The Reckoning of Time

...declared with your greatest praise and the immortality of your name. They also thought that my labors would gain some authority through the recommendation of a prince, under whose protection they might be published. Therefore, when I received to be judged several books written by the Anglo-Saxon Bede concerning the nature of things, times, and nineteen-year cycles, which had not been printed in this manner before, I was first delighted by the age of the manuscript, and all the more so because (as I learned from the inscription) it had belonged to Heribert, he who was later added to the catalogue of saints. I judged the not-at-all vulgar erudition, with most pleasant diagrams added throughout, not unworthy of posterity, even if the writer himself followed a simple and almost slack form of speaking.

Therefore, while it was destined for the press, I began to restore it where it was corrupted by the ignorance of the scribe or by age, and then to explain certain passages more clearly, though beyond the original intent, than they had been gathered together very briefly by him. I also added many things from the field of mathematics, and due to the pleasantness of the subject and a pen running more freely, more labor slipped in during the revision than I had intended. Nor did I think this would be fruitless or unnecessary for those who are held by a desire to know the nature of most beautiful things. For there were many such things that could hardly be understood without employing geometric proofs, which these disciplines enjoy, by one not well versed in this kind of study; others were useless unless they were extended by the addition of times and calculations up to the years of our own age, such as the nineteen-year cycles, which Bede left incomplete, and which reached us neither whole nor corrected.

This work, most adorned prince, which slipped out from me during reading and the pleasure of study rather than being written, I have brought to light and into the hands of men under your auspices. I did this so that if by chance the genius that Martial requires in a book that is to live is not inherent in it through us, it might nevertheless reach posterity through the authority of your name, which has been and is daily consecrated to eternity by most honest signs.

I also did this so that we might be able to gratify your grace in some matter in the name of our common studies, for I could not easily say how much they owe to you. Indeed, I think it matters much for the increment and preservation of studies if princes and rulers of public affairs are imbued with honest and liberal arts and the precepts of philosophy. For there are many examples that subjects are mostly added to the same studies to which their princes are devoted. For who did not serve in the military in the times of Romulus and Alexander? Under Augustus, everyone composed poetry. Nero’s interest in music invited very many to the art of singing. Under the reign of Justinian, a legislator of laws or rather a rhapsodist (even if some think him to have been ignorant of ancient law, and, what would be more shameful to say, analphabeton illiterate), everyone learned to respond concerning the law. Nor is it as false as is commonly tossed about: "As is the prince, so is the people."

Since these things are so, I truly believe that good literature owes you a great deal, because you not only love and promote it, but you also understand and cultivate it beautifully. The former makes you excel in prudence and humanity, the latter in the company of the most learned men, and both make you act as a true prince; both gain for you very many admirers and lovers of your praise, especially those who wish for good counsel in honest disciplines.

Finally, I did not doubt that I would also be doing something personally pleasing if I wrote to you about those arts that lift our thoughts from human affairs to heaven, and which, through the contemplation of celestial things, affect the mind with inexhaustible pleasure while it admires the majesty of nature, and, as has been written beautifully by Plato, lift up the eyes and the mind immersed in barbarian mire, and, having wiped away the filth, direct them toward the most excellent view of nature. For who is so far removed from the study of humanity that he does not sometimes, with eyes lifted to the most beautiful lights of the world in the sky, admire this untransmutable handiwork of God, which is superior to all admiration? This thought carries spirits beyond the heavens into the veneration of the supreme creator. Therefore, David also exclaims with a prophetic spirit in the psalms: The heavens declare the glory of God, and...