Fundamentals of Arithmetic; Fundamentals of Music

hardly any science, being complete in all its parts and lacking nothing, relies so much on its own safeguards that it does not also desire the assistance of other arts. For in fashioning statues from marble, the labor of hewing the mass is one thing, and the method of forming the image is another, nor does the luster of the polished work await the hand of the same craftsman. But the panel is committed to the hands of the painter by the carpenters: the wax, plucked with rustic observation; the dyes of colors, sought out by the skill of merchants; the linens, worked in laborious weaving shops, provide a manifold material. Is the same not also seen in the instruments of war? Here one sharpens arrows with shafts, there a strong breastplate groans upon a black anvil, while another buys the coverings of a raw boss to be fixed to the circle of his own labor. By so many arts is one art perfected. But the completion of our labor runs to a much easier outcome. For you alone will place the hand upon the final work, in which there is no need to labor over the consensus of those who decide. For however much this judgment is proven to be cultivated by many arts, it is nevertheless fulfilled by one examination.

Therefore, you may test how much labor the time drawn out in long leisure has added to us in this study, whether the swiftness of an exercised mind comprehends the flights of subtle matters, and whether the thinness of a meager discourse suffices for explaining those things that are hindered by obscure judgments. In which matter, the gains of another's judgment are also sought by me, since you, being most expert in both languages, can prescribe, by mere pronouncement, how much those who are without Greek speech should dare to judge of me. But not bound by the dictates of another, I constrain myself by the strict law of translation, but having wandered a little more freely, I insist upon another's journey, not his footprints. For even those things which were discussed more diffusely concerning numbers by Nicomachus are moderate.