Columen
Columen (later culmen) is used in architecture, either generally for the roof of a building, or particularly for a beam in the highest part of the slope of a roof. By this description Vitruvius seems to mean either the collar-beam, or the king-post, but more probably the latter, as he derives columna from columen (Vitr. 4.2.1; 4.7.5).
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.