Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/83

 and encouragement; it is the deposit of those quiet hours when, as Marcus says, he left his stepmother, the Palace, to set up his rest with his own mother, Philosophy (vi. 12). His retirement from public affairs was not spent in the contemplation of a mystic, rather he began at first to record for his own use those short elementary maxims of his faith and practice (iv. 3). Later he was led to expand, with a larger view, what he began for his own service. He desired to point his fellows to the City of God, which is the reality in what seems a world of coming into being and quickly passing away. That he was in fact occupied with some literary and philosophic attempt seems indicated by that one passage in which he has definitely referred to this side of his life: 'You are now', he says, 'not likely to read your Memoranda, your Deeds of Greece and Rome, the Extracts you made and laid up against old age' (iii. 14). To this variety of past and present activity he may again allude where he says: 'Put away your volumes' and 'Cast out your appetite for books' (ii. 2 and 3). Memoranda is the diminutive form of the word he himself employs for Epictetus' Memoirs, which Arrian himself uses to describe that work, and which is used by Galen and others for works of considerable compass. 'Memoranda and Extracts' covers the substance of the Meditations as they have come down to us.

After the death of the Emperor in March 180, an editor, perhaps Marcus' Greek secretary Alexander, may have made a selection from the literary remains. The partial disorder would be explicable in one of three ways: the editor may have followed, without readjustment, the incomplete and unarranged rolls to which he had access; lxxv