Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/13



edition of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was the product of years of unremitting and almost secret labour. Few even of his friends were allowed to know how closely and continuously Farquharson lived with the subject of his studies. Only the evidence of his library—the hundreds of volumes bearing in their margins 'copious notes' and forests of cross-references, written in his delicate, even, hand and dating, some of them, from his undergraduate days—has revealed the range and the detail of his inquisition into the form and matter of the Meditations, how early he began it and how deeply it absorbed him.

Many drafts of passages of exegesis and annotation—discarded, resumed, altered, discarded, and again adopted, and all in that same faultless script—attest the diffidence with which he undertook the work and make it difficult to trace the stages of its composition.

Records, however, show that it was in March 1936 that he first discussed with the Clarendon Press the plan of his book and that the Delegates accepted it in February 1938. In June 1939 the MS., excluding the Notes, was sent to the Printer. When Farquharson died in August 1942 Volume I was printed off (save for the Introduction, which he had seen in proof), and of Volume II he had seen rather more than half (pp. 433–717) in proof, and passed for press pp. 433–608. The remainder of the Notes in Vol. II was in MS., perfectly ready for the press. How many alterations he might yet have made in this portion of the Notes it is impossible to say, for he was always ready to abandon or rewrite the fairest of fair copies if he thought improvement possible.

In a series of letters which he wrote to me weekly from the outbreak of war in September 1939 Farquharson v