“On July 31, 1554, the degree of master of philosophy was publicly conferred on Cureus by the most illustrious and eminent dean of the philosophical college, Caspar Peucer, (a man justly most famous in church and state to all posterity and never praised enough), who proposed to him, when he was heard in private examination, a passage of Lucan from the colloquy of Pompey with the sailor, ‘Quae sit mensura aequoris in caelo?’ Also the 32nd proposition of the first book of Euclid. He then offered two writings to the examiners: the first in Latin, a history concerning the nature and examples of the virtues which are seen in bees; the other in Greek, a history of Sanseverino, prince of Naples not long before our time who, since he excelled in military virtue by employing an ingenious stratagem, escaped, as Pontano tells, the toils of the Arabs when he set out for the Holy Land. Melanchthon approved especially of this narration and said that the style resembled that of Xenophon, that most praiseworthy little Attic bee….”

From University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Lynn Thorndyke