TO ALVISE MICHELE

GIOVANNI BERNARDO

FELICIANO SENDS GREETINGS original: "S." is an abbreviation for "Salutem," a standard Latin greeting wishing the recipient health and prosperity.

A decorative woodcut initial letter 'Q' depicting a scholar wearing a cap, seated at a desk and reading a book. The background shows bookshelves and various academic objects.

How much effort the ancients always devoted to regulating and shaping human conduct original: "moribus," referring to ethics, character, and social habits can be clear to any person who considers the ancient method of philosophizing. Indeed, it is evident that all the schools of the philosophers were held more for the purpose of establishing a way of life than for the sake of mere contemplation and theoretical knowledge. This is shown both by the ancient discipline of Pythagoras and the later instruction of Socrates: from whose discussions every principle of living civilly and morally emerged. Many others, but especially those two splendid lights of wisdom, Plato and Xenophon, handed these principles down to posterity most seriously and elegantly in their literary monuments. For since man has an innate natural desire not so much for merely finding happiness original: "beatitudinem," often translated as "blessedness" or the highest form of human flourishing as for actually attaining it, the philosophers did not think it sufficient to have labored in defining what happiness is, unless they also devised a method by which we could actually reach it. Just as the investigation of the nature of things [provides] a path to finding the first cause of all, and the first author of all, God...