Bodies as behavior

The Dinocrates-Alexander episode of book 2 supplies the reader with a complex heuristic for differentiating good architects from bad. Vitruvius claims to rely on his knowledge and writing in anticipation of his own success, whereas he attributes Dinocrates’ renown to an attractive bodily appearance. A close intertextual reading of the passage threaded through Livy 1 suggests that Alexander and Dinocrates violate the ideal architect–autocrat relationship. The manner in which one interprets the episode indicates whether one can distinguish altruism from ambitio and the like. Alexander’s appetitious reaction to Dinocrates and his body is further problematized by the latter’s nudity and evocation of Hercules and athletic victors. Discussions in the rhetorical handbooks indicate that arguments concerning a plaintiff’s or defendant’s bodily state can support arguments about his character. The handbooks seem to presume a widespread valorization of what the Greeks would call καλοκἀγαθία‎, but there is an implicit acknowledgment that beauty dissimulates vice. The athletic and/or gladiatorial body is therefore a particular locus of contestation and controversy, as Cicero’s (and Sallust’s) depictions of Catiline show. On the Greek side, writers as early as Tyrtaeus and Xenophanes had suggested that wisdom is better than strength. Isocrates frames the issue politically, and Vitruvius takes it one step further. Following the Roman handbooks that viewed the cultivation of bodily attributes (vs. the fortuitous possession of those attributes) as the primary signifier of character, Vitruvius suggests that athletes are ethically and politically bankrupt, while writers deserve triumphs and apotheosis. Archimedes, Socrates, and even Vitruvius himself provide counterexamples.

Introduction

The introduction gives the reader some sense of De architectura’s complex reception as literature and establishes the scope of the work to follow. Recent interest in technical literature has rightly stressed the need to embrace the entirety of technical works, not just “more literary” portions, such as prefaces. At the same time, the paratextual portions of works, including but not limited to their prefaces, are privileged places of transaction between author and reader. That technical authors are sometimes thought to have only dabbled in literature, moreover, means that paratextual elements—albeit not lacking scholarly attention altogether—have not been fully integrated into wider conversations about (Latin) literature. This book, as the introduction emphasizes, aims to do just that. Special emphasis is placed on the dynamism of Vitruvius’s didactic expert-persona and his characterization of De architectura as a munus.

Introducing the architectus

Vitruvius prioritizes the ideal architectus over the ars architectonica and thus also restricts access to the body of architecture. The architectus embodies architecture, but he becomes complete only through a “well-rounded” course of training in various disciplines, which Vitruvius likens to a corpus. This encyclios disciplina has recalled the artes liberales for many readers, who imagine that Vitruvius invokes these disciplines to “elevate” architecture or indeed Vitruvius himself. Yet it is also clear that architecture was already viewed as intellectually meticulous. By creating an asymmetry between his training (multidisciplinary but moderate) and his influence (extending even to the products of all other arts), Vitruvius creates a gap reminiscent of a similar disparity that characterizes the ideal orator in Cicero’s De oratore. Vitruvius recreates the ebb and flow of De oratore in order to put architecture in competition with the oratory as the best sort of civic knowledge. Of special importance is that both Vitruvius and Cicero demur on whether their disciplines were true “arts,” recalling the principal objection leveled by Socrates against rhetoric in Gorgias. Cicero effectively sidesteps these issues by negating the possibility of a Roman ars oratoris and by insisting instead on oratory’s embodiment. Vitruvius’s architectus also becomes a distinctively Roman master of signs and representation, precisely because he embodies architecture. Vitruvius’s account ultimately differs from that of Cicero, however. Whereas the orator’s attention to decorum proved his suitability as an ambitious leader in the interest of the republican civitas, the training of the architectus ultimately ensures that he will faithfully (but not obsequiously) serve the princeps.

History from the ground up

Vitruvius’s suggestion that De architectura will allow Augustus to comprehend buildings already built almost certainly points to the Augustan program of renovating buildings. But it also introduces the notion that buildings “already built” could represent the Augustan present for the future. History can be “built” just as it can be written, and its monuments can also be repurposed, whether through spoliation in the concrete sense or by recharacterizing what celebrated architectural signifiers mean, or both. Vitruvius’s phraseology in the preface (memorias posteris tradere) reflects a well-known Augustan concern for posterity’s reception in a general sense, but it also recalls historiography, especially Livy and (later) Tacitus. Vitruvius returns to this same language in his discussion of historia—one of the disciplines in which the architectus is supposed to be trained—in his aetiology of caryatids. Just as Augustus co-opted the forms of the Erechtheum korai for his forum, so does Vitruvius invent (here in the rhetorical sense) a new “history” of the caryatids that is useful for the Romans. The key to understanding Vitruvius’s approach here is textuality: his description of caryatids and their meaning is couched entirely in the language of rhetorical narratio, which suggests again that Vitruvius envisions architecture as a kind of ornamental persuasion, with a scope that rivals historiography in its ability not only to tell future generations about the present, but also to recharacterize the past in terms that suit the present’s needs.

Epilogue

The epilogue examines the implications of Vitruvius’s claim at the end of the preface to De architectura 2 to have relied on his scripta and scientia rather than his physique to achieve renown. Vitruvius designs for himself a palimpsestic body. His textual corpus and the knowledge occluded by it (cf. chapter 3) complement his physical corpus (cf. chapters 4 and 5) in an iconic definition of a pistos hetairos who is remarkable for the power he claims over the emperor’s legacy no less than for his alleged subservience. Professionalism was, as ever, political. Again, this is not to say that Vitruvius was a mere shill for Augustus. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Vitruvius’s characterization of Alexander works to caution Augustus against tyranny and even (perhaps) to encourage artistic autonomy by comparison with later accounts of the meeting with Dinocrates, in which Alexander rejects the project for its hubris and connotations of flattery, which may yet remain perceptible beneath the surface of the Vitruvian version.

The body in brief

This chapter continues to develop a picture of Vitruvian expertise by interrogating the implications of Vitruvius’s repeated characterization of his text as a complete body marked by brevitas. The corpus hominis bene figurati in book 3 (so-called Vitruvian man) is reconsidered for its relevance to the corpus of De architectura as a text. The body and its parts remain powerful metaphors for composition: a body is complete and well ordered, and provides a “lifelike” mimesis of what it represents. Despite ancient and some modern claims to the contrary, textual bodies never embrace the comprehensive wholes with which they are associated and, in the Roman period, are rarely politically disinterested. Textual bodies are often emphatically reductive and, as such, mediate various wholes and universals through synopsis and other forms of “definition.” Such a bodily metaphor is especially appropriate for Vitruvius’s “expert” text. Examples from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero’s letters, and the so-called universal historians show that the textual “body” (also often described as “brief”) involved specific, ideological value before Vitruvius. His claims to have ordered the synoptic body of architecture properly suggest an analogous ideological function. Physical bodies are “compositions” of nature, so the author’s claims to have put a textual body in good order mimic nature’s sense of what is appropriate. This is another quality particular to experts. Such expertise has implications well beyond the proprietary fields on which they lay claim. By cordoning off the true totality of architecture from the reader, the guiding corpus metaphor of De architectura is basically restrictive.

Vitruvius, man?

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.”