Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/70

 translation, distributed into thirty-five sections, with a valuable bibliography and notes on the manuscript sources. This was followed in 1774 by his revised Greek text, with Gataker's translation, and a similar rearrangement by subjects.

His theory is that Marcus had, during his campaigns, composed a moral treatise upon a series of tablets; after his death, these were distributed to relatives and friends, and treasured by them as relics of their admired sovereign. In this way the entirety of the work was dismembered from the first. Later on, some editor made the best collection he could of these Sibylline leaves, and so they were copied out, as they now appear in the Vatican MS., continuously and in disorder, with no indication of Books or subjects. Joly believed that the survival of the X excerpts, in a somewhat different order (they begin with chapters from Book vii, in an inverse sequence), was confirmatory of his view. He regarded the arrangement by Books in the manuscript from which the first edition was printed with suspicion.

Joly produced a more or less orderly composition under titles; he did in fact, though he does not suggest the analogy, what a succession of editors have attempted to do for Pascal's Pensées, he reassembled the Meditations into a kind of Apology for Stoicism.

Few critics have accepted Joly's hypothesis, although similar attempts have since been made from time to time, with the inevitable divergent results. As to his theory of the cause of the dispersion of the parts, there is no evidence of a Greek book, at this date certainly, being preserved thus upon a series of wax tablets, consisting of pieces of such divergent lengths, and presumably docketed by subjects. One would suppose that the notes would have been transferred by Marcus' secretary to a roll or codex at some early stage of his work.

But there are two difficulties which appear insuperable lxii