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THE PRINTER TO THE KIND READER

G R E E T I N G S.

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JUST AS the foods we eat, though the same ones are served daily, are no less sweet and pleasant to those who are hungry; so too the books of learned men (the storehouse of spiritual nourishment), though they are reprinted quite often and set before the public gaze of the literate, are not for that reason any less welcome or dear to those who desire to feed and satisfy their minds with the humanities original: "humanitatis artibus," referring to the liberal arts and classical studies that make one "human." and noble disciplines. How many times, I ask you, have the works of Aristotle, Demosthenes, Homer, Hippocrates, Galen, Cicero, Virgil, Pliny, and others of that same rank been published by the presses? Yet who, unless they are ignorant, envious, or pridefully fastidious, condemns so many editions? Who would not judge a man worthy of the heaviest rebuke if he rejected a harvest and abundance of wheat, wine, or fruit?

Certainly, we should much less despise a wealth of learned volumes. For the former things pertain only to the body, while these pertain to the soul; and as much as the soul excels the body, so much do the things proper to the soul surpass physical things. Least of all should we reject a multitude of books written about philosophy; on the contrary, a certain flowing abundance and luxury of these is to be desired, so that all men (as far as possible) may gather the sweetest fruits of philosophy. Nothing more useful, nothing more desirable, and nothing more excellent than philosophy can be found or even imagined. For she is the procreatress and, as it were, the parent of all the arts worthy of praise; she is the art of life, the medicine of the soul, and the cultivation of the mind which pulls out vices by the root—in short, the mother of all good deeds and blessed words. For this reason, Marcus Tullius Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator. quite rightly said of her:

O philosophy, guide of life! O seeker out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could not only we, but the life of man in general, have been without you? You brought forth cities; you called scattered men into the fellowship of life; you joined them together, first by sharing homes and then by marriage; you united them through the communion of letters and speech. You were the inventress of laws, and the teacher of morals and discipline. To you we flee; from you we seek help; to you we hand ourselves over, as we did in large part before, so now entirely and completely. Indeed, one day spent well and according to your precepts is to be preferred to a sinful immortality. Whose resources, then, should we use rather than yours? You who have granted us tranquility of life and taken away the terror of death.

So he wrote. Therefore, a great portion of men cannot be criticized enough—those who not only do not deign to accept such a rare and divine gift when offered, but even despise it and, as it were, trample it underfoot. They ought instead to remember that they were born as men, not as dogs or pigs A reference to the biblical proverb about casting pearls before swine. who take more delight in mud than in the most precious pearls; and they should therefore apply themselves with all their strength to these studies, which are of all things most worthy of a human being.

And so, it is not for those drones original: "fucis," referring to male bees that do no work; a common metaphor for the lazy or unlearned. but for the true bees—that is, the true foster children of philosophy—that we have spent our labor and expense in reprinting these philosophical writings. I trust that these efforts will be neither fruitless nor in vain, and that they will be most welcome to you, kind reader. For we have not spent our efforts on just any common writers, but on the undisputed princes of philosophy themselves: Plato and Aristotle. The latter we produced from our workshop not long ago. The former, however, we now present to all followers of truth...