PROLEGOMENA.

Verily, nothing certain can be put forward regarding this matter until the very difficult question concerning the scholia of Germanicus and their author has been more accurately treated. It seems indeed beyond doubt that those scholia were translated from the Greek scholia of Aratus; but at what time that was done, that cannot be easily judged in the state of these scholia, which have been miserably interpolated through long use in schools. Another difficulty is added to this case, with which we are dealing. For in that part of the scholia, where we noted a consensus with our writer, nothing that can be compared is read in the Greek scholia of Aratus; and indeed, in the transcript that the Royal Library of Berlin preserves, made by the hand of N. Heinsius of the Puteanus codex of Germanicus's scholia, all these things are missing. Therefore, their origin seems even more uncertain.

The chapters that follow regarding geometry are translated from Euclid, indeed in such a way that they do not agree with certain other versions, nor could they have been copied from them.

What is then handed down concerning music appears for the most part to have been drawn from older sources. This is proven by the mention of poets and certain other writers who seem to have been less known than the learning of this writer suggests. Then those things that are told about Rhythmonius, Hymenaeus, Periclymenus, and Perimede (ch. 10), and later about Hypate, Mese, and Nete the names of strings on the Greek lyre of the Muses (p. 90, 6), about Apollo (p. 90, 15), and about his son Lycorus, born of the nymph Paramesa (p. 91, 1), although silly, must nevertheless be referred to Greek authors, and perhaps that Nicocrates (p. 87, 8) handed down all these fables.