MORGAN. — ON THE LANGUAGE OF VITRUVIUS. 499 



at all periods. Praun (p. 59) cites Valerius Maximus as a special lover 

 of it, so that we need not come down to late Latin to find it. Even the 

 modal use, which is such a favorite with Vitruvius, is found, once in 

 Cicero, and examples occur in Caelius, Sallust, and the Bellum Hispani- 

 ense, until finally Ovid and Livy made it common (Schmalz, 3 p. 305). 



Next there follows in Ussing a long paragraph which I do not think 

 it worth while to reproduce here. It deals with the undoubted fact that 

 in Vitruvius the mood employed in indirect questions is very apt to be 

 the indicative. 40 After referring to this usage in Plautus, Ussing says : 

 ' No classical prose writer would indulge in putting the indicative in a 

 dependent clause which really expresses a reflection or a doubt.' He 

 does not say that late writers do so, but of course it is well known that 

 such is the fact (for instance, see the literature cited in Sittl, Die lokalen 

 Verschiedenheiten, p. 134), and his argument therefore is that this phe- 

 nomenon in Vitruvius is evidence of late authorship. In this paragraph 

 Ussing says nothing about the appearance, here and there, of this indica- 

 tive in several prose writers who not only belong to the ' classical period ' 

 but who are also so strict in their standards of style that they are entitled 

 themselves to be called ' classics.' That is, Ussing adopts the attitude of 

 those earlier generations of scholars who, from the time of Lambinus down 

 to near the present day, did not scruple to emend away all offences against 

 the strict norm of classical style. Such is not the attitude of most 

 scholars now ; individualities in writers are recognized, and departures 

 from the strict norm are often welcomed, rather than rejected, as indica- 

 tions either that the literary language had not yet attained to exactness 

 in following rules or that the writer in question is employing the phrase- 

 ology of colloquial speech, which then, as always, was less careful than 

 the literary style. In this spirit we ought to consider the appearance of 

 the indicative in indirect questions in Vitruvius. The best general state- 

 ment with regard to this employment of the mood has been made by 

 Schmalz (Lot. Gramm.? p. 359). The usage crops out in the Rhetor ad 

 Herennium, in Varro, in Cicero's early writings and in his letters, and in 

 letters to him. It is avoided by the historians though not by the poets 

 of the Augustan age, and it is found in Petronius and Pliny the Elder. 

 The closest parallels to the indicative in clauses expressing 'a reflection 

 or a doubt' as in Vitruvius, are to be found in the seven examples cited 

 by Marx from the Rhetor ad Herennium in his edition of that book, 

 p. 17G f. 



40 The fullest collections are to be found in Praun, p. 71 ff., and Richardson, 

 Harvard Studies in CI. Phil. 1, p. 157. 



