Hyginus' Book of Fables and Poetic Astronomy

...not to be useless or unpleasant to those who know; therefore, I wished to dedicate this labor of mine to your Excellency, most illustrious Otho, and to bring it into the light under the auspices of your name. At once, I wished to make myself recommended to you by this gift, and I wished that you might be the one whose protection and patronage—as if a safeguard—could defend this book and these studies of ours from the injury of others and of unlearned men. For just as certain amulets are believed to protect infants, from whose necks they are hung, against envy and the fascination of evil, so I trust that those who read your name and title prefixed to this book may be more quickly deterred from criticizing and speaking ill of it. Nor, indeed, do I doubt that you will accept this gift of ours with a willing and grateful mind. For although it may be called, as the saying goes, completely meager and light—for what else does it consist of but fables, and those ancient and obsolete ones?—it is nevertheless sent and given from such a spirit that, by its zeal and goodwill, it should deserve your approval. For if they remember that Artaxerxes, that great king of the Persians, was pleased by an apple which he had received as a gift offered by a rustic man, because he had given what he held to be most personal and precious, it is fitting that these fables should also be more commendable to you for the same reason: as they are the most personal of my own possessions, having sprung from our own foundation, and having spent almost the better part of my past life knowing and cultivating them. Even so, if you should wish to look at the book itself, or at the effort we have spent in correcting it, those things also hold no small weight of recommendation. For this author is—while perhaps not so pure and elegant, to the extent that in some places he might appear little Latin—nonetheless ancient, and not entirely unlike or abhorrent to the remaining writings of Hyginus that have reached us. Above all, however, he is useful to those who are much and diligently occupied in these humanistic studies original: "humanioribus... studiis". For from this, many things that have been hitherto either not at all, or at least wrongly, understood by Ovid and many other poets, finally seem to be able to be understood and explained. You may find here many things that are now plain and straightforward, which for a long time have variously and miserably tormented even great and learned men. How