MORGAN. — ON THE LANGUAGE OP VITRUVIUS. 483 



Ussing has certainly pointed to a misuse of that word which is not found 

 elsewhere before the ecclesiastical writers. This preposition was origi- 

 nally a participle (Thielmann, Archiv, IV, 248), not an adverb like other 

 prepositions, and we have no early parallel of its employment as an 

 adverb, though we might expect to find it in the less careful writers 

 from analogy with the adverbial use of other prepositions. In Vitruvius, 

 trans contra seems to be a translation of KaravTtKpv, especially in 219, 7, 

 where he had in mind the pseudo- Aristotelian de mundo, 2, or a similar 

 account of the itoXol. It may also be observed that Vitruvius uses intra 

 as an adverb half-a-dozen times (see Nohl's Index), a usage commonly 

 called post-Augustan, but found in Bell. Hisp. 35, 2 (Kbhler, Act. Erlang. 

 I, p. 400) ; also adversus five times as an adverb, — found thus in prose 

 not elsewhere before Nepos (Thesaurus, s. v. p. 851, 48 ff.). And we 

 must be slow to stamp trans contra as a necessarily late doublet lest we 

 meet with the fate of that ' grammaticus haud incelebri nomine ' in Gellius 

 (19, 10), who sneered at praeter propter only to be confounded by learning 

 that it had been used by Ennius, Cato, and Varro. 



Next Ussing turns to prepositions, saying : ' In the use of prepositions 

 we are struck by several peculiarities which indicate the dissolution of 

 the language : ab, indicating the cause, " because of," in 58, 1 : ab pondere 

 union's non habent rigorem . . . ab lentitudine firmas recipiunt catena- 

 tiones ; 59, 6 : ab suci vehementi amaritate ab carle aut tinea non nocetur. 

 Ab, " compared with," has been — no doubt correctly — substituted by 

 Rose for ad in 142, 2 : non enim atria minora ab maioribus easdem pos- 

 sunt habere symmetriarum raiiones, a habit which Wdlfflin in Archiv, VII, 

 p. 125, has proved to exist in the ancient Latin translations of the Bible, 

 Itala, and Vulgata, and which is analogous to the use of other preposi- 

 tions such as prae, super or supra, ultra.' — These criticisms may be 

 briefly dismissed. A glance at the Thesaurus s. v. ab, pp. 33-34, will 

 be enough to show that the use of this preposition to denote cause is no 

 evidence of the ' dissolution of the language ' unless the language began 

 to dissolve with Lucretius, Varro, Livy, and the Augustan poets. The 

 other criticism, about ab, 'compared with,' is taken from Praun (p. 79), 

 who, by an oversight foreign to his usually careful work, has misinterpreted 

 the passage. There is no idea of comparison here, for ab maioribus does 

 not depend upon minora. The sentence means : l In the case of smaller 



our manuscripts and its insertion in the margin might give rise to the differences 

 found in UG on the one hand and S c on the other. The restoration of this second 

 non ij,ives to the passage the meaning which Eberhard (de Vitruvii genere dicendi, I, 

 p. 9) desired to find in it, though with his reading this would not be possible. 



