Full text: Vitruvius: The architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio in ten books

154 
Smyrna. Whichever of these circumstances occurred he 
richly deserved it, for that person does not seem to have 
merited a better fate, who reflects on those that are 
beyond the reach of hearing and explaining what is said 
of their writings. I, therefore, O Cæsar, do not publish 
this work, merely prefixing my name to a treatise which 
of right belongs to others, nor think of acquiring repu- 
tation by finding fault with the works of any one. On 
the contrary, 1 own myself under the highest obligations 
to all those authors, who by their great ingenuity have 
at various times on different subjects, furnished us with 
copious materials; from which, as from a fountain, con- 
verting them to our own use, we are enabled to write 
more fully and expediently, and, trusting to whom we are 
prépared to strike out something new. Thus adhering 
to the principles which I found in those of their works 
adapted to my purpose, I have endeavoured to advance 
fürther. Agatharcus, at the time when Eschylus taught 
at Athens the rules of tragic poetry, was the first who 
contrived scenery, upon which subject he left a treatise. 
This led Democritus and Anaxagorus, who wrote thereon. 
to explain how the points of sight and distance ought 
to guide the lines, as in nature, to a centre; so that by 
means of pictorial deception, the real appearances of 
buildings appear on the scene, which, painted on a flat 
vertical surface, seem, nevertheless, to advance and 
recede. Silenus afterwards produced a treatise on the 
symmetry of Doric buildings; Theodorus, on the Doric 
temple of Jupiter in Samos; Ctesiphon and Metagenes, 
on that of the lonic order in the temple of Diana at 
Ephesus. Phileos wrote a volume on the lonic temple 
of Minerva at Priene, and Ictinus and Carpion on the 
Doric temple of Minerva at Athens, on the Acropolis; 
Theodorus Phoceus on the vaulted temple at Delphi; 
Philo on the symmetry of temples, and on the arsenal at 
the Piræus; Hermogenes on the Lonic pseudodipteral 
temple at Magnesia, and the monopteral one of Father
	        
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