Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/72

 Marcus to meet his most pressing difficulties, to comment upon his reading of history, to summarize his own experiences, and to provide wholesome precepts for 'the Conduct of his own life', to use Suidas' title for the work.

That there is evidence of some such continuity in the Meditations appears to have been the contention of Braune in an essay which I have not been able to procure. Stich refers to this attempt as equally futile with Joly's undertaking. Readers of Marius the Epicurean will recall a reconstruction of part of Marcus' thought in that romance. Pater introduces it under the guise of a lecture traditionally delivered by Marcus in Rome before he set out for his campaign on the Danube. This occasion may well have been invented by the biographer who wrote the feeble and mendacious life of Avidius Cassius in the time of Julian ( 360).

My own opinion is that the order is disturbed, but I have not tried to reconstruct an original of whose existence we have no evidence; I have rather endeavoured to indicate traces of continuity both of subject-matter and verbal expression in the individual parts as they have been preserved to us.

Although any attempt to reconstruct an original is doomed to failure, it is certainly conceivable that in the Meditations we possess the elements of a book which the author had projected, and which death prevented him from completing. It is possible also that not all the passages which have been preserved would have found a place lxiv