PREFACE.

...in the choice that one would have made regarding what ought to be removed.

I make no apology for the liberty I have taken in changing phrases, because I believe I would have failed greatly had I done otherwise; the ways of speaking in Latin are even more different from those of English than the words themselves. I have maintained all the fidelity I owe to my Author, not by measuring my steps exactly against his, but by following him carefully wherever he goes. I have always acted in this manner, except when the obscurity of the subject matter forced me to translate word for word; for in those cases, I have done so so that if some enlightened mind in these matters—who lacks only the knowledge of the Latin language—should encounter it, they might discover the meaning or supply it by changing something.

It is true that such changes are very dangerous, and it is to be feared that one might increase the harm while wishing to remedy it, just as it appears the Copyists have often done when they corrupted the text while thinking they were correcting passages they believed were corrupted because they did not understand them. There is an example of this at the end of the 8th chapter of the 2nd book, where the Copyist who wrote a manuscript I used, having read in the original he was copying, ex veteribus tegulis tecti structi original Latin: "built, covered with old tiles", believed there was a solecism A "solecism" is a grammatical mistake or an intentional breaking of grammatical rules., imagining that tecti was a plural noun meaning "roofs", and that he had to write ex veteribus tegulis tecta structa, meaning roofs made with old tiles. Instead of correcting a fault, he actually ruined the sense of the discourse, which requires it to read ex veteribus tegulis tecti, structi parietes original Latin: "walls built, covered with old tiles", as is found in the printed books that followed a good manuscript in this regard. Nevertheless, I believed that this should not prevent me from proposing my conjectures on the passages of Vitruvius that are manifestly corrupted. For if remedies are sometimes dangerous when applied to those who are well, it is certain that however doubtful they may be, they cannot harm when they are merely proposed. This is why I never include in the translation the corrections that conjectures have led me to make without noting them; thus, I do not force the Reader to follow my opinion, but I endeavor to persuade them of it.

A great number of these corrections are found in the Notes, some of which are quite important; all the other Interpreters together had not made so many. It would be desirable for there to have been even more. For far from approving the modesty of those who dared not touch the text of Vitruvius out of a respect for his Copyists at the prejudice of truth, the great veneration I have for the Author himself has led me to declare my feelings on his thoughts. In this, I did not believe I was doing wrong to the opinion one should have of the competence of such a great figure, since without deciding anything, I merely propose the doubts I have that he may have been mistaken in some way; for I do not believe that when one undertakes to explain an Author, one commits to making his panegyric A public speech or published text in high praise of someone., nor to defending everything he wrote.

Although the Notes are primarily to provide the reasoning for the translation and the new corrections to the text, as well as those taken from other Interpreters, I have nonetheless made remarks in passing to serve as explanations for obscure terms and for the things themselves where a great number of difficulties are encountered.

Some may find that these Notes are too few in number, and that they are not the most necessary or important. In truth, it would have been easy to make them more ample by translating everything that Caesaranus Cesare Cesariano (1475–1543), an Italian architect and the first to translate Vitruvius into a modern language (Italian, 1521).,