origin, and order of its own.
In accordance with these details, and starting from carpenter's work,
artists in building temples of stone and marble imitated those
arrangements in their sculptures, believing that they must follow those
inventions. So it was that some ancient carpenters, engaged in building
somewhere or other, after laying the tie-beams so that they projected
from the inside to the outside of the walls, closed up the space between
the beams, and above them ornamented the coronae and gables with
carpentry work of beauty greater than usual; then they cut off the
projecting ends of the beams, bringing them into line and flush with the
face of the walls; next, as this had an ugly look to them, they fastened
boards, shaped as triglyphs are now made, on the ends of the beams,
where they had been cut off in front, and painted them with blue wax so
that the cutting off of the ends of the beams, being concealed, would
not offend the eye. Hence it was in imitation of the arrangement of the
tie-beams that men began to employ, in Doric buildings, the device of
triglyphs and the metopes between the beams.

3. Later, others in other buildings allowed the projecting principal
rafters to run out till they were flush with the triglyphs, and then
formed their projections into simae. From that practice, like the
triglyphs from the arrangement of the tie-beams, the system of mutules
under the coronae was devised from the projections of the principal
rafters. Hence generally, in buildings of stone and marble, the mutules
are carved with a downward slant, in imitation of the principal rafters.
For these necessarily have a slanting and projecting position to let the
water drip down. The scheme of triglyphs and mutules in Doric buildings
was, therefore, the imitative device that I have described.

4. It cannot be that the triglyphs represent windows, as some have
erroneously said, since the triglyphs are placed at the corners and over
the middle of columns--places where, from the nature of the case, there
can be no windows at all. For buildings are wholly disconnected at the
corners if openings for windows are left at those points. Again, if we
are to suppose that there were open windows where the triglyphs now
stand, it will follow, on the same principle, that the dentils of the
Ionic order have likewise taken the places of windows. For the term
"metope" is used of the intervals between dentils as well as of those
between trig