Science & Tech Quote by Marcus V. Pollio

Harmony, for Vitruvius, is less an airy aesthetic than a technical passport stamped in Greek. He frames it as a "science" that’s "obscure and difficult", then delivers the real twist: the difficulty isn’t only the ear or the math, it’s the vocabulary. The line reads like a practical warning to readers, but it also functions as cultural boundary-setting. If you can’t handle Greek terms, you’re not just missing words; you’re missing the intellectual infrastructure behind the art.

That move makes sense in the Roman moment he’s writing from. Rome is an empire busy absorbing Greek culture while insisting it can systematize and improve it. Vitruvius, an architect assembling a total handbook on building, treats music theory as part of the architect’s toolkit: proportion, resonance, the tuning of spaces, the design of theaters. Yet he admits a dependence that Roman self-confidence often tried to disguise. Latin, the language of law and administration, runs up against Greek as the language of theory.

The subtext is a quietly elitist gatekeeping: mastery requires access to education, tutors, and the cosmopolitan prestige of Greek learning. He’s not apologizing for jargon; he’s defending it as unavoidable because the concepts arrived bundled with their original terms. The intent is to keep technical knowledge precise, but the effect is to remind you who gets to be “acquainted” - and who gets left hearing only the echo.