Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/25

 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.' 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. 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