Vitruvius, man?

Abstract

Chapter 1 surveys what little we can say with reasonable certainty about Vitruvius’s life and the circumstances surrounding De architectura’s publication. Our knowledge of the historical Vitruvius is occluded by a lack of contemporary external testimony, by his declared attitudes toward representation, and by a particularly complex reception tradition both within and outside of Classical scholarship. This chapter focuses in particular on the second of these factors. First, I examine how the work’s dedicatory preface, with its open interest in “representing” Augustan auctoritas, exemplifies the basic difficulties presented by Vitruvius’s rhetoric in the absence of external testimony. I also examine Vitruvius’s attitudes toward texts through close readings of the prefaces to books 7 and 9. The presence of Ennius in the latter of these has confounded scholars, but his appearance there in conjunction with references to the simulacrum and figura poetae compels analogy to ancestral imagines. Next, I turn to Cicero’s Pro Archia, which also compares the commemorative power of text and image with recourse to Ennius. I suggest that Vitruvius’s strategies of self-representation portray him as a close adviser who appropriates the glory of an imperator for the populus Romanus. Comparisons with Horace’s persona in his Satires and apparitorial scribae remain useful, even if Vitruvius’s scribal status is not assured. But Vitruvius’s self-effacing pose should also be understood as an iteration of an earlier model, the Ennian “good friend.”