Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/47

 original. If there are any mistakes of an uncial origin, and this is not certain, they would, we must suppose, have already been in the presumed archetype of P and A.

Schenkl did not live to publish his proposed study of the text, but he appears to have thought that A, or perhaps its archetype of the eleventh or twelfth century, bears evidence of an editor of the text, who wrestled long and painfully with an old and mutilated original. He means, no doubt, Arethas. He goes further and suggests that the common source of all our manuscripts is the presumed edition of the learned deacon of Patras at the end of the ninth century. This is a suggestive and interesting hypothesis which other critics have adopted, but the evidence is too slight and conjectural to carry conviction.

There is, however, one source from which we can judge of this theory, the evidence of Suidas' Lexicon. He has preserved, very fortunately, passages of considerable length from the Meditations. Wherever the extracts he gives are actual extracts, their text is substantially our present text, and what he gives must represent citations from his original sources, which are older than the tenth century, how old we cannot determine. Thus whatever Arethas did to the text, the evidence we have from Suidas suggests that the manuscript he used was in its readings close to the tradition preserved to us. Unfortunately the majority of the passages in Suidas are paraphrases of the original text, and cannot therefore be used as evidence for the exact words of the original; indeed it looks as though the source of many of them was not the text of the complete original, but a Florilegium of some kind from the Meditations: they are so often introduced by or a similar word, like the passages we have in the C excerpts. If this be true, the process of making selections from Marcus had xxxix