition. It has been criticized as too free in conjecture; but the proposals are always in the margin or the notes, and are not so hazardous as those of Saumaise. In the margin too are careful cross-references, like those in the Authorized Version of the Bible; they are invaluable for the elucidation of the subject-matter. Opposite the Greek text is an entirely new Latin version, very close and accurate. There follows a continuous commentary, with scrupulous inquiry into the work of earlier interpreters, explanations of the technical terms and phrases, parallels from authors, ancient and modern, and many references to the Sacred Scriptures. The sources of Marcus' sayings are indicated and his doctrine illustrated. The chronological and material background is filled in from historical documents and literary evidence. In passing, Gataker proposes many palmary emendations of the authors, sacred and profane, whose works he quotes.
The notes are enriched by communications made to Gataker by Saumaise, Patrick Young (Junius), the Biblical scholar and King's librarian, and by Arnold Boot, a learned Dutchman, a physician who was the friend of Archbishop Ussher. Besides all this, there are copious indexes and a preface with a study of the Stoic philosophy, and a generous but judicious comparison of the moral teaching of Marcus Aurelius with that of Christianity. The preface closes with the words: 'this dissertation, such as it is, with eyes clouded by old age and troubled with rheum, a hand trembling with the frost and sickness (as I had no secretary to assist me), I have heaped together rather than composed, scribbled rather than written this poor work, in Surrey, in the parish of Redrith (Rotherhithe), a suburb of my native city London, in January, in a severe winter, twin brother to the winter of old age and weakness, in the year of salvation 1651, the seventy-eighth of my life'.
These sad lines will explain how it was that Gataker had little or no part in seeing the volume through the press. The reader will condone a few blemishes upon so vast a performance, mistaken references (few in all) from one part of the book to another, occasional inexactitudes and some misprints, hardly any of which, it must be said, are corrected in the later issues.[82]
Gataker's edition has long been, and will always remain, the principal authority for any one undertaking to study or edit the Meditations.
Casaubon's edition was never reprinted, but his notes with Xylander's were annexed to the Utrecht edition of Gataker; his text and Latin translation were reprinted at Oxford, 1680, with a few selections from Xylander's and Gataker's notes. Gataker's edition was reprinted at London, 1697 and 1707, with a life of Marcus by G. Stanhope and notes selected from the D'Aciers' French translation of 1690–1. At Utrecht appeared a splendidly printed reissue, 1697 (Gataker's Opera Critica followed in 1698), the Greek citations in Gataker's notes being translated into Latin. This, the last edition, includes, in the Opera Critica, a reprint of Gataker's autobiography, with a further account of his life by his son Charles.
Gataker's text and translation, with very brief extracts from his notes and Casaubon's, were reprinted at Oxford, 1704. The editor, R.I.[83], has added a few good remarks. The text and translation also appeared at Leipsic, 1729, with a good summary of Marcus' philosophy by Budde, and a life by Wolle. The text and translation were again published at Glasgow (Foulis), 1744 and 1751, and at Leipsic 1775.[84] This last issue is memorable for the brief notes and emendations appended by S. F. N. Morus, and the consequent text became a kind of authorized version until the end of the nineteenth century.
Casaubon had consulted one manuscript of the X family of excerpts (Mo 2), which is nearly related to A.
Lucas Holste[85] (1596–1661) of Hamburg, the learned custos first of the Barberini collection, then of the Vatican Library, was meanwhile visiting Oxford, Paris, and Florence, studying manuscripts, primarily for his edition of the Greek geographers. When in France he bought the Lyons edition of Marcus and Marinus, and discovering in Florence that the Life of Proclus was existent in its complete form, he contemplated editing both works. He made a proposal to the Elzevirs[86] in 1636 for an edition of the Meditations, to be accompanied by other authors. He was a man of larger projects than performance, and only a part of his store of learning was published by himself or posthumously. In the case of the Meditations, he may have abandoned his project when Gataker's edition appeared. His adversaria on Marcus and Marinus are noted in his copy of the Lyons text, which is now in the Bodleian, a part of the D'Orville purchase of 1805. He has collated the text of the Meditations with a manuscript of the X excerpts at Florence, L. 4[87], and the Marinus text with Med. Laur. LXXXVI. 3, which he elsewhere says is 'the best manuscript I have collated, and I have collated many'.[88] He has corrected the faulty Lyons text from Xylander and Casaubon, and freely revised the Latin version.[89] There is also a full list of the Suidas extracts, and many parallels from Greek literature are noted. His own emendations, at more than one place, anticipate those of later critics. He does not mention Vaticanus A; but at one place he enters a variant which must be derived from that manuscript, viz. ἐπὶ τὰ for ἔπειτα, xii. 30.
In 1675 Holste's friend and patron Cardinal Francesco Barberini,[90] nephew of Urban VIII, published an Italian version of the XII Books of M. Aurelius Antoninus.[91] He notes at the end a number of variants from Vaticanus A, and I have thought it possible that Holste drew his attention to the manuscript when he had himself abandoned his projected edition. The book was part of Stefano Gradi's collection,[92] and did not come into the Vatican until after Barberini's death.
In the second half of the eighteenth century J. P. de Joly, whose work is described below,[93] obtained a collation of Vat. Gr. 1950 (A), from Winckelmann, by permission of Cardinal Alexandre Albani. He also secured collations of five of the Vatican excerpts, and of three Laurentian. He himself consulted Par. 2649. The results he published in his Greek text of 1775,[94] which was accompanied by Gataker's translation.
The path indicated by an amateur was now pursued by professed scholars. J. M. Schultz had published an excellent German translation with occasional critical notes, Schleswig, 1799; a Greek text, with Latin version, followed, 1802.[95] He corrected the vulgate text by the help of A, one or more of the Paris excerpta, four Laurentian excerpts, and Guelferbytanus 77 (G). He also first published Menage's and Reiske's adversaria.
Schultz's edition was unfavourably, even harshly, reviewed, and he expresses his chagrin in the sad preface to his second edition, Leipsic, 1820. The text he then gives is much improved, but he follows Coray's edition, almost slavishly. His text was stereotyped by Tauchnitz, 1829, and was for long a familiar edition. Its readings are adopted in the Didot edition, 1840, with little change.
In 1816 a greater scholar, the Greek patriot Adamantios Coraês, issued a revised text, being volume iv of his Parerga for the Chian society. His introduction, in modern Greek, gives an account of the Emperor's precepts, with a brief bibliography (Gataker, Leipsic, 1775, and Schultz).[96] In the footnotes he merely gives his corrections, which are based upon A, and his own conjectures, the book being a school edition. Many solecisms are removed from the previously accepted text, good readings are adopted from A, and his own emendations are most felicitous. After Casaubon, Gataker, and Reiske, he has done far the most to establish a sound text.
The eccentric edition of the younger Capel Lofft followed in 1861.[97] It was not noticed until Dr. Rendall drew attention to its merits. Lofft gives a perfect swarm of emendations, followed by a second set in the appendix. Recent editors have adopted some of his suggestions, and his very audacity often draws attention to textual problems which may easily be overlooked.
In 1882 Johann Stich[98] published a text, with a critical introduction and an apparatus criticus of the now familiar type. He added a considerable index. For his edition he himself first collated M1 and M2, Barberinus, and Mo 2. He omitted the C group, though Cramer had published a collation of C at Oxford in 1839. A second edition, with a new preface, bringing the history of criticism up to date, followed in 1903, but his excellent text he left substantially as in his first edition. His tendency is to prefer the readings of A, where tenable, without exaggeration. He recorded all Nauck's corrections.
In the present century four editions of the text have succeeded to Stich's, viz. I. H. Leopold, Oxford, 1908; H. Schenkl (ed. major et minor), Teubner, Leipsic, 1913; A. I. Trannoy's text, with French vis-à-vis, Paris, 1925; C. R. Haines, The Communings with Himself of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Loeb, London, 1916. One further manuscript of the X group, Vat. Gr. 2231 (V 6), was described and collated by Weyland, just after Schenkl's text was published, in 1914.
Leopold's text is eclectic, as indeed any text of Marcus must be with our present evidence. He appears to attach more weight to P than Stich or Schenkl were inclined to do. More than once he leaves corrupt places with no indication of their precarious condition. The brief apparatus criticus pays excessive attention to recent emendations, especially by Englishmen; perhaps he wished to pay a compliment to English work. Schenkl has banished most conjectures and many variant readings to a supplement. His preface, apparatus criticus, and supplement give a very full account of the manuscripts and his opinion of their value and interrelation. He divided the chapters, for reference purposes, into a very large number of sections (here he is followed by M. Trannoy). A most valuable index follows. The distinctive feature of Schenkl's text is his determined predilection for A. He follows this manuscript, even where it appears to have been corrupted by familiar causes, easily illustrated from itself. Moreover, he has a strong fancy to construct readings which contaminate P and A, where these authorities differ. The result is a text which differs from Leopold's in at least 180 places, not counting minutiae of orthography. His own conjectures are usually recorded in the apparatus criticus, and he speaks very modestly about them. Neither in his Epictetus nor in his Marcus Antoninus does he show himself a master of conjecture,[99] but scholars will be grateful for the immense labour he gave to these two tasks of his youth and age.[100]
M. Trannoy's edition, with a translation into French vis-à-vis, Bude, 1925, was preluded by five pamphlets on the text, containing a liberal number of emendations.[101] Some of these have been adopted in the Budé edition, others he has later relinquished overtly, or has tacitly abandoned. The apparatus criticus follows Schenkl's report of the manuscripts closely, and contains in consequence some inaccuracies. A few emendations by M. Mondry Beaudouin are recorded. M. A. Puech's preface is brilliant, and there follows an interesting introduction on the Stoic doctrine and the manuscript evidence by M. Trannoy. The character of the Loeb series did not allow Mr. Haines to indulge in a full apparatus criticus. He has a few emendations, and an independent and exact translation into English. There are valuable historical notes and a good index to the subject-matter.
IX. Translations
The Meditations have been more often translated than edited. Wickham Legg[102] has printed a list of texts and translations down to 1908. He says: 'Translations into Latin, English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and the Norse languages are extant. But besides these we have versions into Czech, Polish, and Russian, and even into Persian.' He gives a list of thirty-six such translators, and adds: 'we have amongst his editors a Roman prelate like Cardinal Francis Barberini; a non-juring bishop like Jeremy Collier; a prosperous Dean like Dr. George Stanhope; seventeenth century scholars like Meric Casaubon and Gataker, with Dacier and his wife; a mere theologian like Grabe; a lieutenant des chasses like de Joly; a time-server like Thomas Rousseau; and we may contrast amongst editors a visionary like the younger Capel Lofft . . . with a real Stoic, like George Long'.[103] He adds: 'the 17th century produced some 26 editions or issues; the eighteenth 58, the 19th 81, while the 20th during the eight years of its existence has already brought forth 28.'
The bare enumeration shows the extraordinary favour which has been paid to Marcus' book. Many great names too are connected with it. Sir Thomas Browne used the Meditations, and refers to it directly in one quaint sentence. The sublime passage in Pascal about the two infinities was probably suggested by Marcus' well-known words.[104] Pope used the Meditations, in Jeremy Collier's translation, for his Essay on Man; Bolingbroke refers to the last chapter, not naming it, in The Spirit of Patriotism: 'Whether the piece be of three or five acts, the part may be long'. Legg reports a lithographed book at Munich containing nearly a hundred pages of selections made by Maximilian the Second, King of Bavaria. But a more famous name connected with the Meditations is that of Frederick the Great of Prussia. He made a paraphrase of its chief doctrines in Le Stoicien, and he continually refers to Marcus in his writings and correspondence.[105] He thought that the book is suited for hours of disappointment and sorrow, to fortify man's courage. Goethe knew the book, and often speaks of it in his correspondence; he was especially interested in Marcus' acknowledgement of indebtedness to his teachers in Book 1. He showed sympathy with Stoical teaching from his early days, and the frequent reminder in his poems that doing, not being, is man's duty is derived from this school, if not necessarily from Marcus.
Of more recent books Maeterlinck's Sagesse et Destinée continually refers to the Meditations, but in other writers the debt is not so easy to trace with confidence. What is more important is the effect upon the circle of everyday readers. Dr. Rendall has said: 'Translations, essays, and the records of biographies all testify how simple and learned alike fall under his spell.' I remember to have read that in 1914, when the news arrived that the Germans had broken faith and violated the frontier of Belgium, the United States Minister to the court of King Albert drove into the countryside to reflect upon the crisis, taking with him the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.[106] In view of the wide interest taken in the book and its teaching, it is surprising that there should be no modern exegetical commentary upon the Meditations since 1652, as we have no modern commentary upon Epictetus, since Upton's of 1741 and Schweighäuser's of 1799. It has been left to the historians of philosophy to reconstruct the broad lines of Stoicism, so that, although the text of these two writers has been so carefully and thoroughly explored, little direct commentary upon detailed problems is available to the student. My friend Hastings Crossley, in England, had indeed contemplated an edition of Marcus, but his delicate health only permitted the publication of one Book.[107] Besides this work much valuable and exact criticism of the Meditations may be found in Paul Fournier's edition of Couat's translation,[108] as well as in Dr. Rendall's and Mr. J. Jackson's versions of the book.
X. The Form and Contents of the Meditations
The question we are now to ask can, within the limits of an introduction, be indicated but briefly; it is a question that forces itself upon a reader, fascinating him by its insolubility.
Is the book which now lies before us the authentic original, or has what Marcus wrote survived only in an incomplete and mutilated form? So many of the writings of classical antiquity have perished entirely or have been carried down by the river of time in a fragmentary or abbreviated condition, that a similar misfortune may certainly have befallen the Emperor's work.[109]
The form of the Meditations is incomplete; sometimes, at least on first perusal, incoherent. Books, chapters even, are not clearly and certainly divided from one another, neither are they always concerned with distinct problems; their present arrangement seems artificially (or should we say artlessly) imposed. The Books, if we except the first, possibly the first three, are a broken series of meditations, like improvisations upon themes in a variety of keys, where similar, even identical, motives recur to a listener's confusion. The subjects shift also so abruptly that connexion is hard to distinguish, even in quite brief phrases. Then, again, a sequence will be interrupted by a theme which appears irrelevant, something strayed from an alien context. Finally, a thought will be repeated, for no obvious reason, in a place hardly removed from that in which it made its last appearance.
The explanation usually given, and now generally accepted, for this disorder and inconsequence is that accident has preserved a private journal, the record of the odd moments of leisure of a busy public man, a philosophical aide-mémoire intended for his own sole use and guidance. What consecutiveness there is, is the sequence of occasion, not subject, and the occasions can only, at best, be divined.
Thus Gataker[110] contrasts Arrian's Memoirs, which profess to be notes of lectures, with the discourses of Marcus: 'which were plainly taken from his own notebooks, as the Proverbs of the wise King of Israel were copied largely from his autographs by the amanuenses of King Hezekiah'.[111] 'It was', he continues, 'this great man's practice, engaged as he was, whether in peace or war, with his pursuit of philosophy, to note down on paper what occurred to him, not consistently observing any continuous series of subjects, but jotting them down, for one reason or another, according to the times and places in which they occurred to his mind or memory. Consequently, they are very often disconnected; identical reflexions are frequently repeated, as they more frequently come to mind, and most of them are expressed not merely briefly, but even incompletely . . . there is just enough to refresh and support the memory in topics so familiar. They are designed principally for his own use; thus some are grammatically imperfect, many introduced without any formal preparation.'
In this way Gataker explains the frequent obscurities, the many uncertainties as to the meaning and bearing of single sayings. The clue to the writer's immediate purpose is lost for want of sufficient knowledge of the occasion which prompted his expression. 'Thus the suspicion that some have entertained of mutilation and corruption are not justified; the text is, as a rule, pure, genuine and entire, surviving in the authentic form in which it originally flowed from the author's pen.'[112] Meric Casaubon's contention in the Preface to his English translation and the Prolegomena to his Greek edition agrees in the main with Gataker's judgement. For the difficulties of interpretation he gives two additional reasons. The disconnectedness, he suggests, is inseparable from the style which Marcus adopted, the manner of writing in aphorisms; the obscurity is due to the wealth of quotation from older authors or of allusions to their works; Marcus refers briefly to what he knew intimately from his wide reading, but we, without the originals, do not follow his meaning. Sometimes, too, Marcus seems inconsistent with himself, where he is in fact stating briefly an opinion with which he does not agree. Many difficulties Casaubon condones because 'what Antoninus wrote, he wrote it not for the publick, but for his owne private use'.
He appears, however, to regard the Meditations as more continuous and connected than Gataker's words would imply them to be. He assumes longer trains of reasoning, and shows this by his grouping of the chapters, a continuity disguised by the aphoristic form into which the thoughts are thrown.
An entirely different view of the origin and present form of the Meditations was taken from the first; and this view has since been advocated more than once. The hypothesis is twofold: it is contended that Marcus designed and did in fact compose a regular moral treatise, and, secondly, that all we now possess is, upon that assumption, an assemblage of the scattered members of a lost original.
Already Casaubon refers to 'the opinion of those who have judged that these xii Books are merely excerpts and eclogues from an ampler and more perfect work'. He does not say who these critics were; and, although he occasionally refers to Xylander as though he were one of them, 'excerpts and eclogues' sounds as if he were aiming at Barthius, who held this opinion.
Whether there were others, as Casaubon implies, or not, Barthius[113] had said: 'The Florida or Eclogues, should you use that term, which have reached us from the books of the Emperor Antoninus are heavenly.' Moreover, he continually referred to our present text as 'the Excerpts from Antoninus'.
This opinion he founds upon internal and external evidence. The form of such chapters as the first of Book i he takes to be plain proof of an excerptor's work, where 'neither head nor foot appears'. His external ground is one of which Joly later was to make use, the existence 'in Italy of written exemplars, which are designated Eclogues out of the Book to Himself'. The manuscripts Barthius had clearly not himself examined, for he rests his statement on Conrad Gesner's entry in his Bibliotheca Universalis,[114] but does not cite that entry exactly. Nor does he go closely into the serious question he has raised, being content with a loose comparison of Marcus' work with the Florida of Apuleius.
In 1742 Jean-Pierre de Joly published anonymously Réflexions de l'Empereur Marc-Aurèle Antonin, the whole rearranged by subjects in thirty-six sections. He used the translation of M. and Mme d'Acier. Later, continuing his study and reflecting upon the origin of the Meditations, he published in 1770 a new French translation, distributed into thirty-five sections, with a valuable bibliography and notes on the manuscript sources. This was followed in 1774 by his revised Greek text, with Gataker's translation, and a similar rearrangement by subjects.
His theory is that Marcus had, during his campaigns, composed a moral treatise upon a series of tablets; after his death, these were distributed to relatives and friends, and treasured by them as relics of their admired sovereign. In this way the entirety of the work was dismembered from the first. Later on, some editor made the best collection he could of these Sibylline leaves, and so they were copied out, as they now appear in the Vatican MS., continuously and in disorder, with no indication of Books or subjects. Joly believed that the survival of the X excerpts, in a somewhat different order (they begin with chapters from Book vii, in an inverse sequence), was confirmatory of his view. He regarded the arrangement by Books in the manuscript from which the first edition was printed with suspicion.
Joly produced a more or less orderly composition under titles; he did in fact, though he does not suggest the analogy, what a succession of editors have attempted to do for Pascal's Pensées, he reassembled the Meditations into a kind of Apology for Stoicism.
Few critics have accepted Joly's hypothesis, although similar attempts have since been made from time to time, with the inevitable divergent results. As to his theory of the cause of the dispersion of the parts, there is no evidence of a Greek book, at this date certainly, being preserved thus upon a series of wax tablets, consisting of pieces of such divergent lengths, and presumably docketed by subjects. One would suppose that the notes would have been transferred by Marcus' secretary to a roll or codex at some early stage of his work.
But there are two difficulties which appear insuperable when the results achieved by this method are considered. The new or revived Meditations are not in fact a continuous treatise, neither is the confusion and repetition of the actual book removed. The new order appears less explicable, fairly judged, than the old. The second difficulty is that, in this new construction, the passages now juxtaposed do not agree in composition with that of their neighbours: passages which in the present text are closely connected, either in subject or in verbal expression, or in both, have become widely sundered. To take two crucial instances, the sections of the present Book i, with their evident order and purpose, are now parcelled out in a different order and under more than one heading. Again the last chapter of Book xii, which has every indication of a designed close, is removed elsewhere, connected indeed with cognate reflections, but robbed of its natural intention and effect.[115]
The latest attempt in this manner is M. Gustav Loisel's A moi-même,[116] an arrangement this time in twelve Books. The Meditations so presented are interesting to read, and the editor throws light on the mind of Marcus by his work; but it is difficult to accept his results or his further contention that Marcus has left the clue to the order of his work. In his candid preface M. Loisel has recorded M. Haussoulier's critique of his work and it is, I think, conclusive. May we not say that he has done for Marcus, what was done by Budde[117] with no idea of reproducing a lost original? He has enabled us to view together under subject-headings,[118] a variety of attempts made by Marcus to meet his most pressing difficulties, to comment upon his reading of history, to summarize his own experiences, and to provide wholesome precepts for 'the Conduct of his own life', to use Suidas' title for the work.
That there is evidence of some such continuity in the Meditations appears to have been the contention of Braune in an essay which I have not been able to procure.[119] Stich refers to this attempt as equally futile with Joly's undertaking. Readers of Marius the Epicurean will recall a reconstruction of part of Marcus' thought in that romance. Pater introduces it under the guise of a lecture traditionally delivered by Marcus in Rome before he set out for his campaign on the Danube.[120] This occasion may well have been invented by the biographer who wrote the feeble and mendacious life of Avidius Cassius in the time of Julian (a.d. 360).
My own opinion is that the order is disturbed, but I have not tried to reconstruct an original of whose existence we have no evidence; I have rather endeavoured to indicate traces of continuity both of subject-matter and verbal expression in the individual parts as they have been preserved to us.
Although any attempt to reconstruct an original is doomed to failure, it is certainly conceivable that in the Meditations we possess the elements of a book which the author had projected, and which death prevented him from completing. It is possible also that not all the passages which have been preserved would have found a place in the completed book. We may possess portions of composition written at different times with different purposes in view. Apart from the continuity of reflection which I seem to detect in considerable passages, and which would be clearer if we might make some small changes of order in the present text, the general character of the whole is not, fairly viewed, what Gataker has suggested. Many of the chapters are indeed brief memoranda, some are hardly grammatical as they stand, but the greater number are carefully composed and can hardly be designed to recall aspects of a creed already entirely familiar to their author. Again, many maxims have primarily a personal reference, may be private counsels and encouragements, but still more of them impress the reader as addressed, even if unconsciously, to a listener other than Marcus. There is again a whole class of reflections, like Book xi, ch. 18, which might well belong to a hortatory or expository discourse. The brief aphorisms, too, are many of them thrown into a proverbial, sometimes an antithetic form, modelled perhaps on sentences like the traditional words of the Seven Sages or the sayings of Heraclitus and Democritus; their very phrases are chosen with such care and precision as a man hardly uses when recording his thoughts in his own behoof. To take three instances: 'What does not advantage the hive, does not advantage the bee' (vi. 54); 'How many whose praises have been loudly sung are now committed to oblivion; how many who sang their praises are long ago departed' (vii. 6); 'Whosoever does wrong, wrongs himself: whosoever does injustice, does it to himself, making himself evil' (ix. 4).
Then again there are longer passages, scattered through the work, which are essays in little, fastidiously composed to the best of the writer's ability. Here are a few, chosen almost at hazard: on retreat or recueillement, iv. 3; lessons from the industry of animals and from the artisan's devotion to his work, v. 1; reflections upon the transitoriness of all things created, iv. 33; upon divine dispensation, v. 8; upon Nature's gradual evolution, ix. 9; on human fellowship, xi. 8. These and others, such as reflections upon lives lived fruitlessly or governed by a ruling passion (iv. 32, 48; vi. 47; xii. 27) are hardly to be viewed as personal reminders; rather they are admonitory and consolatory thoughts, statements of religious belief, criticisms upon the vanity of human wishes, all such as might be elements of a book of wholesome doctrine.
To the two distinct kinds of material corresponds broadly a contrast of style. There are, on the one hand, the unstudied notes, the aides-mémoire or brief hints, which Marcus himself compares to a surgeon's 'first-aid' equipment, aphorisms resembling the well-known Prescriptions of Hippocrates. These are often bald and simple in shape. Much the larger part, on the other hand, is laboured with care, worked up into something approaching artistic finish. The style is always notably parsimonious, free from rhetorical artifice and, except for an occasional alliteration, brief, succinct, and severe. An extreme case will illustrate my meaning. The chapter upon the Age of the Emperor Augustus (viii. 31) is the quintessence of this studied manner; the effect upon a reader who recalls the long reign, involuntarily contrasting its outward success as recorded on the Monument of Ancyra with its domestic failure, the chagrin and sorrow of the solitary ruler, is overwhelming. Very powerful too is the brief corollary; the thought of Rome's street of tombs, and the melancholy epigram: 'The last of his line'.
Samuel Johnson once said:[121] 'I fancy mankind may come in time to write all aphoristically, except in narrative, grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.' Is not much of the Meditations an attempt to create a novel form of literature and to find the proper vehicle for its expression? Marcus at times seems to aim at conveying into his Greek sentences something of the lapidary force of the Latin tongue.
Another mode of composition consists in the rare sentences written in a satiric vein; 'All that comes to pass is as familiar and well-known as the rose in spring and the grape in summer. Of like fashion are sickness, death, calumny, intrigue, and all that gladdens or saddens fools' (iv. 44: cf. v. 33, vi. 13, and the masterly vignette x. 36, and the dialogues, v. 1, 28 and 36). This occasional indulgence of satiric power, so quickly dropped or silenced, gives diversity to the prevailing monochrome; it resembles an artifice of Pascal, whose ironical pictures of men's ambition and distraction are a foil to his religious earnestness.
A study of the Meditations then, as a whole, suggests a various character of invention, which may be due to a variety of motives in the composition of its parts; that the larger bulk has a decided literary aim appears to me indisputable.
XI. The Actual State of the Work as it has been preserved
Returning to the Meditations as we now possess them, what indication of unities or incipient unities of composition do we actually discern? Book i stands by itself, with its clearly defined plan and distinct physiognomy. Only one other passage in the remainder is written in the same style, the duplicate portrait of Antoninus Pius in vi. 30. 2. Book ii, if we omit ch. 10, leaves a strong impression of unity. Book iii again approaches a unity, with a marked close. Further these two Books have, in their headings, definite marks of their place of composition.
The structure of the remainder is less clearly determined and the distribution into Books, if we had to make it for ourselves, might certainly be altered. Some signs, however, there are of openings and closes. Thus Book v has a marked beginning and end. The first chapters of Books ix, x, and xi might fairly be taken to be commencements of new reflections; Book viii, however, runs on continuously with the last chapter of Book vii. Of the composite character of Books vii and xi I shall speak when examining the evidence to be derived from the state of the manuscripts. As to the last two Books, with only the contents to guide us we should be led to make a break after xi. 18, and to begin a new Book at xi. 19, which would run to the end of Book xii.
Not necessarily demanding from the author the precision and method of a regular treatise, but assuming a general order in the parts of his book, we are struck by some anomalies. There are passages of considerable length which appear alien in their present context. The most conspicuous is the extract from the Moralia of Theophrastus, or the paraphrase of his words, at ii. 10, in a Book which has otherwise a distinct and orderly development. Where it now stands, this chapter has a very remote connexion, if any, with what precedes and follows it. Similar passages, or fragments, are the aesthetic essay in iii. 2, possibly the inquiry about Retreat or Retirement at iv. 3; the inquiry into the source of Socrates' moral grandeur, on the basis of Aeschines' dialogue Telauges, vii. 66; the striking discussion of Tragedy and Comedy, xi. 6. To these we may perhaps add the shorter character of Antoninus Pius, vi. 30. 2.
All these appear to the reader unexpected in their present places; they are, moreover, somewhat different in complexion and in literary technique from the Meditations generally.
M. Trannoy[122] has discussed some of these digressions. He regards them as strata of earlier composition: 'old notes, grouped in some measure by subjects and utilized later in our work to piece out its somewhat meagre bulk'. But utilized by whom? M. Trannoy evidently considers this patchwork to be due to Marcus himself, not to some hypothetical editor of his remains.
The disorder in the passages just considered might certainly be explicable in this way, or by Gataker's theory of a mere commonplace book, never rearranged, perhaps not intended to be rearranged. But there is a further difficulty in the present text, which is most simply explained by supposing that the original order has been disturbed. Two paragraphs which appear to be continuous are often sundered by a short and, in the context, quite irrelevant sentence. To give one or two instances. The sequence of iv. 27 and 29 is broken by iv. 28, so much so that Gataker proposed to move iv. 28 to follow and interpret iv. 18. Again, vii. 23 and 25 belong together, while vii. 22 and 24 would make a satisfactory sequence. In Book ix, 13 and 15 are congruous but severed by 14; so 18 and 20, 19 and 21 appear to be closely allied.
The natural explanation is that displacement of the author's order has occurred, not that Marcus introduced an irrelevance. That such accidents occurred, even in carefully guarded texts like Aristotle's, is well known. Simplicius[123] suggests that this has befallen chapters 16, 17, and 18 of Epictetus' Manual, the original order having been 16, 18, 17, and he was writing within a few centuries of its publication. We are not precluded from such an hypothesis in the case of a text whose history extends over thirteen centuries.
The evidence of the manuscripts, P cod and A, confirms on the whole the impression gained from the study made in the last section. P cod was divided, Xylander tells us, directly or by implication, into twelve Books, with the general title: 'The writings of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus to Himself.' There was one difference in the book division; i closed at ii. 3 and, ii began at the present ii. 4. At the close of i. 17, the words: 'Written among the Quadi, on the Gran' appear in the text, followed by a (viz. a', that is, Book i). This appears to be the title of the present ii, which was originally labelled i. We may surmise that the present first Book once stood apart from the Meditations proper, being prefixed as an Introduction or, as some think, intended for an Epilogue. Books ii–xii may thus have originally been separate volumes, a distinct book, with a different purpose.
That the present vii may have once been two Books (in which way the number twelve would be completed) is suggested by a note which has got into the text of the first edition, though missing in A. Book vii, as was remarked above, is at present disordered. After vii. 31 (the end of which is mutilated) follow three chapters labelled: 'On Death', 'On Pain', 'On Glory' (such labels are nowhere else employed by Marcus); then comes a series of extracts from Plato, Euripides, and others, with one or two aphorisms which may be original, vii. 35–51. To this succeed chs. 52–75 in the author's familiar manner of writing.
At ch. 52 init. a marginal note, as Xylander remarks, had crept into the text of P cod. It runs: 'This is not a beginning but is continuous with the chapters above, which preceded the Plato citations (viz. preceded ch. 35).'[124] This would appear to indicate that the original Book ran vii. 1–34 (or 1–31 more probably), 52–75. The evidence of A is perhaps confirmatory. The scribe has left a space of half a line at the end of ch. 51. He begins ch. 52 with a capital, in red, and he found his original obscure.
A more conspicuous case of intrusion will be found at the close of xi. Chapters 22–39 are a mere collection of poetic extracts, anecdotes, and maxims, the latter being summaries of known passages of Epictetus or remarks now generally assigned to him. Nearly all trivial in interest and markedly inferior to the extracts in vii, they have no bearing on what precedes and follows them in the Meditations.
Nor is this all. These fragments break the continuity of xi. 20–1 with xii. 1. Not merely the subject-matter but also the form of language in xii. 1 is closely related to the part of xi which precedes the fragments. Here the scribe of A comes to our assistance. At the end of the extracts he has drawn an asterisk, after which is the entry: 'Of the Emperor Antoninus'. This is the exact form of words which is the heading of the set of excerpts called C. It is reasonable then to suppose that the material of xii was derived from a set of detached folios and that the extracts of which we are speaking are derived from another source and either did not belong to the body of the Meditations, or at best belonged to a different part of that book. The state of things is at least some evidence of dismemberment or partial dismemberment of the Meditations.
The general condition of A, if regarded apart from P, might in itself suggest, as Joly said, that it contains a series of chapters which have survived from a larger and more complete whole. There is no numeration of Books, no title. The chapters are indicated by rubricated letters, but these capital letters are often introduced so as to interrupt the natural sequence of thought. The Books, where they are distinguished, are merely distinguished by an interval of a line or two. If we had only the evidence of A, we should get the following provisional grouping: i, ii. 1–3, ii. 4 to end, iii–iv, v–vi, vii–viii, ix, x–xi, xii, that is to say, nine Books, or a prefatory Book followed by eight Books. We might, therefore surmise that if there were originally twelve Books, as Suidas says there were, three have been lost, and that the original from which both A and P are derived was renumbered by the scribe of P cod to give an appearance of a complete twelve Books.
There is one other disturbing feature in the text as it has reached us. There are some chapters, especially in Book xii, which not only resemble mere notes but are introduced by ὄτι, a well-known sign of an extract in collections of eclogues.[125] This is a characteristic of the manuscripts of excerpts from Marcus which are denominated C,[126] and the same is true of many of the excerpts of the Meditations in Suidas. This seems evidence that, before the date of the archetype of our manuscripts, there existed a set of eclogues from the Meditations which Suidas sometimes drew from. From this the C excerpts which do not precisely follow our present order may have been derived.
The X excerpts have two remarkable features. They appear to come from a Florilegium (which most critics ascribe to Planudes, 13th–14th century) in which extracts from Marcus are mixed with extracts from Appian's book on the Nature of Animals, for no reason that can be discovered. Their other characteristic is that they do not follow the present order of the text. They begin with passages from Book vii arranged in inverse order.[127] This, so far as it goes, points to Book vii, which we have seen to be of a composite arrangement, having once had a different order of chapters and possibly a different position in some earlier manuscript. The state of the excerpts generally does seem to suggest that our present manuscripts (as their internal evidence at two points indicates) were at some time assembled from sheets which had fallen into disorder.
Two other lines of inquiry occur to one as possible. First, in chapters which so often refer to experiences in the author's life, we might expect to find definite historical allusions which should fix the order in which individual passages were composed, and in this way determine the periods in which the Books were written. Secondly, the same problem might be resolved by the manner of writing used by the author, that is either by stylistic evidence, or by the way in which he treats his subjects of contemplation. Both these lines of investigation have been pursued, but neither with any definite result.[128]
Mr. Haines's summary of the two inquiries arrives at the conclusion that the Meditations were 'composed as a connected whole, Books ii–xii being written consecutively in that order and Book i added afterwards as an introduction.' The dates which he tentatively suggests are:
Book ii written in the land of the Quadi, a.d. 171–2.
Book iii at Carnuntum, a.d. 172–3.
Books iv–viii at the front, a.d. 173–5.
Books ix–x during the revolt of Cassius, a.d. 175–6.
Books xi–xii at Rome before Marcus went North, a.d. 178.
Book i written in or shortly after a.d. 178.
I have discussed some of these questions in the introduction to the several Books; here it is enough to say that the results attained are extremely doubtful, and are reached only by minimizing the negative instances. In fact the only certain points are that the whole work was clearly written towards the end of the life of Marcus, certainly after his accession to the throne, and, as to details, that the death of Domitia Lucilla (circa a.d. 156) is mentioned in i. 17. 7, and implied in viii. 25 and ix. 21; that Marcus alludes to Lucius Aurelius Verus' death (a.d. 169) as some time past in viii. 37; that Marcus probably refers to his title Sarmaticus (a.d. 175) in x. 10; that he certainly appears to refer in ix. 3 to the approaching birth of a child, and that his youngest child was born in a.d. 166–7. As to the composition of Book i the reasoning is hazardous in the extreme. There is the reference to Alexander the Platonist (i. 12), who is thought to have become Greek secretary about a.d. 174, but who is in this chapter classed as a teacher, with the other teachers of an earlier date; and there is the mention of Faustina in i. 17. 8, which would naturally be taken to imply that she was alive when it was written. The only ground advanced for a late date is that the sketch of Pius in vi. 30. 2 is shorter than that in i. 16, and so more likely to be written later than a.d. 174, about which time Book vi is dated.
As Mr. Haines says, as much may be said against as for Breithaupt's reasoning from the manner of composition, viz. that, assuming the present order of the Books, subjects of composition are treated more briefly when they recur. To me iv. 3. 2–3 would appear, by itself, fatal to Breithaupt's argument, for there seven favourite positions of the writer are enunciated for the first time, in the curtest fashion, and they are all treated later at various places and at considerable length. Such a passage shows that the statements of doctrine rest upon lessons accepted by the writer before he began to compose, as we should expect from their nature would be the case. When these points arise, as they do from time to time, the development of them is longer or shorter according to the mood and interest of the moment.
XII. Comparison of the Meditations with other Books of Spiritual Consolation
The conclusion that a study of the Meditations from its various sides has led me tentatively to adopt is that the book enshrines a variety of reflections gradually accumulated over a period of some ten to fifteen years, and governed by the idea of producing a work of consolation and encouragement; it is the deposit of those quiet hours when, as Marcus says, he left his stepmother, the Palace, to set up his rest with his own mother, Philosophy (vi. 12). His retirement from public affairs was not spent in the contemplation of a mystic, rather he began at first to record for his own use those short elementary maxims of his faith and practice (iv. 3). Later he was led to expand, with a larger view, what he began for his own service. He desired to point his fellows to the City of God, which is the reality in what seems a world of coming into being and quickly passing away. That he was in fact occupied with some literary and philosophic attempt seems indicated by that one passage in which he has definitely referred to this side of his life: 'You are now', he says, 'not likely to read your Memoranda, your Deeds of Greece and Rome, the Extracts you made and laid up against old age' (iii. 14). To this variety of past and present activity he may again allude where he says: 'Put away your volumes' and 'Cast out your appetite for books' (ii. 2 and 3). Memoranda is the diminutive form of the word he himself employs for Epictetus' Memoirs,[129] which Arrian himself uses to describe that work, and which is used by Galen and others for works of considerable compass. 'Memoranda and Extracts' covers the substance of the Meditations as they have come down to us.
After the death of the Emperor in March a.d. 180, an editor, perhaps Marcus' Greek secretary Alexander,[130] may have made a selection from the literary remains. The partial disorder would be explicable in one of three ways: the editor may have followed, without readjustment, the incomplete and unarranged rolls to which he had access; again, he may have put them together into an order which satisfied himself but is not satisfactory to us; or again, the publication may have originally been more regular, and since have suffered dislocation and occasional truncation in the course of transmission.
Perhaps the likeliest hypothesis, as it is the simplest, is that the editor recorded religiously what he had to his hand, misunderstanding sometimes notes which marked passages not destined for their present context, sometimes embodying at the wrong place marginal additions. Sentences are undoubtedly left standing now which appear to belong to a different order of thought and purpose from their neighbours, perhaps even from the main collection.
This explanation certainly assumes what cannot be proved. Indeed it is contrary to the opinion of Gataker and other critics, probably also to the sense of an ordinary reader, for it implies that Marcus was occupied with a work which he intended some day to publish. In favour of this explanation are the traces in what we possess of a unity, especially the completed first Book, the nearly finished Books ii and iii, the other incipient unities, and the conclusion of Book xii. The difficulty which will be felt is that the tenour of so much of the writing is as of a soliloquy, not intended to be overheard. This may be met in part by supposing that the original purpose was to fortify the writer's own heart and mind, and that this only gradually expanded itself to a wider ambit, an address to his fellow men. Marcus has hit upon a form of self-expression not previously used in Greek letters, and has written a manual of admonitions useful for the philosophic life, Spiritual Consolations, in fact a Religio Imperatoris. He is gradually feeling his way to the right expressional use of his new instrument, and has often failed to reach the final and sufficient shape.
A clue to the origin of the Meditations is furnished by another work of similar form and content, whose genesis we are acquainted with. I do not mean St. Augustine's Confessions or the famous book of Jean Jacques Rousseau, with which the Meditations is sometimes compared, but a considerable book, which appears to have grown up, in a similar way to this one, in the busy loneliness of the Chartreuse. The thoughts of Guigue, 5th Prior (born a.d. 1083, elected a.d. 1110), have at last been printed in their original order and completeness.[131] They reveal a series of religious musings: 'not a treatise nor the scraps of a treatise, not an autobiography, but the sequence of the Prior's reflexions, written scrupulously but with no affectation, in order to see clearly into himself, and to seek humbly in the strength of his God a sure refuge for his own frailty'.[132] From the context it is clear that Dom Wilmart, as he penned this sentence, was conscious of the striking resemblance in manner and motive of Guigue to the Roman Emperor. In what follows he again writes in terms closely applicable to the Book we are considering: 'Guigue, when he likes, knows well how to pursue a train of argument . . . yet his habitual taste is for sentences more or less brief, where he endeavours to present an original thought, to enunciate a true maxim, suggest an antithesis, outline a miniature.' A further resemblance between the Prior of the Chartreuse and Marcus consists in their occasional references to experiences of their own life, with here and there the mention of a contemporary by name, for instance the Prior's namesake, the Baron Guigo.
The Meditations might then be taken as an exactly similar book,[133] with a parallel genesis, and, with the necessary allowances, much the same outlook upon experience. A closer analogue is another book better known to most English readers. This is Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. The learned Norwich physician tells us of his famous essay: 'This I confess . . . for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisurable hours composed.' Criticism he disarms by the excuse: 'being a private Exercise directed to my self, what is delivered therein, was rather a Memorial unto me, than an Example or Rule unto any other.'[134]
'Directed to myself', 'a Memorial unto me';—the terms might be thought a reminiscence, they are certainly a happy rendering, of Marcus' Τὰ εἰς Ἑαυτόν, 'his meditations concerning Himself'. Like Marcus too the 'whimsical Knight' had his commonplace books, the armoury upon which he drew for this work and his Christian Morals.
Still more to the point is an even more famous writing, Blaise Pascal's Pensées. Left incomplete and in fragments at his death, it at length came out, with considerable expense to order and textual integrity, in the Port Royal edition, put together in a manner believed to agree with the dead man's purpose. However it be arranged, and arrangements have been many, the sense of the several paragraphs, the liaison of argument, the precise point of those occasional barbed shafts of incomparable irony, can, at least by the ordinary reader, be now surmised and no more. Pascal's general aim is easy to detect, if we have sympathy with him and even dimly share his faith, but the whole is there in promise only, not in performance. I have often entertained the thought that the Meditations grew up like the Pensées, that Marcus had in mind a Defence of Philosophic Belief which he had neither leisure nor ability to complete.
Pascal's Pensées are incomplete and isolated fragments, some written by himself, some dictated, the whole edited and published by other hands. Did the same fate overtake the Emperor's tablets and rolls, corrected perhaps already at some places by himself? We shall never know. All things considered, it appears reasonable to conjecture that an effort was made to collect faithfully what was thought to be best worth preserving, to respect the autographs or originals, to leave alone the repetitions, interruptions, digressions, even the inconsequences; to rearrange but little. If so, what we have may be no more than a selection, collected and arranged by an editor very much in its present shape.[135] The unity which runs through the whole arises from the rare sincerity and earnestness of the writer; what is logically inconsequent leaves behind a sense of continuity; as we read, many anomalies become intelligible, many hard places plain, though some will still be dark, even insoluble. But even so, with the injuries, dealt by the hand of time and by the misunderstandings of copyists, the unfinished pages are not incomplete. The merit and charm of Marcus is that, wherever you take him up and whenever you lay him down, you have had communion with a wise and chastened temper, faithful to its prescribed limits, always consistent in itself. 'It is not like acting and dancing, where the whole, if you interrupt it, is ruined. In every act and wherever surprised, the soul has made what it purposed entire, and nowhere deficient; so that it can say: I possess what is my own' (xi. 1. 1). The radiance of a lofty and humble spirit illuminates these sentences, as the sun lights up and blends the coloured fragments of an ancient window.
A. CONTRIBUTORS TO THE HISTORY AND CRITICISM OF THE TEXT
Editions of the text described in the preceding pages are indicated by ed.; translations by tr. The brackets indicate abbreviations in the app. crit.
B. MODE OF REFERENCE TO ORIGINAL AUTHORITIES
Abbreviations are usually those adopted in Liddell & Scott's Lexicon, a new edition. In regard to the following authors the method used is:
ERRATA
VOLUME I
p. 22, app. crit. For 1–26 D read 1–25 D
p. 52, app. crit. For 6–29 D read 1–26 D
p. 60, app. crit. For 1–13 D read 1–11 D
p. 65, 1. 24. For proportion, only so you will not be dejected if read proportion; only so will you not be dejected, if
p. 79, 1. 16. For too. read too.'
p. 132, 1. 19. Delete 42
p. 132, 1. 20. Insert 42
p. 132, 1. 15, Test. For 1. 90, read 1. 93,
p. 136, 1. 13, Test. For χρῄζουσι read χρῄζουσιν
p. 238, 1. 6. For ἰλέως read ἴλεως
p. 405, 1. 3. For shell read cell
SIGLA
P = editio princeps (Xylandri ed. prior) ex codice hodie deperdito Tiguri a.d. mdlix0 impressa.
P cod. = eiusdem codicis verba in notis Xyl. servata.
A = cod. Vaticanus Gr. 1950, saec. xv.
D = cod. Darmstadtinus 2773 (cod. Creuzeri), saec. xiv vel xv, excerpta continens.
C = codd. excerpta c libris i–iv continentes.
Mo 1 = cod. Monacensis Gr. 323, saec. xvi, excerpta continens.
Mo 2 = cod. Monacensis Gr. 529, olim Augustanus, saec. xiv, excerpta classis X continens (cod. Hoeschelianus apud Cas.: B apud Schenkl).
X = codd. excerpta e libris iv. 49–xii. 34 continentes.
Consensus codicum nullo signo addito exhibetur.
Bas. = Xyl. editio altera, Basileae a.d. mdlxviii0 impressa.
Xyl. versio Latina uncinis rotundis inclusa citatur.
Testimonia ex Suida vel aliunde petita: loci auctorum parallel, ad calcem textus exhibentur.
Foliorum cod. A series (341 r–392 v) in textu nota |, inter testimonia verbo primo indicatur.
Index compendiorum p. lxxx datur.
Footnotes edit
- ↑ 'Marco Antonino, in omni vita philosophanti viro et qui sanctitate vitae omnibus principibus antecellit' Hist. Aug. iv. i. i. In Justinian's Novels he has ceased to be Divus Marcus and is referred to like this: εὖ μὲν ἀρξάμενος ὁ φιλοσοφώτατος ἐθέσπισε Μάρκος Corpus J. C., Novel xxii. 19; καὶ ὁ φιλόσοφος ἐν βασιλεῡσι Μάρκος ibid, cviii, proem, § 2. Cf. Photius, cited p. xii, note 4.
- ↑ Μάρκος, ὁ καὶ Ὰντωνῖνος, βασιλεὺς Ῥωμαίων, ὁ ἐπαιφετὸς κατὰ πάντα φιλόσοφος, s.v. Μάρκος
- ↑ Αὐτοκράτορι Τίτῳ Αἰλίῳ Ἁδριανῷ Ἀντωνίνῳ Εὐσεβεῖ Σεβαστῷ Καίσαρι καὶ Οὐηρισσίμῳ υἱῷ Φιλοσόφῳ καὶ Λουκίῳ Φιλοσόφῳ . . . ἐραστῇ παιδείας Ap. I, ch. 1. 1.
- ↑ Αὐτοκράτορσι Μάρκῳ Αὐρηλίῳ Ὰντωνίνῳ καὶ Λουκίῳ Αὐρηλίῳ Κομμόδῳ, Άρμενιακοῖς, Σαρματικοῖς, τὀ δὲ μέγιστον Φιλοσόφοις Legatio, 1. 1.
- ↑ M. Ant. i. 7. 1; i. 17. 4 and 9.
- ↑ ii. 2; cf. ii. 3.
- ↑ τὰ ὑπομνημάτιά σου, τὰς τῶν ἀρχαίων Ῥωμαίων καὶ Ὲλλήνων πράξεις καὶ τὰς ἐκ τῶν συγγραμμάτων ἐκλογάς iii. 14.
- ↑ M. Cornelii Frontonis Opera Inedita, Angelus Maius, Milan, 1815; 2nd edit, (plus centum epistolis aucta), Rome, 1823. Edited and translated in the Loeb Classical Library by C. R. Haines, 1919. My references are to the pages of M. Cornelii Frontonis et M. Aurelii Imp. Epistulae, S. A. Naber, Leipsic, 1867.
- ↑ 'Tu prior lege: et si quis inerit barbarismus, tu, qui a graecis litteris recentior es, corrige atque ita matri redde: nolo enim me mater tua ut opicum contemnat' Naber, p. 24, cf. p. 239.
- ↑ Hexameters, id. pp. 24 and 34.
- ↑ Mihi vero nunc potissimum Graece scribendum est. Quam ob rem, rogas? Volo periculum facere an id quod non didici facilius obsecundct mihi, quoniam quidem illud, quod didici, deserit' id. p. 252.
- ↑ op. cit. p. 143 sq.; 'eloquentiae studium reliquisse, ad philosophiam devertisse' p. 150, cf. p. 75.
- ↑ πρὸς γὰρ τῷ κεκριμένῳ τοῡ λόγου καὶ ἑδραῖον τοῡ ἤθους ἐντετύπωτο τοῖς γράμμασιν Philostr. Dial. vol. ii. p. 258 Kayser (Leipsic). Cf. Philostr. Vit. Soph. 2. 12, p. 243 for what purports to be a private letter of Marcus. There is a fictitious letter in Migne, Patr. Gr. cxv, p. 1233.
- ↑ ἔχεις δ', ἴνα μηδὲ μακρὸν ᾖ σοι τὸ τῆς yυμνασίας στάδιον, τὰς εἰς Φάλαριν ἐκεῖνον, οἶμαι . . . ἀναφερόμενας ἐπιστολάς, καὶ αἶς Βροῡτος ὁ Ῥωμαίων στρατηγὁς ἐπιγράφεται καὶ τὸν ἐν βασιλεῡσι φιλόσοφον Photius Patr. Constantin., Ep. 233 (cii, p. 861 Migne)
- ↑ M. Ant. i. 12.
- ↑ Conrad Gesner says: παρὰ τοσούτου ξυγγραφέως ἐξεδόθη, εἰ καὶ μὴ εἰς ἔκδοσιν ἴσως ὖπ᾽ αὐτοῡ γραφέν Edit. princeps, Dedicatio, p. 11.
- ↑ τῆς μετὰ Μάρκον βασιλείς ἱστορίαι in eight Books, covering the period a.d. 180–238.
- ↑ λόγων τε ἀρχαιότητος ἦν ἐραστής . . . δηλοῖ δὲ ὄσα καὶ εἰς ἡμᾶς ἦλθεν ἢ λεχθέντα πρὸς αὐτοῡ ἢ γραφέντα Herod, i. 2. 3.
- ↑ πῶς δ᾽ οὐκ ἀπόλωλε μὲν πίστις, ἀπόλωλε δὲ ἐλπὶς ἀγαθή; Dio. Cass. Epit. lxxi. 24. 2
- ↑ Πίστις δὲ καὶ Αἰδὼς καὶ Δίκη καὶ Άλήθεια,
'πρὸς Ὄλυμπον ἀπὸ χθονὸς εὐρυαδείης' (Hes. Op. 197) M. Ant. v. 33. - ↑ ὦς ἔγωγε τοῡτ' ἂν μόνον ἐκ τῶν παρόντων κακῶν κερδάναιμι, εἰ δυνηθείην καλῶς θέσθαι τὸ πρᾶγμα καὶ δεῖξαι πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις, ὄτι καὶ ἐμφυλίοις πολέμοις ἔστιν ὀρθῶς χρήσασθαι Dio. Cass. l.c. 26. 4; cf. ἀρκεῖ οὖν καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτης τὸ παρὸν εὖ θέσθαι M. Ant. vi. 2.
- ↑ καί μοι πάλαι μὲν οἰομένῳ πρός τε τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον καὶ τὸν Μάρκον . . . εἶφαι τὴς ἄμιλλαν Epist. ad Them. p. 253 a.
- ↑ καθαρώτατον καὶ εἰλικρινέστατον θῶς p. 317 d.; cf. M. Ant. x. i, xi. 12.
- ↑ The nearest phrases are ἄκομψον καὶ ἀκαλλώπιστον, applied to Marcus, p. 317c, cf. ἄκομψος vi. 30. 1; of Pius, καλλωπισμός i. 16. 5; καινοτομήσαντι p. 334 cf. καινοτόμον i. 16. 3; ἀπρὶξ εἴχετο p. 335 d. cf. iv. 32. 2, where both are perhaps imitating Pl. Tht. 155 e. Christ, however, says that the Meditations were familiar to Julian, referring to Geffcken, Julianus, 1914 (Geschichte griech. Litt., p. 831, ed. 6).
- ↑ οὐδέν σοι προσδεῖ τῶν Μάρκου παραγγελμάτων οὐδ' εἴ τι χρηστὸν ό δεῖνα τῶν αὐτοκρατόρων ῤῆμα προήκατο Them. Philadelphi Or. 6, p. 81 c.
- ↑ 'Iturus ad bellum Marcomannicum, timentibus cunctis ne quid fatale proveniret, rogatus sit non adulatione sed serio ut praecepta philosophiae ederet. nec ille timuit sed per ordinem paraineseos (hoc est praeceptionum) per triduum disputavit.' Hist. Aug. vi. 3. 6–7, cf. Aurel. Victor, De Caes. 16. 9. The date of this extravagant life of Avidius Cassius is generally put in Julian's reign—see Baynes, Hist. Augusta, p. 84.
- ↑ Μάρκου τοῡ αὐτοκράτορος τὸ μεγαλωφελέστατον βιβλίον παλαιὸν μὲν καὶ πρὸ τοῡ ἔχων, οὐ μὴν ὄτι καὶ παντάπασι διερρυηκὸς καὶ τοῡ χρησίμου ἑαυτοῡ τοῖς πουλομένοις βασκήναντος, ὄμως ἐπεὶ τὸ νῡν ἐξεγένετό μοι ἐκεῖθεν ἀντιγράψαι καὶ νεαρὸν αὖθις τοῖς μεθ' ἡμᾶς παραπέμψαι, διττὸν δὲ τοῡτο κεκτῆσθαι ἑτέρου μηδὲ καθ' ἐν ἔχοντος χρῆσθαι, φθανερᾶς ἐργον καλῶς ὑπολαμβάνων ψυχῆς . . . ἐπιδείκνυσθαι τὸ γλίσχρον . . . τῆς προτέρας ἐμοὶ κτήσεως κληρονόμον δίκαιον ᾠήθην τὴν μανίερον ὑμῶν καταστῆσαι ἀγιωσύνην Cod. Mosc. 315 f. 115 r., ed. Sonny, Philol. liv, p. 182. For a full account of Arethas and his MSS., see Kougeas, Arethas of Caesarea, Athens, 1913.
- ↑ Kougeas gives references to eight such codices, l.c., p. 99. One or more are to be seen reproduced in most Greek palaeographical books, e.g. Maunde Thompson, An Introduction etc. Nos. 53 and 54.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Test, to ii. 3, σύμφωνον τοῦτο τῷ τοῦ αὐτοκράτορος Μάρκου· πάντα ἄνωθεν ῥεῖ σοφῶς εἰρηκότος Sonny, Analecta ad Dio. Chrys. p. 116. The note in Epict. schol. is οἶμαι διὰ τὰ ἄνωθεφ ῤεύσαντα.
- ↑ τοῦτο θεωρείσθω καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν μοναχῶν τῶν δοκούντων εἶναί τι· jαὶ ἐὰν ἔχωσι τοὺς χαρακτῆρας τῶν προβεβασιλευκότων ἐν τούτῳ τῶ τάγματι, Ἀντωνἰου φημὶ καὶ τῶν κατ᾽ αὐτόν, ἔστωσαν ἡμῖν πατέρες· εἰ δὲ νέας χαραγὰς φέρωσιν, τῷ χρυσεψητἢ παραπεμφθήτωσαν· κἀκεῖνος αὐτοὺς δοκιμάσει l.c. lxxxiii (corrected ed. min., 1916, schol. ad iv. 5. 17). If τῷ χρυσεψητἢ refers to Marcus, we have the first use in his connexion of a title which suggests the famous 'Golden Book'.
- ↑ See Stich's first edition of M. Ant. Praef. p. x, Leopold M. Ant. Praef. p. vi, Schenkl M. Ant. Praef. p. xv, p. xix. The evidence for the connexion with the Anthology is inconclusive.
- ↑ ὁ Μάρκος Ἀντωνῖνος οὖτος καὶ βιβλίον [παιδείας] τῷ παιδὶ Μάρκῳ συντάττει πάσης κοσμικῆς ἐμπειρίας καὶ παιδείας μεστόν Niceph. Hist. Eccl. 3. 31 (Migne, Patr. Gr. cxlv, p. 960.)
- ↑ Libro aureo de Marco Aurelio, &c. Seville, 1528 (19 subsequent editions in the XVIth cent.); Libro del Emperador Marco Aurelio co relox de principes, Valladolid, 1529 (9 subsequent issues in the XVIth cent.). English translations were: The golden boke translated out of Frenche &c., John Bourchier Knyghte, lorde Berners, 1534; The Diall of Princes, Th. North, 1557. In Christ's Geschichte der griech. Litt. 1924, p. 832, Berners's translation is cited as evidence that the Meditations 'were very much read in England'.
- ↑ (Mon père) 'si mesloit son langage de quelque ornement des livres vulgaires, sur tout espagnols: et entre les Espagnols, luy estoit ordinaire celuy qu'ils nommoient Marc Aurele' Essais, ii. 2. For his own opinion, see Essais, i. 48.
- ↑ K. N. Colvile says: 'In his own century the learned Rhua protested against his unscholarly romancing and his latest Spanish editor admits that he has mingled true and false quotations and ascriptions beyond all unravelling' The Diall of Princes, 1919, p. xxx. He refers to Pedro de Rhua, Cartas sobre las obras del . . . obispo de Mondoñedo, 1549, and to M. Martinez de Burgos. There is not the smallest trace of the narratives in the Hist. Aug. or other true sources, much less of the Meditations either in Berners's book or in North's Dial, in which I have read Guevara.
- ↑ 'Antonini Augusti itinerarium; Ejusdem liber ἐκ τῶν καθ᾽ αὑτόν, Romae servatum Graece' Bibl. Univ. f. 53v. This is the title usual in the Vatican X excerpts.
- ↑ 'Eius certe librum graece scriptum legi: cuius titulus Μάρκου Ἀντωνῖνου ἐκ τῶν καθ᾽ αὑτόν, ex quo variam et multiplicem illius sapientiam facile colligere possumus' Lilius Giraldus, Dial, v, de Poetarum Historia, Basel, 1545, p. 603.
- ↑ 'Demum et M. Antonius [sic] Caesar et philosophus de piscibus nonnihil scripsit, cuius etiam quaedam extant adhuc' De Lat. Poetis, op. cit., p. 553.
- ↑ 'Adde his M. Aurelium Antoninum longe sapientissimum, eum dico qui Philosophicum maluit quam Caesareum cognomen' Petrarcha, De Officio et virtutibus imp., Opera, Basle, 1554, p. 438.
- ↑ τούτου τὰ βιβλία παρὰ καλοῡ κἀγαθοῡ ἀνδρὀς Μιχαήλου Τοξίτου, ποιητοῡ εὐφυεστάτου (ἐκ τοῦ Ὄθωνος Είνερίχου τοῦ Παλατίνου ἄρχοντος λαμπροτάτου βιβλιοθήκης) λαβών p. 10.
- ↑ Michael Schutz genannt Toxites, C. Schmidt, Strassburg, 1888, see Schenkl's edition of M. Ant., p. viii.
- ↑ Morelli, prefect of the Bibliotheca Marciana, writes to Boissonade: 'Interpres Latinus quinam fuerit cum Fabricio ignoro . . . testatur Conr. Gesnerus in Epistola ann. 1562 ad Guillclmum Turnerum de libris a se editis, Tiguri impressa ann. 1566 cum vita Gesneri auctore Iosia Simlero, se Antonini et Marini libros Andreae patrueli anno 1558 excudendos dedisse, una cum translationibus latinis, in Antonini quidem libros Guil. Xylandri, in Marini vero Proclum, amici cujusdam nostri, iuvenis pereruditi, qui prac modcstia nomen suum exprimi noluit' J. F. Boissonade, Marinus, Vita Procli, Leipsic, 1814, p. ix.
- ↑ 'Cum enim ex eodem omnia haec opuscula penu sint deprompta, (nam Antonini exemplum quo usus sum, de Palatini Electoris illustrissimi inclytae memoriae Othonis Henrici, et bibliothecae libro fuisse transsumtum, Gesnerus, vir incomparabilis doctrinae ac humanitatis . . . affirmauit) idemque iis interpres, tarmet si diversis temporibus, contigerit' p. 4. He refers to inedita, Antoninus Liberalis, &c., which he published from the Heidelberg library, with his second edition of Marcus.
- ↑ 'Sunt quaedam in eo libro quae prorsus non attingere videbatur praestare, quam conjiciendo aliena pro Antoninianis fortassis ingerere' ibid., p. 4.
- ↑ 'Verba appendere ad trutinam neque volui, neque vero debui: sensum quidem secutus sum, an autem assecutus sim ubique aliorum opto iudicium: cur difficile hoc fuerit, multae sunt, neque non manifestae causae. Etsi fateor, in quibusdam me vel ut divinarem opus habuisse, vel audacter a codice Graeco aut usu communi discessisse' op. cit., p. 25 (i.e. p. 9).
- ↑ 'Xylandrum etiam amo, propter animi ejus candorem, probitatem, honestatem, quarum virtutum manifesta exstant indicia, cum in scriptis viri, tum in tota ejus vita' Plu. Moralia Oxon. a.d. 1795, p. cvi.
- ↑ 'Quae mea lucubratio cum (quod in promtu est cuiuis videre atque iudicare) foede esset incuria operarum typographicarum deprauata, itaque plane edita, ut pro non edita censeri optimo iure posset, iam pridem cogitaram de remedio ei malo faciendo ' op. cit., p. 3–4.
- ↑ Dr. V. Scholderer informs me that 'the books are full of complaints about the dearth of good accounts of Zürich printing. The article on the Gesners by Schottenloher in the Lexicon des gesamten Buchwesens, 1935, is of twelve lines only.'
- ↑ 'cum in eodem codice manuscripto M. Antonini libris, Marini Proclus quoque contineretur.'
- ↑ See Xylander, cited at p. xxiii above, note 4.
- ↑ 'Gesnerus affirmauit'. See Sch. in BphW, 1914, col. 485.
- ↑ Schenkl, M. Antoninus, 1913, ed. maj. Praef. pp. viii-ix; 'est cod. Pal. Gr. 404 (fol. 73–101) descriptus in Henrici Stevensoni sen. catalogo (Romae 1886) [read 1885], p. 263.'
- ↑ The colophon says: ὑπὸ ἀνδρέου δαρμαρίου τοῦ ἐπιδαυρίου εἴληφε τέρμα ἐν τῷ ἔτει ͵αφοθ᾽. H. Stevenson, Catalogus Palat. 1885. That is, the codex was completed in a.d. 1579.
- ↑ Pacius' MSS. were purchased by Peiresc, who gave some of them to Holste. It would be natural that the Marinus should be one of those that were so given, as Holste was intending to publish the complete text (see p. 1) and writing to Peiresc about it. Was it by this channel that it got into the Palatine collection?
- ↑ Described by C. Schenkl, after R. Schöll, Xen. Studien, iii. 72; by Prof. W. W. Baker, Trans. Am. Phil. Ass. xliii, 1912, item xi. See also Stich, Rhein. Mus. xxxvi, p 175.
- ↑ Stephanus Gradius, Ragusinus, appointed by Innocent XI Primarius et Major Custos of the Vatican Library 14 Jan. 1682, died 7 May 1683. Cardinal Barberini, who used the MS. for his Italian version, says: 'conservato nella Biblioteca e musco del nobile nõ meno che dotto Signore Abbate Gradi.'
- ↑ Dated s. xv, in Marchant's edition of Xen. Hiero, Agesilaus, Lac. Pol., Vect., Ath. Pol. Closely related to Vat. Gr. 1335, s. x vel xi.
- ↑ First published by K. Wotke in Wien. Stud. x. 175, 1888. See C. Bailey, Epicurus, p. 375.
- ↑ Hobein, Maximus Tyrius, Leipsic, 1910, p. xi, note 1, p. xl. It is remarkable that, in the first decade of the XIXth century, no one working on Marcus Antoninus appears to have realized that Vat. Gr. 1950 was then in Paris. See the list of manuscripts taken from Rome to Paris, Recensio ms. cod. Leipsic, 1803, p. 76.
- ↑ Schenkl, M. Antoninus, 1913, Praef. p. xi says De Animalium Incessu, but in fact it is De Motu, beginning περὶ ζῴων κινήσεως.
- ↑ First collated by Werfer, Act. Phil. Monac. iii. 3, 1822, p. 417; described by Voltzx and Cronert, Centralbl. für Bibl. xiv, p. 558.
- ↑ Collated by Cramer, Anecd. Graec. Paris. vol. i, p. 173, 1839; H. Schenkl, Eran. Vindob. p. 163, 1893. I have taken Sch.'s abbreviations, ed. mai. p. xxxiii, using his descriptions and Leopold's, Oxon. 1908, p. v. I have collated Cν and Cο, and referred to Cramer for Cπ and to Sch.'s and Leop.'s app. crit. for the rest of C.
- ↑ V 6 was described, with a collation by Weyland, Berl. phsl. Woch. 1914, col. 1180, subsequently to the issue of H. Schenkl's text.
- ↑ For these X excerpts, I have followed Leop.'s and Schenkl's app. crit., with Weyland's report of V 6. See Stich, adnot. crit. ad M. Anton. Program, Zweibrücken, 1880–1.
- ↑ H. J. Polak in Hermes, xxi, p. 321, 1886.
- ↑ M. Ant. i. 17. 4 and vi. 55 in Canterus, Novarum Lectionum, lib. 7, ch. 1.
- ↑ He calls the Meditations 'Eclogae', Casp. Barthii, Adversariorum Commentariorum Libri LX, Francofurti, mdcxxiv, cf. p. lxi below.
- ↑ See especially Justus Lipsius, Opera, vol. iv, Vesaliae, 1675.
- ↑ Zanta, La Renaissance du Stoîcisme au XVle Siècle, Paris, 1914.
- ↑ M. Antonini Ro: Imp: De Vita Sua Lib. xii ad animi tranquillitatem fortuna tam secunda quam adversa parandam perquam utiles, etc. Argentinae, mdxc. See Schenkl, ed. mai., Praefatio, p. xxviii.
- ↑ Marci Antonini Imperatoris et Philosophi, de Vita sua Libri xii. Graece et Latine. Opus ad mores insigne, nunc primum Latinae interpretationis e regione Graeci contextus et numerorum ac distinctionis ad nouas quasque sentential appositione illustratum. Accessit Marini Proclus item Graece et Latine. Lugduni . . . mdcxxvi.
- ↑ Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the Roman Emperor, his Meditations concerning Himselfe: treating of a naturall Mans happinesse; Wherein it consisteth, and of the meanes to attain unto it. Translated out of the Originall Grecke; with Notes by Meric Casaubon, B. of D. and Prebendarie of Christ Church, Canterbury . . . London mdcxxxiv. Republished 1635, 1663, 1673, 1692. Reprinted in briefer form, Dent, 1898, edited by W. H. D. Rouse, London, 1900, 1906.
- ↑ Especially the translation of i. 17. 35 viii. 7 fin.; vii. 24; v. 36; vii. 75. The criticism of the last two instances is not so happy as that of the remainder.
- ↑ Marci Antonini Imperatoris De Seipso et Ad Seipsum libri xii. Guil. Xylander Augustanus Graece et Latine primus edidit: Nunc vero, Xylandri Versionem locis plurimis emendavit et novam fecit: in Antonini libros Notas et Emendationces adjecit Mericus Casaubonus Is. F. . . . Londini, mdcxliii.
- ↑ Gataker declined in the year 1644 the offer made to him by the Earl of Manchester to become Master of Trinity.
- ↑ Marci Antonini Imperatoris de rebus suis, sive de eis quae ad se pertinere censebat, Libri xii, Locis haud paucis repurgati, suppleti, restituti: Versione insuper Latina nova; Lectionibus item variis, Locis-que parallelis, ad marginem adjectis; ac Commentario perpetuo, expiicati atque illustrati; Studio opera-que Thomae Gatakeri Londinatis. Cantabrigiae . . . Anno Dom: mdclii.
- ↑ He is still sometimes cited, e.g. in Galen, De aff. dign., ed. de Boer, Leipsic and Berlin, 1937, Testimonia, p. 22.
- ↑ For instance, the omission of the word 'boni', iv. 42, stood until the Oxford edition of 1704.
- ↑ In Brunet, in the Bodl. written catalogue, and elsewhere, R.I. is said to be Ibbetson. Bywater, however, informed Crossley that the initials stand for R. Ives or Ivies. I have failed to confirm this.
- ↑ Unfortunately this text is that of Xylander's second edition; the translation is Gataker's, but his marginal emendations of the Greek are not printed.
- ↑ Lucas Holste (Holstenius) of Hamburg, created Primarius et Major Custos of the Vatican Library by Innocent X, 2 September 1653, died 2 February 1661. There is a most interesting account of his life and labours by Boissonade in Michaud's Biographie Universelle, Milton visited him when staying in Rome.
- ↑ Writing to Peiresc from Aquae Sextiae, he says: 'Procli Vitam Lugduni editam cum Antonino de Vitae Suae Officiis in transitu mihi comparavi . . . meum exemplar (sc. Marini) dimidio auctius est; 'he intends to publish Marinus: 'sequetur deinceps Vita Procli auctore Marino media (leg. dimidia) parte auctior quam hactenus edita fuit' Boissonade, Lucae Holstenii Epistolae, p. 85, p. 47. His proposal is dated Idibus Maiis 1636: 'Quae de . . . Paraenesion M. Aurelii Imp. nova editione Graeco-Latina tecum egi patruis tuis significabis, quibussi consilium hoc probetur, singulos ego auctores diligentissime emendatos, quod quidem tu oculata fide testari poteris, subpeditabo' (to Lud. Elzevir, from Rome), Meursii, Op. vol. xi, p. 599 F, ed. 1762, Boissonade, l.c., p. 267. In a letter to Donio, Holste mentions: 'li miei Geographi e Filosofi antichi, Hierocle, M. Antonino, Arriano', Boissonade l.c., p. 307.
- ↑ Med. Laurent, lix. 44; this is made certain, inter alia, by his citing ὤστε xi. 9, a variant which is only in L 4 and P 6.
- ↑ Boissonade, Marini Vita Procli, 1814 Praef. p. xiii.
- ↑ His mode of working here, although on a smaller scale, resembles very closely what is described of his annotation of Arcerius' edition of the Life of Pythagoras, see L. Heubner, Iamblichi De Vita Pythagorsca liber, Leipsic, 1937, p. xii. Holste evidently intended to publish a commentary on Iamblichus' Life and to combine it with Marinus'Proclus.
- ↑ Franciscus Barberinus Florentine 'creatus S.R.E. Bibliothecarius ab Urbano VIII, Kal. Jul. 1626.' He died 10 December 1679.
- ↑ I Dodici Librs di Marco Aurelso Antonino Imperadore di sè stesso ed a sè stesso Rome, 1675. The translation is anonymous but is known to be by the Cardinal. There is a copy in the Codrington Library, at All Souls College, Oxford.
- ↑ Barberini says: 'conservato nella Bibliotheca e museo del nobile nô meno che dotto Signore Abbate Gradi'.
- ↑ p. lxi.
- ↑ Pugillaria Imperatoris M. A. Antonini, Graece scripta, disjecta membratim et . . . restituta pro ratione argumentorum. Sequitur Interpretatio Gatakeri Londinatis similiter ordinata. Curante . . . Johanne-Petro de Joly, Parisiis, mdcclxxiv.
- ↑ Marci Antonini Imperatoris Commentariorum, quos ipse sibi scripsit, libri duodecimo Graeca ad codicum manuscriptorum fidem emendavit, notationem varietatis lectionum et interpretationem latinam castigatam adjunxit . . . J. M. Schultz, Slesvici, mdcccii.
- ↑ ΜΑΡΚΟΥ ΑΝΤΩΝΙΝΟΥ ΑΥΤΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΟΣ ΤΩΝ ΕΙΣ ΕΑΥΤΟΝ ΒΙΒΛΙΑ ΙΒʹ . . . ΕΝ ΠΑΡΙΣΙΟΙΣ ΕΚ ΤΗΣ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΙΑΣ Ι.Μ. ΕΒΕΡΑΡΤΟΥ 1816. The preface is signed Α. ΚΟΡΑΗΣ.
- ↑ ΜΑΡΚΟΥ ΑΝΤΩΝΙΝΟΥ ΠΑΛΑΙ ΜΕΝ ΑΥΤΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΟΣ ΠΩΜΑΙΟΥ Δυναστευοντος δ'ετι νυν, καὶ εισαει ΣΕΒΑΣΤΟΥ . . . ΤΑ ΕΙΣ ἘΑΥΤΟΝ, C. L. Porcher, N. Eboraci U.S. a.d. 1861 A. Liberatae Reip. 1. The pseudonym stands for C(apel) L(offt) Stoicus. Here are two of his notes: (on ὤσπερ τὰς ἄλλας . . . φύσις viii. 35) ως περι τας αλλας δυναμεις εσκευαστο τῶν λογικῶν σχεδον οιον ἦ τῶν αλογων φυσις: Chaotica haec critici, diu sed frustra, velut caeci Cyclopes in caverna ψηλαφητι tentabant. Nimia jamdudum; ad nauseam usque; quid plura? Habes quae arida nuper ossa in corpus verum vivumquc constituta. Again (on ἐὰν ὑπὸ ἄλλου γένηται τὰ δίκαια x. 13): Deliri est delira proponere. Itaque ego ψεγηται, quod et prope, et spero probe. (This has been accepted.) Schenkl writes: κρίνηται Lofft; ψεγηται idem sec. Rend, (in Loftii editione non adparet), Adn. suppl. p. 189. Possibly Lofft changed his mind in the reprint of 1863, which Schenkl used (Praef. p. xxx) and which I have not seen; it was lent him by Dr. Rendall.
- ↑ This is the familiar Teubner edition, to which Schenkl 's text of 1913 succeeded.
- ↑ That this may not seem an easy generality, see ἐπὶ τοῦ γρίφους for ἐπὶ τοὺς συγγραφεῖς i. 17. 9; καὶ περὶ τῶν ἰδίων ἤτοι v. 7; ἐγρήyορσις x. 38.
- ↑ Epictetus, 1894, but based on work done at Oxford in 1881; Marcus Aurelius, 1913.
- ↑ Hypothèses critiques sur les Pensées de Marc-Aurèle, i-v, 1920–2, A. I. Trannoy.
- ↑ J. Wickham Legg, A Bibliography of the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus 1908, reprinted 1910.
- ↑ George Long, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus, 1862; revised 1869; included, with Matthew Arnold's essay, in the York Library, George Bell, 1905. This translation has been of great assistance to me by its scholarly accuracy.
- ↑ 'Quand je considère la petite durée de ma vie, absorbée dans l'éternité précédant et suivant, 205 Brunschvicg', see M. Ant. iv. 3.
- ↑ See Friedrich der Grosse als Philosoph, Ed. Zeller, 1886, pp. 35 sq., 73, 82; and Anmerkungen 15, 116 c, 118, 120 (where are references to the King's correspondence), 174.
- ↑ President Roosevelt seems to have been thinking of the Meditations when he said: 'Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds. They have within themselves the power to become free at any moment.' Address at the celebration of the Pan-American Union's 49th Birthday, 14 April 1939.
- ↑ Hastings Crossley, The Fourth Book of the Meditations &c. 1882.
- ↑ Pensées de Marc-Aurèle, Traduction d'Auguste Couat, éditée par Paul Fournier, Bordeaux, 1904.
- ↑ Only four of the eight original books of Arrian's Memoirs of Epictetus now survive, with the Manual, which purports to be a digest by Arrian himself. They depend upon one manuscript, the XIIth-century one in the Bodleian Library. To read the Memoirs is to be convinced that they are no longer in their original form and order.
- ↑ Praeloquium.
- ↑ 'These also are proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah King of Judah copied out.' Proverbs, heading of ch. 25 R.V.
- ↑ Contrast this with what Gataker says elsewhere: 'Verum ejusmodi quam plurima in scripto illo insigni passim est deprehendere, partim misere divulsa, partim male coalita, alia luxata et loco dimota, alia superflua et redundantia, alia manca et mutilata, alia in mentem vel nullam vel perversam vel adversam etiam depravata.' Adversaria miscell. Utrecht, 1698, p. 564a. Contrast also Saumaise: 'Haud alium puto autorem ex antiquitate Graeca corruptiorem ad nos, injuria temporum, fortean etiam hominum, qui eum interpolarunt, transmissum. Ubique hiatus et lacunae, quae tamen solidum mentiantur. Transpositiones etiam multis locis commissae ab hominibus, uti videtur, sciolis, qui sententias plerumque minutis punctiunculis, Stoico more, signatas non capiebant.' Epistula ad Gat. missa cited by Gat. in his Praeloquium.
- ↑ Caspar Barthius, Adversaria, 1624, Lib. i, ch. 11, pp. 22–4, cf. pp. 2412–18. An emendation (he says it was made in youth) of viii. 3 is: οὐ μὲν γὰρ εἶδον τὰ πράγματα καὶ τὰ ἡγεμονικά· ἦν αὐτῶν ταῦτα πρόνοια καὶ αἱ ὔλαι· ἐκεῖ δἐ ὄσων δουκείᾳ πεσών l.c. p. 23.
- ↑ p. xxii, note i, supra.
- ↑ L. C. T. Rousseau, Morale de Marc-Aurèle, Empereur Romain, Paris, An. vii (1798–9), has eight chapters, divided into twenty-four sections. There is also Histoire philosophique de Marc-Aurèle, avec les pen sées de ce prince présentées dans un ordre nouveau . . . par feu M. Ripault, Paris 1830.
- ↑ A moi-même, Paris, 1926, par Gustave Loisel. M. Loisel has also written a popular, but careful, life of the Emperor.
- ↑ Marci Antonini libri xii, Leipsic, 1729; Introductionem ad philosophiam stoicam ex mente M. Antonini praemisit Ioan. Franciscus Buddeus . . . Ienensis.
- ↑ Some idea of M. Loisel's reconstruction may be got from the close of his new Book xii. His order is: xi. 3; x. 29; ix. 21; xii. 23; vi. 28; xii. 35; viii. 58; vii. 18; iv. 5; xii. 36; iv. 14; viii. 18; vi. 10.
- ↑ Braune Marc Aurels Meditationen in ihrer Einheit und Bedeutung, Altenburg, 1878.
- ↑ W. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, vol. i, ch. xii, p. 219. Dr. Rendall refers tacitly to Pater in M. Aurelius Antoninus To Himself, 1898, Introduction, p. ciii. The ancient references to the lecture are Hist. Aug. vi. 3. 6–7 ('per triduum disputavit'), S. Aurelius Victor (circa a.d. 360) Caes. 16. 9. The lecture in Pater would take 20 minutes in delivery.
- ↑ Journey to the Hebrides, ed. Chapman, p. 184.
- ↑ In his edition in the Budé series, Introduction, p. vii.
- ↑ Simplicius, Comm, in Manuale Epict. ed. Schw. p. 208. ed. Heinse p. 128 c.
- ↑ οὑκ ἔστιν ἀρχὴ τοῦτο, ἀλλὰ τῶν ἀνωτέρω τῶν πρὸ τῶν Πλατωνικῶν συναφές Ed. princ. p. 83. The MS. P cod. had Πλατωνικόν, in the text before ch. 35, and it will be seen that this and other glosses appear in the text of the first edition. Not all are in A.
- ↑ e.g. ii. 15; iv. 10; viii. 4; xii. 16, 21, 22.
- ↑ e.g. in i. 15: περὶ ὦν λέγοι. ὄτι οὔτως φρονεῖ καὶ περὶ ὦν πράττωι. ὄτι οὐ δικαίως πράττει as if separate dicta.
- ↑ The order in Mo 2 is vii. 23, 22, 18, 7; vi. 35, 43, 44 &c.
- ↑ Schenkl, Berl. ph. W. 1916, col. 33; Wiener Studien, xxxiv, 1912; Breithaupt, De M. Aurelii Ant. Commentariis Quaestiones selectae, Göttingen, 1913; Haines, J. of Phil. xxxiii, 1914, pp. 278–95.
- ↑ τὰ ὑπομνημάτια iii. 14; τοῖς Ἐπικτητείοις ὑπομνήμασιν i. 7. 3; γραψάμενος ὐπομνήματα εἰς ὔστερον ἐμαυτῷ διαφυλάξαι Arr. Epict. Proem. 2; δι᾽ ὑπομνημάτων ἔχειν Galen v. 1.
- ↑ Some have supposed that his freedman Chryseros may have been charged with this duty. All we know is that Chryseros wrote an annalistic history of Rome.
- ↑ Le Recueil des Pensées du B. Guigue, Dom André Wilmart, Paris, 1936. Guigue was previously accessible in a rearrangement in twenty chapters, selected from the entire work, Louvain, 1546 (Wilmart, op.c. Preface, p. 41). Gataker more than once cites this edition to illustrate Marcus.
- ↑ op.c. Preface, p. 10 and p. 13.
- ↑ What Dr. Rendall says of Marcus, op.c. Introd., p. civ, is unconsciously very close to Dom Wilmart's description of Guigue's aim and manner.
- ↑ Browne's Preface to Rel. Med.; cf. his Letter to Sir K. Digby, 3 March 1642.
- ↑ In connexion with what has been said of the editing of Marcus' book, compare what is recorded of Frederick the Great's posthumous verses: 'Lorsque le Roi eut mis la dernière main aux pièces que nous avons nominées Poésies posthumes, il fit présent à son lecteur, Henri de Catt, du manuscrit destiné à l'impression . . . ce manuscrit se composait de trois cahiers, écrits par le secrétaire et chargés de corrections de la main du poëte' Œuvres poétiques de Frédéric II, 1849, Tome III, Avertissement, p. ix.