Vitruvius dedicated his, the only work on architecture to have survived from classical antiquity, to Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, and claimed repeatedly that he was "writing the body of architecture (corpus architecturae)." A detailed examination of meaning of this claim, read in the specific imperial context that brought De architectura to light in ca. 25 B.C., is the principal focus of this study, which has been undertaken less as an effort to come to positive terms with the relevance (or irrelevance) of Vitruvius' normative prescriptions for Roman building practice than in the attempt to try to understand what he was trying to say about architecture and why. The exegesis is developed in four parts. The first deals with the corporeal identity of the book itself: a ten-scroll "angelic" messenger, whose written form proves to be as significant an index of its meaning as its content. The second part assesses Vitruvius' presentation of his treatise to Augustus in the preface to Book 2 of his treatise as the emperor's Herculean body: at once the agent and proof of Roman conquest and, like Hercules, the philanthropic purveyor of the benefits of civilisation to conquered peoples. The third unravels what Vitruvius meant when he said that buildings, temples especially, were to be put together in the same way that nature puts together the bodies of beautiful men. The fourth part concludes that the beautiful body, in question is the body of the king: that of the emperor himself, whose body---corpus imperii---was, at that historical juncture, imagined as congruent with the body of the Roman world. For Vitruvius, through architecture---as architecture---this kingly body was to be the chief agent of the empire's enduring coherence. That the project of Roman world dominion so consistently shaped this first self-conscious attempt to give a comprehensive account of architecture raises troubling questions about the discipline itself. It is in raising such questions that Vitruvius' De architectura acquires more than antiquarian interest.
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