28 Plut. Pericl., 2, I, p. 153a.

29 Luc. Somnium, 8, 11.

30 Petrarca. Op. cit., p. 112.

31 It is not only and not so much the accidental fact that Vitruvius' book found itself in the exceptional position of the only textbook on architecture that has survived from antiquity and has been sanctified by the authority of antiquity. Such a role belonged to it already during the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, when it was diligently studied; but it was only thanks to the Renaissance that Vitruvius's book for Baroque and Classicism moved from the status of a practical manual to the status of a cultural symbol, a spiritual value, the significance of which is not limited by professional frameworks.

32 Cf. Averintsev 1973, p. 167 and note. 33 on p. 255.

33 Hist. Nat., XXXV, 36, 1.

34 Hist. Nat., XXXV, 36, 2. 86 Hist. Nat, XXXV, 36, 3.

36 Hist. Nat., XXXV, 36, 5.

37 Hist. Nat., XXXV, 36, 10. 88 Hist. Nat., XXXVI, 4, 4.

39 Vasari 1896, p. 489.

40 Ibid., p. 942.

41 Deorat., I, 10,40.

42 Deorat, I, 23, 106.

43 De orat, III, 2, 6.

44 Inst. orat, II, 16, 17. 46 Inst orat., IV, 1, 70.

46 Inst. orat, X, 1,83.

47 De arte poetica, 400 etc.

48 Cicero calls Plato "as if he were a kind of god of philosophers" (Denat. deor. ?, 12, 32); an even more striking example is the poetic deification of Epicurus by Lucretius.

49 Usually divus, but also divinus princeps, e.g. in Nazarius' panegyric to Constantine the Great, XXXV, 3. In the very center of the world of late antiquity stand the figures of the sage and the monarch as images that are relative and precisely for this reason competing; already on the threshold of the epoch there is a significant "agon" of the legendary meeting between Alexander and Diogenes.

50 Cf. Burckhardt 1908, p. 180.

51 A. Politiani epigrammata latina, LXXXVI (Marullo, Poliziano, Sannazzaro 1976, p. 82).