Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/77

 later in our work to piece out its somewhat meagre bulk'. But utilized by whom? M. Trannoy evidently considers this patchwork to be due to Marcus himself, not to some hypothetical editor of his remains.

The disorder in the passages just considered might certainly be explicable in this way, or by Gataker's theory of a mere commonplace book, never rearranged, perhaps not intended to be rearranged. But there is a further difficulty in the present text, which is most simply explained by supposing that the original order has been disturbed. Two paragraphs which appear to be continuous are often sundered by a short and, in the context, quite irrelevant sentence. To give one or two instances. The sequence of iv. 27 and 29 is broken by iv. 28, so much so that Gataker proposed to move iv. 28 to follow and interpret iv. 18. Again, vii. 23 and 25 belong together, while vii. 22 and 24 would make a satisfactory sequence. In Book ix, 13 and 15 are congruous but severed by 14; so 18 and 20, 19 and 21 appear to be closely allied.

The natural explanation is that displacement of the author's order has occurred, not that Marcus introduced an irrelevance. That such accidents occurred, even in carefully guarded texts like Aristotle's, is well known. Simplicius suggests that this has befallen chapters 16, 17, and 18 of Epictetus' Manual, the original order having been 16, 18, 17, and he was writing within a few centuries of its publication. We are not precluded from such an hypothesis in the case of a text whose history extends over thirteen centuries.

The evidence of the manuscripts, P cod and A, confirms on the whole the impression gained from the study made in the last section. P cod was divided, Xylander tells us, directly or by implication, into twelve Books, with the general title: 'The writings of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus to Himself.' There was one difference in the lxix