War & Peace Quote by Marcus V. Pollio

Fortification, for Vitruvius, is design with an attitude: architecture that doesn’t just stand there looking dignified, but actively meddles in the enemy’s day. The phrasing is telling. He doesn’t talk about gloriously defeating an opponent; he talks about “annoying” them. It’s almost petty on purpose, a reminder that premodern warfare often hinged on attrition, delay, confusion, and exhaustion as much as decisive battle. A wall is not a moral statement. It’s an instrument for making an approach miserable.

The technical intent is clean: towers must project outward from the wall so defenders can fire laterally “right and left” through embrasures, raking the base of the wall and eliminating blind spots. The geometry matters because siegecraft exploits dead angles; Vitruvius is prescribing an early form of interlocking fields of fire. Projection equals visibility, visibility equals control.

The subtext is Roman pragmatism dressed as neutral instruction. Vitruvius writes like a man cataloging best practices, but the casual certainty about harassing bodies at a distance reveals an empire’s default setting: security as engineering, dominance as logistics. His voice is bureaucratic, which is precisely what makes it potent. Violence is normalized by being treated as a drafting problem.

Contextually, this sits in a world where cities were vulnerable to raids, civil wars, and shifting allegiances, and where Roman authority depended on the built environment as much as law. The line quietly insists that good architecture anticipates hostility. It’s a reminder that “public works” and “military works” were never cleanly separated; the wall is civic identity, and the tower is its argument, projected outward.