INTRODUCTION
of Constantinople, may have been engaged in compiling the anthology of extracts from various authors,, including Marcus and Aelian, which has come down to us in twenty-five or more MSS dating from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.[1] They are practically of no help in re-establishing the text,[2] and contain in all forty-four extracts from books IV.–XII.
Our present text is based almost entirely upon two MSS, the Codex Palatinus (P) first printed in 1558 by Xylander but now lost, which contains the whole work, and the Codex Vaticanus 1950 (A) from which about forty-two lines have dropped out by accidental omissions here and there. Two other MSS give some independent help to the text, but they are incomplete, the Codex Darmstadtinus 2773 (D) with 112 extracts from books I.–IX. and Codex Parisinus 319 (C) with twenty-nine extracts from Books I.–IV., with seven other MSS derived from it or from the same source. Apart from all these there is but one other MS (Monacensis 323) which contains only fourteen very short fragments from Books II., III., IV., and VII.
Translations of this Book have been made into Latin, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Norse, Russian, Czech, Polish and Persian. In England alone twenty-six editions of the work appeared in the seventeenth century, fifty-eight in the eighteenth, eighty-one in the nineteenth, and in the twentieth up to 1908 thirty more.[3]
The English translations are as follows.—
1. Meric Casaubon.—"Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. His Meditations concerning himselfe: Treating of a
