En lector, librum damus vere aureum, planeque scholasticum, quo continentur haec

TO THE BEST AND MOST PRUDENT MEN, THE CONSULS AND SENATORS of Hilperhausen in Franconia, their lords to be observed. Greetings.

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Most wise Consuls and Senators, all sensible men consider that authors who teach both piety and morals, and finally contain precepts for the honest government of the whole of life, should be proposed to youth. Among these, the little book of Admonitions Parænefeon Admonitions/Exhortations by Nilus, bishop and martyr, a most holy man, will deservedly be numbered; for it is truly pious and elegant, encompassing the principal chapters of piety, honesty, virtue, and the government of life and morals, included as brief sentences and axioms like certain oracles. This method of teaching, as it is most ancient and best, so it is also by far the most useful, which we have attempted to show elsewhere at greater length.

Moreover, Ioannes Honterus of Braşov original: "Coronensis", a most learned man and very deserving of letters in his fatherland of Transylvania, and one most studious of languages and all antiquity, discovered this author at one time in a certain most ancient library among the clearly barbaric men in Wallachia (which is a region neighboring Transylvania) while he was searching the libraries of that region and neighboring Moldavia. He would have undoubtedly discovered more, and would have shared them with students, had not less favorable fates begrudged that land and also the public utility, and had they not snatched away that man, as they also did Wagner, both of them most learned and excellent in the knowledge of languages, and the most shining lights of their Transylvania.

Furthermore, when friends sent that author (whom we owe to Honterus, who first brought him out of the shadows into the light, where he had long waged war, hiding with moths, worms, decay, and other pests of good books of this kind) to us from Transylvania, so that we might make him of public use, we translated him from Greek into Latin: