A decorative horizontal woodcut border featuring interlocking geometric and floral patterns with central circular motifs.

TO THE YOUTH

OF AQUITAINE, AND THE READ-

er, Robert Balfour

sends greetings.

Large ornamental drop cap 'I' decorated with intricate floral and foliate scrolls.

Among the learned monuments of ancient Greece is this work, Peri kyklikēs theōrias meteōrōn On the Circular Theory of Meteors, left to us by the great writer Cleomedes. Beyond a most accurate description of the heavens and the stars, it is so instructed and adorned with such learning and such a multiple variety of geometric theorems that, if one excludes the writings of Ptolemy alone from ancient authors in this genre, one will find absolutely nothing in all of antiquity to compare with it. It is all the more to be lamented that it immigrated so unluckily from Greece into Latium, and for so many years lay unknown and inglorious together with its author. But we know this happened through the laziness of the leader and interpreter. For Georgius Valla of Piacenza, who was the first to attempt to transfer it into Latin lands and commit it to Latin custom, I will speak freely, he behaves so childishly throughout the whole work, and through a depraved interpretation often attaches so many vain and false things to it, that he seems not so much to have translated it as to have perverted it; and not so much to have brought Cleomedes into Latium as to have expelled him from it, and to have condemned him to the misfortune of eternal exile. For although that man was excellently learned, as his other works testify, it can hardly be said how negligently he performed this duty of interpretation, and what a useless translation he left to us, in which almost everything is rendered obscurely, much ineptly, and not a little unfaithfully, expressing nothing less than the author's meaning. He mocks us entirely, and in place of the precious purple of Cleomedes, he foists upon us I know not what vile rags, which anyone from the common crowd would disdain and loathe. Jupiter snatched his spouse from Ixion, and in place of Juno, he cast a cloud before him: he wished to steal Cleomedes from us

And in place of the man, to hold out a cloud and empty winds.

For those who know Cleomedes from no other source than this translation, there is no doubt that they judge him a vain and inept writer, and not worthy enough for anyone to waste good hours upon. The opinion derived from this source has flowed widely indeed, no less publicly damaging to us than privately disastrous to Cleomedes himself. g. For that reason alone, he lay for so many years in neglect and squalor, despised, ignored, and known only to a few, and those learned in Greek.