Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/68

 Meric Casaubon's contention in the Preface to his English translation and the Prolegomena to his Greek edition agrees in the main with Gataker's judgement. For the difficulties of interpretation he gives two additional reasons. The disconnectedness, he suggests, is inseparable from the style which Marcus adopted, the manner of writing in aphorisms; the obscurity is due to the wealth of quotation from older authors or of allusions to their works; Marcus refers briefly to what he knew intimately from his wide reading, but we, without the originals, do not follow his meaning. Sometimes, too, Marcus seems inconsistent with himself, where he is in fact stating briefly an opinion with which he does not agree. Many difficulties Casaubon condones because 'what Antoninus wrote, he wrote it not for the publick, but for his owne private use'.

He appears, however, to regard the Meditations as more continuous and connected than Gataker's words would imply them to be. He assumes longer trains of reasoning, and shows this by his grouping of the chapters, a continuity disguised by the aphoristic form into which the thoughts are thrown.

An entirely different view of the origin and present form of the Meditations was taken from the first; and this view has since been advocated more than once. The hypothesis is twofold: it is contended that Marcus designed and did in fact compose a regular moral treatise, and, secondly, that all we now possess is, upon that assumption, an assemblage of the scattered members of a lost original.

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