Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/26

 gather from the letter to Demetrius, and from notes made by the learned Archbishop of Caesarea in others of his books, 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 1558–9.

Some fifty years later (circa 950) Suidas published his Lexicon. There he refers to the Emperor's Conduct of his own Life, in xii Books, 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 ( 1110–85) cites Marcus by name in his Chiliades, 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. The xviii