M. Vitruvii Pollionis ... De architectura libri. X. ad Augustum Caesarem accuratissime conscripti, & locis quamplurimis hac editione emendati

for having opened the path to the understanding of nautical matters by collecting testimonies from everywhere and comparing them among themselves. Why this? Certainly because by this industry of his, he has guided as if by hand those who needed an assistant to understand ancient histories. Therefore, those who read that little book do not think they are wasting their effort. What then should be thought of Vitruvius? Who has embraced not just one part, but so many things simultaneously: he does not dig up buried monuments of antiquity from here and there, but he left us antiquity itself, of which he was an eyewitness, described as if on tablets. Nor should you object to me that the method of the ancients was completely different from ours: and for that reason, the names they used neither suit our times nor can be understood by us. For although the tenth book is judged by others to be more abstruse: we see however that Budaeus, helped by the work of the presbyter Iocundus, has accommodated the names of the machines to our age and present use. Nor do I deny that there are some things which hardly any man will ever grasp: but these should not be an impediment to investigating the rest. To these is also added a third thing, that he does not speak like a manual laborer: but explains with reason the matters of which he speaks, drawn and taken from the sources of the liberal arts. Thus, here philosophers will recognize many things taken from their inner treasures. Mathematicians will have things in which they may exercise themselves. Musicians will have the principles of their art translated from Aristoxenus.

Since these things are truly so, I hope I have not incurred much ill will among the learned, who have brought to light this most famous Author, noble in so many gifts and so many excellent examples. In which, although anyone endowed with honest candor will be able to estimate how much labor I have exhausted, I wanted to indicate some things as if with a finger, intending to permit the rest to the ingenuity of learned men. In the beginning, we obtained the Parisian copy, which scholars will easily understand to be corrupt and poorly arranged according to the mode of the text by comparing it. In the very work of the Author, more than one hundred and forty places are either corrected or restored for the better: also the variety of reading is diligently exposed in many places. Furthermore, we have added annotations throughout the Chapters. Whenever the Chapters were too prolix, we have inserted them into those same ones. Moreover, in all these, so that the labor of searching might be easier and more expeditious for the Reader, we have so fitted the individual places of the Annotations or Castigations to the text with their own letters, that immediately, the order in which all things are connected appears.