Compendium of Learning (Compendiosa Doctrina), Vol. I

If anyone in human memory has been conflicted by adverse fortune among scholars, I truly feel myself to be such a one, for nature denied me the strength of Hercules, yet imposed upon me labors, and I might almost say greater ones. Certainly, it fell to him once to clear the stables of Augeas; to us, it fell first to edit the remains of the books of Lucilius, then those of Ennius, and now, for I am coming to Nonius, a third.

I have undertaken a work that is varied, multiform, vast, and obscure, hardly less so than the most ancient life of the Roman people itself, about which—without Nonius and Festus—we would, by Hercules, know little. Finally, it is so intricate that the deeper you penetrate into the recesses of this labyrinth, the further you seem to be from the end. For, to say nothing of the many things confused by the fault of the author himself, the scribes who lived between the fifth and ninth centuries, a time most hostile to studies, had such incompetence or negligence in transcribing that the more errors you remove, the more appear to spring up, as if from the heads of a Hydra.

It has been more than twenty-five years since I began to treat Nonius, whose study I have never interrupted at any time, whether things were going well or badly for us, whether we were occupied with other matters, or whether, with all cares relaxed, we were enjoying our leisure in a purely Greek fashion.

And yet, we were always afraid to put the finishing touch to the undertaking, not led by impatience with the work or a desire for rest (for we have not lived an idle life), but terrified by the immensity of the task and rightly remembering that saying of Thucydides which Hemsterhusius constantly impressed upon his friends: ignorance brings boldness, but calculation brings hesitation. original: "ἀμαθία μὲν θράσος, λογισμὸς δὲ ὄκνον φέρει."

Indeed, regarding the fact that friends would from time to time boast, in order to excite and encourage us whenever we lacked heart, that greater praise and joy would come to our labor because those who in this century had been involved in treating the book of Nonius had for the most part turned out to be very poor scholars, I consider this to be far otherwise. On the contrary, the hope of striving for the highest results is present especially when one enters into competition with energetic men.