Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/30

, 1545, Conrad Gesner refers to the Meditations as the work of the author of the Itinerarium, and employs the title. The same title is used by Lilius Giraldus, 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. Neither Petrarch nor any of the writers of this period cited by Gataker in his Testimonia shows an acquaintance with what Marcus actually wrote.

The recent history of the Meditations dates from the issue of the first printed edition by Andreas Gesner, filius, at Zürich in 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 xxii