The text of Marcus Cetius Faventinus

Abstract

Some reviewers of my little book, Vitruvius and later Roman building manuals (VLMB), express the wish that I had produced my own text of the Treatise De Diversis Fabricis Architectonicae, which can now be assigned to Marcus Cetius Faventinus, instead of just reprinting the text given by Valentin Rose in his Editio Major of Vitruvius (Leipzig 1867).On the whole, I agree with them; and having learnt about the texts of Vitruvius and Faventinus, I feel I can briefly list the handful of alterations that I would now make in the latter. The list is so short, that perhaps it could be pasted on an endpaper of my booklet.Since 1867, as I noted, the only direct addition to our knowledge of the little treatise has come from the manuscript S, discovered at Schlettstadt in Alsace in 1871 and now put in its proper place among Vitruvian manuscripts as a fairly late copy of the text that served also as the archetype for H and for the common source (also vanished) of E and G. S not only gives us the name of the author – the only known manuscript to do so – but also the only uncial text down to a point in the thirteenth chapter corresponding to p.298, line 19 of Rose. All the manuscripts of Faventinus known to Rose in 1867 were, by contrast, in minuscule.