Vitruvius's treatise De architectura (On Architecture, ca. 30-20 B.C.), an architectural and engineering compendium in ten books (each about thirty pages long), is the author's only known work and is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity. The work is important not only for the picture it provides of the theory and practice of architecture and engineering in classical antiquity but also for its pervasive influence on subsequent architectural theory and practice beginning in the early Renaissance and continuing into the nineteenth century.

Most of the little that is known about the life of Vitruvius (only his family name has come down to present-day readers) must be gathered from his treatise, especially in the preface to book 1. He served under Julius Caesar, probably as a military engineer, and his description of conditions in Numidia suggests that he was there with Caesar in 46 B...