By Water & Blood

Preface

Many and varied things, Eustathius my son, has nature joined to us in this life; but nothing has bound us more than love for those begotten from us, and she has willed that our care in rearing and educating them be such that parents can take from no other cause so much pleasure if what they desire turns out according to their wish, nor so much grief if the opposite befalls.

Hence it is that nothing is reckoned by me more important than your education. Aiming at its completion, and holding shortcuts preferable to long circuits, and impatient of every delay, I do not wait for you to advance only through those studies to which you yourself diligently attend; but I also take care that I should have read for you, and that whatever I have worked through—whether after you were already brought into the light, or before you were born—in various volumes of either the Greek or the Roman tongue, should all be for you an equipment of knowledge, and, as it were from a certain storehouse of letters, whenever need arises either of recalling some history that lies hidden in a heap of books unknown to the crowd, or of some memorable saying or deed, it may be easy for you to find and draw it forth.

Nor have I heaped up things worthy of memory in a disorderly pile; but the diversity of varied matters, differing in their authors and confused in their times, has been so arranged into a kind of body that what we had noted down indiscriminately and promiscuously as an aid to memory might come together in order, cohering like limbs.

And do not count it a fault in me if the matters I borrow from varied reading I often set forth in the very words in which they were related by the authors themselves, because the present work promises not a display of eloquence but a store of things to be known; and you ought to take it in good part if you recognize knowledge of antiquity now in our own words not obscurely, now faithfully in the very words of the ancients, according as each matter has offered itself either to be narrated or to be transferred.

For in a certain way we ought to imitate bees, which wander and pluck flowers, then arrange whatever they have brought and distribute it through the combs, and by a kind of mixture and by the property of their own spirit change the varied juice into one flavor. We too will commit to the pen whatever we have sought out by diverse reading, so that under the same arranging hand it may coalesce into order. For things better distinguished are also better kept in the mind; and the very distinction, not without a certain ferment by which the whole is seasoned, blends the various draughts into the use of a single flavor, so that even if it appears whence something was taken, it may yet appear to be something other than that from which it will be recognized as taken.

This we see nature do in our body without any work of ours: the foods we receive, so long as they persist in their own quality and float solid, are a bad burden to the stomach; but when they have been changed from what they were, then at last they pass into strength and blood. Let us accomplish the same in those things by which talents are nourished: that whatever we have drunk in we not allow to remain intact, lest it be foreign, but let it be cooked into a kind of digestion; otherwise it can go into the memory, not into the talent.

From all things let us gather whence one may be made, just as one number is made from single ones. Let our mind do this: let it hide all by which it has been helped, yet show what it itself has produced—as those who compound fragrant unguents take care above all that the ingredients to be blended have no proper odor of their own, meaning to confuse the juices of all into one breath. You see of how many voices a chorus consists, yet one sound is rendered from all. There some voice is high, some low, some middling; women join the men; a pipe is interposed: thus the voices of individuals are hidden there, those of all appear, and harmony is made from dissonant sounds.

Such I wish this present work to be: let there be in it many arts, many precepts, examples of many ages, but conspiring into one. In which, if you neither scorn what is already known to you nor avoid what is unknown, you will find very many things that it is either a pleasure to read, or an adornment to have read, or a use to remember. For I think nothing has been inserted in this work either useless to know or difficult to grasp, but all things by which your talent may be livelier, your memory better supported, your speech more skillful, your discourse more uncorrupted—unless somewhere we, born under another sky, are not helped by the vein of the Latin tongue.

Which from those who, if indeed for some there shall by chance sometimes be time and will to become acquainted with these things, we wish asked and obtained: that they take it fairly and kindly if in our discourse the native elegance of a Roman mouth is wanting. But how incautious am I, who have run upon the charm of a rebuke once proceeding from M. Cato against A. Albinus, who was consul with L. Lucullus. That Albinus wrote Roman affairs in Greek speech. In the first book of his history it is written to this effect: that it was fitting that no one should be angry with him if anything in those books was written with too little composition or less elegantly. "For I am," he says, "a Roman man born in Latium, and Greek eloquence is most foreign to us." And therefore he asked pardon and favor against a bad opinion if anything had been mistaken. When M. Cato had read this: "Surely you," he said, "Aulus, are too much a trifler, since you preferred to beg off from fault rather than be free from fault. For we are accustomed to ask pardon either when we have erred unawares or when we have admitted a wrong under the compulsion of one commanding. I ask you," he said, "who drove you to commit that for which, before you did it, you would ask to be forgiven?"

Now we shall state the argument which we have given to this work, as under a kind of habit of a prologue.