Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/32

 is, that the pages he worked with bore no evidence of their origin.

Xylander, as he states in his notes, made a few corrections of the manuscript text, and these were most, not quite all, adopted by Gesner in the printed text. Generally the text was left as he found it, his Latin translation indicating what he took to be the sense, and silently suggesting a good many emendations. This is the same scrupulous regard for the manuscript text which he observed in his edition of Plutarch (Vitae 1560, Moralia 1570). He explains his method in the introduction to this second edition: 'in case some ungenerous critic should fancy that I am serving him with a rechauffe, I have corrected my preface, the author's words in the Greek and Latin, and not only have I removed the misprints, I have also reviewed and corrected my own translation in several places and made some additions to the notes. Some places there are in the book which it appeared better not to touch rather than by conjecture to substitute possibly for Antoninus' own words diction that would be foreign to him.'

The translation is most elegant, and, on the whole, remarkably exact. Sometimes Xylander goes astray, and sometimes his fidelity to the words makes little sense, although it has the advantage of showing what text he had before him. Still we cannot use his work, like one of the old verbal Latin translations, as certain evidence of the words of his manuscript. He sometimes paraphrases and condenses, but we can detect words and sentences which the printers overlooked. He says in his first dedication: 'I neither desired nor indeed was I justified in attempting a faithful verbal translation. I have indeed followed the xxiv