Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/66



The question we are now to ask can, within the limits of an introduction, be indicated but briefly; it is a question that forces itself upon a reader, fascinating him by its insolubility.

Is the book which now lies before us the authentic original, or has what Marcus wrote survived only in an incomplete and mutilated form? So many of the writings of classical antiquity have perished entirely or have been carried down by the river of time in a fragmentary or abbreviated condition, that a similar misfortune may certainly have befallen the Emperor's work.

The form of the Meditations is incomplete; sometimes, at least on first perusal, incoherent. Books, chapters even, are not clearly and certainly divided from one another, neither are they always concerned with distinct problems; their present arrangement seems artificially (or should we say artlessly) imposed. The Books, if we except the first, possibly the first three, are a broken series of meditations, like improvisations upon themes in a variety of keys, where similar, even identical, motives recur to a listener's confusion. The subjects shift also so abruptly that connexion is hard to distinguish, even in quite brief phrases. Then, again, a sequence will be interrupted by a theme which appears irrelevant, something strayed from an alien context. Finally, a thought will be repeated, for no obvious reason, in a place hardly removed from that in which it made its last appearance.

The explanation usually given, and now generally accepted, for this disorder and inconsequence is that accident has preserved a private journal, the record of the odd lviii