ABSTRACT
Vitruvius wanted to raise architecture to the level of scientia or knowledge, and the best
9.1 DISPUTED VALUE OF THE TEN BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE
The Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio lived in the first century BC, and is thought
According to J.J.Coulton numerous earlier works, now all lost, were written during the
centuries before and after the building of the Parthenon, the first of them being among the
earliest Greek prose works.3 In the absence of these, Vitruvius provides us with the
nearest thing we have to an account, however second-hand, of ancient Greek architectural
theory. For although he was a Roman, and writing mainly about the Italian architecture of
his time, he describes the late republican phase of that architecture, in which the old
Etrusco-Italic tradition had succumbed overwhelmingly to Greek influence, and had not yet
developed the distinctively ‘Roman’ character of imperial buildings like the Colos-
seum or the thermae of Titus (both AD 80). Axel Boëthius and J.B.Ward-Perkins write that
Vitruvius thus discloses to us on the one hand the legacy of old Rome…and on
the other hand the hellenistic influence which pervaded Roman architecture of
the previous centuries. Further, he describes Greek buildings with no Italic
It seems probable that what Vitruvius has to say about proportion, being the most
theoretical part of his treatise, is that which is closest to the imported Greek tradition.
