The nomen Vitruuius (“Vitruvius”) is the only name known with certainty from most MSS,
the cognomen Pollio comes from a single MS of F, the praenomen is variously
reported as Aulus, Lucius and most commonly Marcus. The gens Vitruuia is well attested on
gravestones centering around Formia between Naples and Gaeta, and it seems likely from
De Architectura that Vitruuius was raised and trained either in Campania or Rome, or both.
He is almost certainly distinct from L. Vitruuius Cerdo, a freedman recorded in the arch of
the Gauii in Verona, since the author was not a freedman, and from C’s praefectus
fabrum Mamurra, though the author served many years with Caesar and then A as
an artillery engineer and staff architect. He received a pension from Augustus and then his
sister Octauia as a reward for service, and he is very likely the same Vitruuius credited with
standardizing water pipe sizes in Rome while working as Agrippa’s staff architect on the cura
aquarum (F, De Aquis Urbis Romae 25.1), a position he also may have received as a
reward for service or for his writing.
The treatise was written in the decade immediately after Actium (31 BCE), a period of
tremendous renewed building activity after the civil wars. A literary hybrid, common in
the last century of the Republic, De Architectura is a technical handbook with literary preten-
sions, aimed at the highly literate Roman elite, i.e., senators and equestrians who directed
building projects, either private or public. Vitruuius seems unknown in contemporary
accounts, but is mentioned later in ways suggesting that his writing remained the most
comprehensive Roman building compendium: P 33.87, 33.91, 36.171–172; F
25.1; F; Seruius, Ad Aen. 6.43 (4th c. CE); Sidonius Apollinarius, Epistulae 4.3.5
(mid-5th c. CE), and indirectly P A.
Vitruuius received a liberal arts education before training as an architect. His handbook
in part presents architecture as a liberal art, whose practice had to be based on a mastery of
those fundamentals of liberal knowledge common to many disciplines. In addition to the
standard seven subjects (mathematics, music, geometry, astronomy; grammar, rhetoric,
logic), he also lists draftsmanship, knowledge of painting and sculpture, law, and philosophy.
Most architects were not trained that way. Vitruuius includes numerous supportive dis-
courses based on generally understood principles of science: the four-element theory
explained the properties of mortar (2.5.2), building stones (2.7.2), types of timber (2.9.1)
and strength and weakness of opus reticulatum (2.8.2); retrograde motion of the planets as
explained by the attraction of heat (9.1.12); latitude determining human physiology and
justifying window placement (6.1.1–11); the variety of springs being due to the variety
introduced into nature by the “inclination of the heavens” (inclinatio mundi), i.e., the inclin-
ation of the Earth on its axis.
Book 1 treats purported theoretical principles, orientation and siting of cities, and survey-
ing, 2 addresses building materials, 3 and 4 the so-called orders and their proportional
principles (Vitruuius never uses the term “orders,” but rather calls them genera, or “types,”
of column), 5 public buildings, including bath construction, with a discourse about music
theory, 6 private building, 7 finishes, 8 water distribution and surveying, 9 astronomy and
the geometry of sundials and clocks (Figure), and 10 a variety of mechanical devices,
including cranes, levers, water lifters, water wheels, pumps, pneumatic organs, catapults
(scorpions and ballistae), and siege engines. The meticulous description of catapults and
organs relies on the same type of modular geometry and arithmetic as his earlier descrip-
tion of the proportions of the orders, sundials, theaters, house proportions, boat design and
proportions in nature (human anatomy). The section on siege-craft (10.13–15) is virtually
identical to chapters in A M’ Peri Me ̄khane ̄mato ̄n (9.4–10.4); they are
M. VITRUUIUS POLLIO