Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/24

 recalls a word used by the biographer of Avidius Cassius, 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 450. We have to wait more than four centuries for the next notice of the book.

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 850–935), was a great collector of manuscripts. Writing at some date before 907, when he was a bishop, to Demetrius, xvi