MORGAN. — ON THE LANGUAGE OF VITRUVIUS. 475 



in his second. As for his example of anteponere, it should be written as 

 two words, ante ponere (so Rose 2 ; cf. Cic. Fam. 1, 9, 21 : ut paulo ante 

 posui), and the Vitruvian employment of pono in these two places should 

 be compared with the common colloquial usage of it, as for example in 

 Cic. Fin. 2, 31 ; Leyg. 2, 6; Livy, 10, 9, 12. For the use of the imper- 

 sonal dignum est in the sense of operae pretium, it would not be difficult 

 to find examples (cf. for instance Plaut. Ps. 1013, and, with indignum, 

 Sail. lug. 79, 1), but the real peculiarity in the Vitruvian usage is that 

 ut with the subjunctive follows, the whole sentence being : quae si prope 

 urbem essent, dignum esset ut ex his officinis omnia opera perficerentur. 

 This impersonal usage does not indeed seem to occur before the very late 

 authors mentioned by Ussing (cf. Drager, II, 258). Avery similar em- 

 ployment of the personal digna is, however, found in Livy 24, 16, 19: 

 digna res visa ut, etc., where of course the relative construction would be 

 as impossible as in the Vitruvian sentence. 13 Finally, of necessitate used 

 in the sense of jiecessario, it must be admitted that this cannot be paral- 

 leled in or before classical times, and that the employment of the ablative 

 of an abstract instead of an adverb is one of the characteristics of African 

 Latin (Sittl, die lokalen Verschiedenheiten der lateinischen Sprache, p. 107). 

 It has in fact been observed that many stylistic peculiarities that are found 

 in the African writers occur also in Vitruvius (Praun, p. 13, n.). How- 

 ever, if the ablative of any abstract is allowable instead of an adverb it 

 would surely be necessitate ; cf. Caesar's qua necessitate adductus, B. G. 

 6, 12, 5 ; qua necessitate permotus, B. C. 3, 24, 4, with the pleonastic 

 necessitate coactus of Bell. Afr. 55, 2 (cf. 21, 1 ; 24, 4), which is like 

 necessario concti in Ter. Andr. 632; Bell. Hisp. 24, 2; 32, 1. This 

 pleonasm with necessitas is common in Vitruvius. 



Ussing's next remark, as he himself seems to be conscious, is of no 

 value as proof of late authorship: 'In a few instances videtur is meant 

 to signify placet : magnitudines balinearum videntur fieri pro copiahomi- 

 num (126, 11); itaque minime fistulis plumbeis aqua duci videtur 

 (210, 13). In other places Vitruvius correctly adds oportere, so that the 

 omission might perhaps rather be called a peculiarity of style in the 

 author, as in primo volumine putavi . . . exponere (36, 23).' — -But this 

 use of videtur cannot be called a peculiarity of Vitruvius nor evidence of 

 late authorship, for the passive of video in the sense of placet or 8o/cet 

 occurs three times in the Bellum Africum (5 ; 25, 1 , 42, 1). Of putavi 



13 For the great variety of constructions with digitus in Vitruvius, see my article 

 in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 17, 1 f. 



