ON THE LANGUAGE OF VITRUVIUS. 

 By Morris H. Morgan. 



Presented December 13, 1905. Received December 23, 1905. 



During the last ten years the question of the date and the authorship 

 of ' Vitruvius de Architectura ' has been revived after a long slumber. 

 In 1896, Professor J. L. Ussing published a treatise in Danish in 

 which his object was to show that the writer of that work was not an 

 architect, but an amateur who lived about the middle of the third century 

 of our era, and who was a mere compiler, drawing chiefly from Varro. 

 Two years later, in 1898, this treatise, much enlarged, was translated 

 into English and carefully revised by the author, and in this form it was 

 published in London by the Royal British Institute of Architects under 

 the title Observations on Vitruvius de Architectura Libri Decern, with 

 special regard to the time at which this work was written. To prove his 

 point, Ussing made use of two kinds of arguments, the first being based 

 upon the language and style, and the second upon the subject matter of 

 the work. Both the original Danish and the translation into English have 

 attracted the attention of classical students and architects in no small 

 degree. Still more recently a French scholar, M. Victor Mortet, has 

 written a series of articles entitled Recherches Critiques sur Vitruve et 

 sonCEuvre in the Revue Archeologique (1902, pp. 39-81 ; 1904, pp. 222- 

 233 ; 382-393) in which he holds that our author wrote during the reign 

 of the Emperor Titus. His arguments depend almost altogether upon 

 the contents of the work, not upon its language and style, which he 

 does not treat in any detail. 



In fact, it is to the nature of the contents of Vitruvius that attention 

 has been almost entirely directed by those who have written upon the 

 subject of his date. Scholars who have examined the question are 

 familiar in this connection with the names of Newton, Hirt, Schultz, 

 Osanu, Detlefsen, Diels, Oehmichen, Thiel, Degering, and others to 

 whose writings there is no need of further reference here. To be 

 sure, Praun in his Bemerkungen zur Syntax des Vitruv, Bamberg, 1885, 

 and Eberhard in his two programmes De Vitruvii genere dicendi, I, 



