Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/79

 the close of xi. Chapters 22–39 are a mere collection of poetic extracts, anecdotes, and maxims, the latter being summaries of known passages of Epictetus or remarks now generally assigned to him. Nearly all trivial in interest and markedly inferior to the extracts in vii, they have no bearing on what precedes and follows them in the Meditations.

Nor is this all. These fragments break the continuity of xi. 20–1 with xii. 1. Not merely the subject-matter but also the form of language in xii. 1 is closely related to the part of xi which precedes the fragments. Here the scribe of A comes to our assistance. At the end of the extracts he has drawn an asterisk, after which is the entry: 'Of the Emperor Antoninus'. This is the exact form of words which is the heading of the set of excerpts called C. It is reasonable then to suppose that the material of xii was derived from a set of detached folios and that the extracts of which we are speaking are derived from another source and either did not belong to the body of the Meditations, or at best belonged to a different part of that book. The state of things is at least some evidence of dismemberment or partial dismemberment of the Meditations.

The general condition of A, if regarded apart from P, might in itself suggest, as Joly said, that it contains a series of chapters which have survived from a larger and more complete whole. There is no numeration of Books, no title. The chapters are indicated by rubricated letters, but these capital letters are often introduced so as to interrupt the natural sequence of thought. The Books, where they are distinguished, are merely distinguished by an interval of a line or two. If we had only the evidence of A, we should get the following provisional grouping: i, ii. 1–3, ii. 4 to end, iii–iv, v–vi, vii–viii, ix, x–xi, xii, that is to say, nine Books, or a prefatory Book followed by eight Books. We might, therefore surmise that if there were originally twelve Books, as Suidas says there were, three have been lost, and that the original from which both A lxxi