History from the ground up

Abstract

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.