TO HIS LORD, THE PATRICIAN SYMMACHUS, BOETHIUS.

In the giving and receiving of gifts, obligations between those who hold one another in high esteem are rightly valued if it is clearly established that the giver has found nothing more generous to offer, nor has the receiver ever accepted anything that he might embrace with more pleasant goodwill. Considering this myself, I have brought not sluggish weights of wealth—for which, when the thirst for possession has ignited, nothing is less suited for wickedness, and when a triumphant spirit has trampled them underfoot, nothing is cheaper for merit—but those things which, taken from the wealth of Greek literature, I have gathered into the treasury of Roman discourse. For the logic of my own work will also be established for me if those things which I have elicited from the doctrines of wisdom are approved by the judgment of the most wise. You see, therefore, how the effect of such great labor looks only to your examination, and should not come to public ears unless it relies upon the endorsement of a learned opinion. In which nothing should seem surprising, since this work, which follows the inventions of wisdom, does not rest upon the authority of its author but upon another's discretion; for the matter of reason is weighed by its own instruments when it is forced to undergo the judgment of a wise man. But I do not establish the same safeguards for this little gift as I do for other arts, for indeed Here begins a medieval scholastic commentary: "The epistle of Boethius to his father-in-law, the patrician Symmachus, begins. Manilius Severinus flourished in the times of Theodoric, king of the Italians, and translated this little book from Greek into Latin, adorning it with the flowers of Roman eloquence. The book of Boethius on Arithmetic begins."