Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/48

 already begun before the time of Suidas, as would indeed be probable on general grounds.

There is one other line of inquiry to be considered in reference to the transmission of the Meditations. This depends on the length of the known omissions in A. The commonest length is of sentences consisting of from 30 to 40 letters, say an average of 35 letters. Schenkl has compared this modulus with the length of lines in the papyrus of Hierocles and with that in some old codices. I presume that he means especially the length of line in some of the manuscripts which we know to have been transcribed for Arethas' library, the Bodleian Euclid, for example. Several of A's omissions, however, are of 23–5 letters in length, corresponding to the 24 (23) letters dropped by both P and A in Book v. 8. It is tempting to suppose that 23–5 was the length of line in an early stage of the text, since it is common in many papyrus rolls of the second century The fact, however, that the one omission common to A. and P (v. 8) is supplied from the X excerpts might be held to show that this oversight belongs to a later period of the transmission. We may perhaps safely use these two moduli in an estimate of a given conjectural emendation or supplement, like Gataker's in v. 16. To argue on the basis of either length to the original format of the Meditations is too hazardous, in view of the variety of lines even in early rolls, much more in the minuscule stage.

As to the sources of literal corruption in both P and A, and their presumed archetype, the ground here is familiar. The errors are such as are met with in the study of every Greek text, and are abundantly illustrated from the apparatus criticus of modern texts of Marcus. The fact that A rarely writes iota subscript proves that his original was of later date than the iota adscript period. P's occasional omission of iota (it is not always easy to read in the print) points in the same direction. More than one explanation might be suggested for the uncertainty about xl