the speed of historical narrative makes the pauses marked by rhythmical clausulae inappropriate, because they slow the whole movement down.
Vitruvius And Building Techniques: Vitruvius' treatise on architecture has proved an important manual for modern students. He describes one of the favourite techniques
for good-quality domestic architecture (opus reticulatum) as -charming' but he comments also on the danger of cracks along the joints The technique illustrated here at
Pompeii, is essentially a wall of mortared rubble, but with an attractive surface prodded by a network of little pyramidal blocks set point inwards. On Vitruvius see also p
772
Kunstprosa had already had a long history. Developed by the fifth- and fourth-century Greek sophists and orators, partly to give prose something of the dignity and affective
power of poetry, but partly also to provide an unambiguous and elegant written language (graphike lexis: Aristotle was the most important theorist who discussed this), it
existed, in our period, in many different forms, and was a versatile and many-sided instrument. It was the vehicle, not only of the higher ranges of literature-history, oratory,
belles-lettres-but of a great deal of technical and didactic writing. Dionysius' The Arrangement of Words 'Longi-nus' On Sublimity, and Onasander's The General, are good
Greek examples, all of the first century; Celsus' encyclopedia (of which the medical books alone survive) Columella's treatise on farming, and Qumtilian's manual of oratory
are Latin ones of the same epoch. There are, however, works from which the signs of formality are absent, and which seem much less 'literary': Vitruvius' Architecture in
Latin and Arrian's Discourses of Epictetus in Greek are notable instances. This lack of formality was itself often deliberate. Arrian wrote his Expedition of Alexander in
Xenophon's Attic dialect, and his book on India in Herodotus' Ionic; so it was with the same deliberate selection of medium that he set down the discussions of the slave-
philosopher Epictetus in the first-century technical language in which such things were actually expressed.