Text.Breler.1611-01.!1v/Translation

To the most noble, illustrious, and wise man, Lord Georg Remus, Patrician of Augsburg, Doctor of Both Laws and Counselor to the Republic of Nuremberg, from Melchior Breler of Fulda, Master of Philosophy and Crowned Poet, lover of many languages.

Noble and truly great man,

The voice is that of an oracle, not a poet; I add, not a saying of the stage, but a response from the Delphic shrine. He who guards against being deceived scarcely guards at all, for even in his caution, and even when he thinks he has taken care, often the cautious one is caught. This was confirmed by the immortal Palladium of the French Kingdom, Henry IV, who, even the day before his assassination, managed to disperse through his guards a surge of people directed at him during his solemn inauguration (among whom the nefarious assassin was mixed), yet he could not avoid that Gallic Atreus. Thus, the father of his country and the mortal deity of the French Kingdom, after so many repelled dagger thrusts, confirmed the saying of a great tragedian writer: "Whom chance often passes by, it sometimes finds." And who could altogether distinguish those masked Bruti and Cassii from the honorable? Solinus once taught us what they are accustomed to be like: similar to a hyena, which follows the shepherds' pens and by constant listening learns to mimic a call that it can reproduce with a human-like voice, so as to savage a man lured out at night. Here I break off my prologue, and I inscribe this prelude to bringing out that owl, as in the tragic iambics of Henry IV (I exclude only the intervention of fate), to your Nobility on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, here by me, under the auspices of the most humane man, Master Leonhard Lemmermann, to be presented in the theater. Perhaps there will be something in it that pleases, something that soothes the ears of the good and scrapes and scalds the ill-tempered. And if the twelve choruses of this mournful tragedy are recited to me by as many languages and nations, then indeed I will finally boast of having served my excellent King most excellently. Farewell, most noble and truly great man.