meditations

The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 led to an
exodus of scholars, bringing with them the Greek texts that
inspired the Italian Renaissance. The Meditations must have
been among them. Yet even at this date the work’s survival
hung by a thread. The only complete manuscript to survive is
a fourteenth-century codex (now in the Vatican), which is
riddled with errors. The first printed edition did not appear
until 1559, when Wilhelm Holzmann (known as Xylander)
produced a text from what seems to have been a more
reliable manuscript. That manuscript, unfortunately, has not
survived. But even at its best it was a very imperfect witness
to what Marcus himself wrote. Our text of the Meditations
contains a number of passages that are garbled or in which
one or more crucial words seem to have been omitted. Some
of these errors may be due to the confused state of Marcus’s
original copy. Others may have been accidentally introduced
in the course of the copying and recopying that the work
underwent in the millennium following Marcus’s death. In
some cases the informed guesswork of scholars over several
centuries has been able to restore the original text. In others,
there is still uncertainty. 11
The Meditations has never attracted great interest from
professional students of the classics, and the reasons are
perhaps understandable. It contains few direct references to
historical events and provides relatively little material for
social historians. As evidence for later Stoicism it pales