On Architecture
Rome · -15
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Vitruvius
Vitruvius
c. 80 BCE–c. 15 BCE · Rome
Architect and engineer whose De Architectura is the only major treatise on building to survive from antiquity.
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Stop 1 of 180 BCE–15 BCELived
RomeרומאItaly
What they did here
Architect and engineer in Augustan Rome.
Rome in this era
In the late Republic (2nd-1st centuries BCE) Rome was a city-state ruling a Mediterranean empire, governed by the Senate and annual magistrates amid growing civil wars. Educated Romans studied Greek philosophy and rhetoric, and Latin writers such as Lucretius and Cicero set out to carry Greek thought into Latin.
About Rome
Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.
In Rome at the same time
Posidonius of Apamea, Nepos, Cornelius, Cicero, Quintus Tullius Cicero, Lucretius, Sallust
Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Vitruvius’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Vitruvius’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.