Success Quote by Marcus V. Pollio

Vitruvius isn’t talking about hydration; he’s talking about control. In a single, clinical sentence, the Roman architect reduces bodies to mixtures that must be kept in proportion, warning that excess water tips matter into rot. It’s the language of early material science filtered through a builder’s sensibility: stability is moral, imbalance is decay. The phrasing “speedily corrupted” doesn’t just describe a chemical process; it smuggles in a civic anxiety. Corruption is what happens to cities and institutions when the mix is off, when softness seeps in, when structure can’t hold.

The intent is practical and diagnostic. Vitruvius writes in an age that treats health, building, and governance as parallel systems governed by the same rules of harmony and measure. If you can predict how mortar fails, you can predict how a body fails; if you can regulate water in an aqueduct, you can regulate risk in an empire. Water here is both literal (moisture that spoils materials, marsh air that sickens, dampness that undermines foundations) and symbolic: the unruly element that must be engineered, drained, channeled.

What makes the line work is its confident compression. “Balance” reads like common sense, but it’s also an aesthetic doctrine: the Roman ideal that virtue is legible as proportion. Read that way, the sentence becomes a quiet manifesto for architecture itself - the belief that durability, health, and even character are achieved not through abundance, but through calibrated restraint.