Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/377

 oi literat On the Classical Authorities for Ancient Art. 367 I of literature, morality, and politics. Carefully too must he exa- mine the daily increasing stores of ancient inscriptions, furnish- ing, as they often do, a ready solution of vexed questions on which he might otherwise spend his ingenuity in vain. Neither must he be unmindful of the history of Roman arms and Roman spoliation ; this will often throw him on the scent of some work of art which Pliny says he had himself seen, without telling us whence it came. I cannot however pursue the consideration of this subject any further. In any country where archaeology occupied the place it deserves to hold as a branch of classical education, the course of illustration here indicated would pro- bably be better adapted to a course of lectures on Pliny than to an edition of the text. I am not, however, sanguine enough to hope that any such recognition will take place. Disregarding chronological order, I have designedly kept to the last such remarks as I have to offer on the works of Vitru- vius, " il quale autore per la difficolta della materia, per la novita de' vocaboli, per l'asprezza delle costruzioni, per la cor- ruzzion de' testi, e giudicato da ciascuno piu che ogni oracolo oscuro." The lapse of upwards of three centuries has done comparatively little to impugn the truth of the words I have here quoted from a letter of Claudio Tolomei, written in 1542. The chief cause of the difficulties attending the elucidation of his meaning rests on the fact, that he is the only writer on architecture whose works have come down to us, and we are consequently much embarrassed by the perplexities attending technical terms, "quod vocabula ex artis propria necessitate concepta inconsueto sermone objiciunt sensibus obscuritatem." Add to these the corruption of manuscripts, the ignorance of copyists, the loss of Vitruvius's own drawings, and the great cloud of commentators that has ever loured over the book, and some feeble idea may be formed of the obstacles which shut out light from his pages. So painful is the unanimity in error of the manuscripts of Vitruvius, beginning from the oldest, which reaches back as far as the eighth or ninth century, that competent judges are of opinion that they must all be the reproductions of some one very corrupt codex. The only point which ought never to have been mooted concerning him his date has been matter of very tedious dispute. Mr Newton, his English trans- lator, places him under the reign of Titus : more recently a