of men, and not merely architects, can recognize a good piece of
work, but between laymen and the latter there is this difference, that
the layman cannot tell what it is to be like without seeing it finished,
whereas the architect, as soon as he has formed the conception, and
before he begins the work, has a definite idea of the beauty, the
convenience, and the propriety that will distinguish it.

I have now described as clearly as I could what I thought necessary for
private houses, and how to build them. In the following book I shall
treat of the kinds of polished finish employed to make them elegant, and
durable without defects to a great age.

BOOK VII

INTRODUCTION

1. It was a wise and useful provision of the ancients to transmit their
thoughts to posterity by recording them in treatises, so that they
should not be lost, but, being developed in succeeding generations
through publication in books, should gradually attain in later times, to
the highest refinement of learning. And so the ancients deserve no
ordinary, but unending thanks, because they did not pass on in envious
silence, but took care that their ideas of every kind should be
transmitted to the future in their writings.

2. If they had not done so, we could not have known what deeds were done
in Troy, nor what Thales, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Xenophanes, and the
other physicists thought about nature, and what rules Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and other philosophers laid down for the
conduct of human life; nor would the deeds and motives of Croesus,
Alexander, Darius, and other kings have been known, unless the ancients
had compiled treatises, and published them in commentaries to be had in
universal remembrance with posterity.

3. So, while they deserve our thanks, those, on the contrary, deserve
our reproaches, who steal the writings of such men and publish them as
their own; and those also, who depend in their writings, not on their
own ideas, but who enviously do wrong to the works of others and boast
of it, deserve not merely to be blamed, but to be sentenced to actual
punishment for their wicked course of life. With the ancients, however,
it is said that such things did not pass without pretty strict
chastisement. What the results of their judgments were, it may not be
out of place to set forth as they are transmitted to us.

4. The kings of the house of Attalus having established, under the
influence of the gr