MORGAN. — ON THE LANGUAGE OP VITRUVIUS. 493 



first of them must be seen in full before it can be studied. It runs thus : 

 Ergo si natura nascentium ita postulat, recte est constitution et altitudini- 

 bus et crassitudinibus superiora inferiorum fieri contraction!,. Now in 

 an earlier sentence Vitruvius had written uti firmiora sint inferiora 

 superioribus (75, 16). Here is the usual ablative of comparison. Why 

 does he not employ it in our passage? He purposely avoids it, I think, 

 because after altitudinibus and crassitudinibus another ablative, inferio- 

 ribus, would be awkward and perhaps obscure. So in Sail. H. 2, 37 : 

 vir gravis et nulla arte cuiquam inferior, another ablative instead of the 

 dative is inconceivable. But it does not follow that in Vitruvius inferi- 

 orum is a genitive of comparison. Every careful reader must already 

 have seen that we are dealing with a brachylogy, and that altitudinibus et 

 crassitudinibus are to be taken a second time so that inferiorum does not 

 depend upon contractiora. In first drawing attention to this example 

 Praun did not cite it completely but omitted the two ablatives, and in 

 this mangled condition it has since been quoted as a case of the genitive 

 of comparison — which it is not. There remains then only one case to 

 be considered (22, 2), and here I do not believe that Vitruvius wrote 

 sagittae missionis but rather sagittae missiotie. 28 Errors in writing the 

 genitive in -is instead of the ablative in -e or -i are not uncommon in the 

 manuscripts of Vitruvius especially where another genitive precedes. 

 Thus we find rationis (2, 23) for ratione, where sollertiae precedes in the 

 manuscripts. We have also solis orbis for solis orbi (224, 28) ; decussis 

 for decussi, where additis precedes (67, 13). And we also find the plural 

 in -es for the ablative singular, as : necessitates for necessitate (54, 14), 

 partes for parte (94, 29), frontis for fronte (82, 12), and f routes for j Yonte 

 where ornationis precedes (119, 17). So it appears that there is little or 

 no good evidence that Vitruvius used the genitive of comparison at all. 



Ussing next observes : ' It has often been said that Vitruvius " trans- 

 lated largely from the Greek." I am not sure that he has translated 

 more than the chapters of Athenaeus which will be mentioned below. 29 



p. 563. It is 231, 1 : Ad unguis inferius ventris sub caudam subiectus est centaurus, 

 which means ' Beneath the Snake's belly, under its tail, lies the Centaur ' ; cf. Ara- 

 tus 447 ; ovpri 5e Kpe/j.a.Tcu inrep aiirov Kevravpoio. Here ad inferius — ad inferiorem 

 partem ventris; for the use of ad, see the Thesaurus, s. v. p. 519, 23; 525, 6-36. 



28 As it was printed by Schneider. Perhaps, as the codd. have sagitta emissionis, 

 we should keep the longer word as in 283, 18: sagittae emissionem, — reading it, 

 however, in the ablative with the earliest printed editions. 



29 Here Ussing is referring to pages 29-41 of his article where, accepting the 

 view of Diels that this Athenaeus Mechanicus was a post-classical writer, he 

 argues that Vitruvius, drawing from him, must be. even later, and rejects Thiel's 



