2 September 2026 · /p/2026-09-02
Three Tests, One Building
Open Vitruvius 1.3.2. Then walk the amphitheatre against that page.
The tests are on a page you can still open. Vitruvius, De Architectura 1.3.2, names them in order: durability, convenience, and beauty. Durability is foundations carried to solid ground and materials chosen wisely. Convenience is a plan that presents no hindrance to use. Beauty is members in due proportion. The eye reads a building, not a heap. That is the reading. It is not a slogan about circuses.
Research starts where the page stops. The Colosseum is an amphitheatre. The Greek word means “theatre with seats on all sides,” and here the seats ring one oval arena. It is not the Circus Maximus. Convenience, on this building, is the same test Vitruvius wrote for any public work — whether a crowd can reach one event and leave again. The numbered openings and passages are how that test was built. They are not a later caption pasted onto the stone.
So the work for 2 September is a check, not a new topic. Read the three tests in the order they were written. Then ask only whether this standing amphitheatre still has to meet them. It has to stand. It has to work. Its parts have to belong together. Yesterday’s page said you can still walk in. Today’s page says what you are walking with: a sentence from Book I, Chapter III, section 2.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Vitruvius, De Architectura 1.3.2, Morgan 1914: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0073%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D3%3Asection%3D2
SECONDARY SOURCES
Britannica, “Colosseum”: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Colosseum
Britannica, “amphitheatre”: https://www.britannica.com/technology/amphitheater