Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/44

 Xylander did not carry out his revision as carefully as we should expect and wish; but he was now working on the printed text and no longer had the manuscript to consult. Thus there is an at least plausible explanation of his apparent negligence, viz. that he was anxious to preserve, so far as possible, the text of the original manuscript. Certainly he did this in the first edition, leaving his version or his notes to show the reader the mistakes he detected. Moreover, this was his practice in his great edition of Plutarch. It may be argued then, I think, that it would be just the graver mistakes of his original that he would leave intact. My own conclusion is that most of these blunders were in the original manuscript, that at least it is safer to work on this hypothesis. There is no evidence that either Toxites, who brought the manuscript to Conrad Gesner's attention, Conrad himself, or Andrew the printer corrected the text as it passed through their hands. We may, as the earlier editors did, use the evidence of P, with the necessary reservations.

As to the weight to be attached to A, the history of the twentieth century text exhibits first the effort of successive editors, by scholarly conjecture, to make an intelligible text on the basis of Xylander's two editions and the Lyons text of 1626. Secondly, the vulgate, thus derived from Xylander's text, was emended by the use of the manuscripts (first of the Excerpts, later of A as well as of the Excerpts), and the tendency to prefer A to P grew more marked from the date of Coraes's text of 18 16 and Schultz's of 1820. This movement culminated in Schenkl's text of 1913. The editor speaks of the Vatican manuscript 'coming into its own'; and his own practice is evident from the fact that, apart from such minutiae as final nu and sigma before a closed syllable, the Leipsic text differs in some 180 places from Leopold's Oxford text of 1908. Yet Leopold himself had said that A, in spite of its many patent errors, 'has often preserved the genuine reading xxxvi