Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/45

 more faithfully than P or made at least a closer approach to the truth'. Most of Schenkl's differences from Leopold arise from a restoration of A's readings or of something supposed to be indicated by them, and there are many places besides (in his app. crit. and adnotationis suppl.) where he has shown great ingenuity in the attempt to find a possible lost reading which might plausibly explain A's idiosyncrasies.

The hypothesis underlying this restoration is that A, by its fidelity to its original, a fidelity not shared by P cod., has preserved an older and truer version of their common original: the illiterate witness is more likely to give an unvarnished statement of what he saw than one who is more educated. This hypothesis has, no doubt, been adopted the more readily because in the criticism of many texts (for instance, of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics) early manuscripts have, in spite of, or even because of, their unsophisticated crudity, been given greater weight than later and more ostensibly literate manuscripts of the same text. In the case of A, however, as evidence for what Marcus wrote, we are not dealing with an old but with a very late manuscript, we are presuming that A has preserved more closely than P cod. the text of their common archetype, not that an early manuscript is ceteris paribus likely to be nearer the original than a later one. Moreover, a close study of A's individual readings shows that many are deliberate, even if infelicitous, corrections of a text which P cod. has preserved, while a similar study of P shows traces of that very naïveté of report which has been ascribed to A. Again, the existence of D shows that A and D depend upon an original which is one step further from the archetype of A D and P cod. than P cod. is. Further, a noticeable feature of A is its steady deterioration in accuracy in the later Books. M. Trannoy gives the statistics: Book i, errors common to P A, 17 to 20, errors peculiar to P, 14, xxxvii