468 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



Pforzheim, 1887, and II, Durlach, 1888, have made careful and valuable 

 studies in the language of Vitruvius, but neither of them endeavored to 

 show anything about his date, accepting the common view that he wrote 

 under Augustus. 1 Consequently when Ussing made use of arguments 

 based upon language and style he was opening an almost new field, 

 although for his collection of examples he relied chiefly upon Praun. 

 His use of these arguments seems to have had a considerable effect upon 

 scholars known personally to me; further, his conclusion was accepted 

 by Lanciani (Bullettino Communale, 1899, p. 24, n. 2); and it led 

 Wolfflin to the statement that the case must be considered as once more 

 reopened for further discussion (Archiv, VII, 301). This dictum caused 

 Degering in his article on Etruscan temples (Gott. Nachriehten, Phil.- 

 Hist. Kl., 1897, 2, 137) to think that Ussing might possibly be in the 

 right, although recently (Rhein. Mus. LVII, 1902, p. 8) he has supported 

 the contrary view on grounds of subject matter. But neither he nor any 

 one of the reviewers 2 of Ussing's treatise has published a detailed study 

 of Ussing's linguistic and stylistic arguments with a view to determining 

 whether they really do furnish evidence of a late date of composition. 

 It seems worth while, therefore, to examine them closely, and this I 

 propose to do in the following article. Ussing's contention is that the 

 phenomena to which he draws attention ' point to the decadence of the 

 Latin language and to its transition to the Romance tongues.' I shall 

 inquire whether these phenomena or traces of them are found in 

 republican Latin writers and in the Augustan and Silver ages. 



But before beginning this inquiry three observations are necessary. 

 In the first place, we must never forget that in ' Vitruvius de Archi- 

 tectura ' we are dealing with a work which, if it was composed before 

 the end of the Augustan age, is absolutely unique in its kind. We have 

 no other prose work on a technical or scientific subject (unless we in- 

 clude agriculture among such subjects) written in Latin as early as this 

 period, and we have no other treatise on architecture, either in Greek or 



1 Such was also the attitude of Richardson in his article in the Harvard Studies 

 in Classical Philology, 1, 153 ff. The dissertation of Stock, De Vitruvii sermone, 

 Berlin, 1888, is of no value for our purposes. The treatises of H. Ulrich, De 

 Vitruvii copia verborum, I, Frankenthal, 1883, and II, Schwabach, 1885, 1 know only 

 from the review in Wolfflin's Archiv, 1, 126. 



2 The chief of these are to be found in Berl. Phil. Woch., 1897, 773 ff. (by Krohn) ; 

 Revue de Philologie, 21, 118 ff ; Bursian's Jahresbericht, 108, 1901, 118 ff. (by 

 W. Schmidt) ; Journal Royal Institute of British Architects, 3 d Ser., 1899, 149 ff. 

 (by Brown) ; Athenaeum, 1897, p. 586. 



