In Lucian, Pancrates lacked a servant on his journey from Memphis to Coptus in Egypt. He took a door bar, spoke some magical words—Eucrates, who tells the story, was there—and made it stand up like a servant, fetch water, turn the spit, serve supper, and do whatever other work he wanted. When it had finished the service he required, he turned his man back into a stick. I have no such skill to create men whenever I please, or money to hire them; no whistle to summon them like a ship’s master and order them to hurry. I have no such authority or benefactor as the noble Ambrose was to Origen, providing six or seven copyists to take down his dictation. So I must do my work myself.

I was therefore forced, like a bear giving birth to her cubs, to bring forth this shapeless lump. I had no time to lick it into shape, as she does her young, but had to publish it just as it was first written: “whatever came into my mouth,” in an improvised style, as I usually perform all my other compositions. “I poured out whatever my genius dictated,” from a confused heap of notes, and wrote with as little deliberation as I ordinarily speak: without affecting grand words, inflated phrases, jingling expressions, figures of speech, striking lines that catch fire in flight like Acestes’ arrows, flights of wit, splendid bursts of inspiration, eulogies, exaggerated ornament, elegant turns, and so on, which so many people love.

I am “a water-drinker”: I drink none of the wine that so greatly improves our modern wits. I am a loose, plain, rough writer: “I call a fig a fig and a spade a spade.” I am as outspoken as I am unrestrained: “the same in my pen as in my mind.” I call a spade a spade; “I write these things for minds, not ears.” I value substance, not words, remembering Cardano’s saying, “words for things, not things for words,” and seeking, with Seneca, “what to write, not how”: what to write about rather than how to write.

For, as Philo thinks, someone occupied with substance neglects words, and those who excel in the art of speaking have no deep learning: Words glitter with trappings, but words have no marrow within. Besides, wise Seneca observed: when you see a man painstaking about his words and polished in his speech, be certain that his mind is occupied with trifles; there is nothing solid in him. “Verbal elegance is no manly ornament.” As someone said of a nightingale: you are a voice, and nothing more, and so on.

On this point, therefore, I declare myself a disciple of Apollonius, a follower of Socrates: I disregard fine phrasing and devote my effort to informing my reader’s understanding, not pleasing his ear. My purpose is not the polished composition an orator requires, but to express myself readily and plainly as things come to me. So my style flows like a river: sometimes rushing and swift, then sluggish and slow; now straight, then “through winding ways”; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow. It is serious, then light; comic, then satirical; more elaborate, then more relaxed, as the subject required or as I felt at the time.

And if you are willing to read this treatise, it will seem to you like a road to an ordinary traveller: sometimes fair, sometimes foul; open country here, enclosed land there; barren in one place, better soil in another. By woods, groves, hills, valleys, plains, and so on, I shall lead you “over steep mountains, slippery valleys, dew-covered turf, and clod-filled fields,” through a variety of sights—things you will like and things you will certainly dislike.

As for the material itself or my method, if it is faulty, please consider Columella’s saying: “Nothing is perfect or brought to completion by one person’s efforts.” No one can observe everything. Even in those great masters Galen and Aristotle, much is undoubtedly defective and may justly be criticized, corrected, and avoided. “A good hunter,” someone maintains, “catches many beasts, not all.” A good huntsman can catch some, not all: I have done my best.

Besides, I do not make my home in this field of study: “These are not the furrows I plough; this is not the dust in which I sweat.” I admit that I am only a dabbler, a visitor, picking a flower here and there. I readily concede that a severe critic examining what I have written would find not just three faults, as Scaliger did in Terence, but three hundred—as many as he found in Cardan’s Subtleties; as many conspicuous errors as Wilhelm Lauremberg, lately a professor at Rostock, finds in Laurentius’s anatomy, or the Venetian Barozzi in Sacrobosco.

And although this is a sixth edition, in which I ought to have been more accurate and corrected all the earlier oversights, it was nevertheless “a work of great labour”—so difficult and tedious that, as carpenters discover from experience, it is sometimes much better to build a new house than to repair an old one. I could write as much again as readily as revise what is already written. So if anything is wrong—and I admit that something is—I ask for a friendly correction, not bitter abuse: Let the Graces accompany the Muses; let every Fury keep away.

Otherwise, as in ordinary disputes, “let us knot the rope of contention—but who benefits?” We may quarrel, and probably abuse one another, but to what purpose? Let us say we are both scholars: Both Arcadians, equal at singing, and ready to answer. What shall we gain by wrangling? We shall trouble and injure ourselves and amuse other people. If I am proved wrong, I will give way; I will correct myself. “If I have said anything contrary to good morals or to truth, in sacred or secular learning, let it be as though I had never said it.”