INTRODUCTION
and P are derived was renumbered by the scribe of P cod to give an appearance of a complete twelve Books.
There is one other disturbing feature in the text as it has reached us. There are some chapters, especially in Book xii, which not only resemble mere notes but are introduced by ὄτι, a well-known sign of an extract in collections of eclogues.[1] This is a characteristic of the manuscripts of excerpts from Marcus which are denominated C,[2] and the same is true of many of the excerpts of the Meditations in Suidas. This seems evidence that, before the date of the archetype of our manuscripts, there existed a set of eclogues from the Meditations which Suidas sometimes drew from. From this the C excerpts which do not precisely follow our present order may have been derived.
The X excerpts have two remarkable features. They appear to come from a Florilegium (which most critics ascribe to Planudes, 13th–14th century) in which extracts from Marcus are mixed with extracts from Appian's book on the Nature of Animals, for no reason that can be discovered. Their other characteristic is that they do not follow the present order of the text. They begin with passages from Book vii arranged in inverse order.[3] This, so far as it goes, points to Book vii, which we have seen to be of a composite arrangement, having once had a different order of chapters and possibly a different position in some earlier manuscript. The state of the excerpts generally does seem to suggest that our present manuscripts (as their internal evidence at two points indicates) were at some time assembled from sheets which had fallen into disorder.
Two other lines of inquiry occur to one as possible. First, in chapters which so often refer to experiences in
