THE PREFACE OF VITRUVIUS 



By Morris H. Morgan. 



Presented November 11, 1908. Received November 4, 1908. 



That the Latin treatise on architecture, extant under the name of 

 Vitruvius in manuscripts of the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and 

 fifteenth centuries, is a genuine work, and that it was first published in 

 the earlier half of the Augustan age,l are two propositions which 

 ought no longer to be doubted. The theory that it is a forgery of the 

 third, fourth, or even of a later century, — a theory propounded 

 originally by Schultz 2 and supported much later by Ussing,3 — has 

 never been seriously entertained by many scholars, and it has been 

 recently refuted on the grounds both of subject matter 4 and of lan- 

 guage^ The ascription of the work to the time of the Emperor Titus 

 is a much older idea. Suggested at first, apparently, in the seventeenth 

 century,6 it was discussed but rejected by the Spanish translator 

 Ortiz ; 7 it was supported by the English translator Newton 8 towards 



1 Cf. Degering, Berl. Phil. Woch., 27, 1292 ff. (1907), and Morgan, Harvard 

 Stud, in CI. Philol., 17, 9 ff. (1906). After the printing of this article had 

 begun, I received L. Sontheimer's dissertation, Vitruvius und seine Zeit., 

 Tubingen, 1908. I have added a few remarks upon it in footnotes 13, 18, 

 49, and 51. 



2 First in his letter to Goethe in 1829, published in Rhein. Mus., 4, 329 

 (1836) ; reprinted by his son, together with a much longer argument in Unter- 

 suchung liber das Zeitalter des . . . Vitruvius, Leipzig, 1856. 



3 In Danish in 1896; more fully in English: Observations on Vitruvius, 

 published in London by the Royal Institute of British Architects, in 1898. 



4 See especially Degering, Rhein. Mus., 57, 8 ff. (1902); Krohn, Berl. Phil. 

 Woch., 17, 773 ff. (1897); and Schmidt, Bursian's Jahresbericht, 108, 118 ff. 

 (1901). 



6 Morgan, Language of Vitruvius, These Proceedings, 41, 467 ff. (1906); 

 cf. Hey in Archiv f. Lat. Lex., 15, 287 ff. (1907); Degering, Berl. Phil. Woch., 

 27, 15*66 ff. (1907); Nohl, Woch. Kl. Phil., 23, 1252 ff. (1906). 



6 See Perrault's Vitruve, ed. 1673, note to Vitr., 1 pr. 1. 



1 Madrid, 1787, preface. 



8 London, 1791, Vol. 1, p. ix. 



