The tenth book of the so-called _De Architectura_ is concerned with machinery--windmills, windlasses, axles, pulleys, cranes, pumps, fire-engines, revolving spiral tubes for raising water, wheels for irrigation worked by water-power, wheels to register distance traveled by land or water, scaling-ladders, battering-rams, tortoises, catapults, scorpions, and ballistæ. On the subject of war-engines Vitruvius speaks with special authority, as he had served, probably as military engineer, under Julius Cæsar in 46 B.C., and had been appointed superintendent of ballistæ and other military engines in the time of Augustus. It was to the divine Emperor that his book was dedicated as a protest against the administration of Roman public works. In its pages we see reflected the life of a nation employed in conquering and ruling the world, with a genius more distinguished for practical achievement than for theory and speculation. Its author is truly representative of Roman culture, for nearly everything that Rome had of a scientific and intellectual sort it drew from Greece, and it selected that part of Greek wisdom that ministered to the daily needs of the times. In his work on architecture, Vitruvius shows himself a diligent and devoted student of the sciences in order that he may turn them to account in his own department of technology.
If you glance at the study of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine among the Romans prior to the time of Greek influence, you find that next to nothing had been accomplished. Their method of field measurement was far less developed than the ancient Egyptian geometry, and even for it (as well as for their system of numerals) they were indebted to the Etruscans. The history of astronomy has nothing to record of scientific accomplishment on the part of the Romans. They reckoned time by months, and in the earlier period kept a rude tally of the years by driving nails into a statue of Janus, the ancient sun-god. As we shall see, they were unable to regulate the calendar. Again, so far were they from contributing to the development of medicine that they had no physicians for the six hundred years preceding the coming of Greek science. A medical slave acted as overseer of the family health, and disease was combated in primitive fashion by prayers and offerings to various gods, who were supposed to furnish general health or to influence the functions of the different parts of the body. So rude was the native culture of the Romans that it is doubtful whether they had any schools before the advent of Greek learning. The girls were trained by their mothers, the boys either by their fathers or by some master to whom they were apprenticed.