Book
15 BCE
De Architectura
Vitruvius
Argues good building rests on three inseparable qualities, firmness, utility and beauty, and systematises Roman engineering and architectural practice into the first surviving treatise on the subject.
Read itBefore you start
- This edition
- Vitruvius's own illustrations are lost. Every diagram you will see in any edition is a later reconstruction from the text, which matters most in the books on machines and water supply, where the prose alone is genuinely hard to follow.
- This translation
- Morris Hicky Morgan's, 1914 — the standard free English version.
FreeIntermediatelink checked 17 Sept 2026
Filed under Ancient Rome in History.