PROLEGOMENA

ASTROLOGY

A decorative woodcut initial 'Q' containing an avian figure, possibly a stork or crane, surrounded by intricate scrolling foliage and vine patterns within a square border.

ALTHOUGH many things in every kind of learning have been handed down by the Greeks, everyone nevertheless acknowledges Greece as the teacher of the fine arts rather than their parent; because she cultivated not her own inventions, but those of the Chaldeans The "Chaldeans" refers to the ancient Babylonians, who were renowned in the Renaissance as the founders of astronomy and astrology.. Those who judge in this way seem to me either to have forgotten the antiquity of the Greeks, or to be ignorant of their illustrious merits in literature. For if we trace the matter back to its furthest origin, we shall discover that the arts were not only invented and perfected by the Greeks in ancient times, but were even derived from them to those nations from whom these critics claim the Greeks drew their knowledge. Since the progress of great things is slow, and a single lifetime does not suffice for their investigation, some of them are at first only in their early stages, and are not transmitted to us in their state of perfection: for this reason it happens that later generations add something by forging ahead with the inventions of their ancestors, and finally something is always left by predecessors for posterity that requires either a corrector or an illustrator. Since this is the case in