Table Of ContentVitruvian Man
Vitruvian Man
Rome under Construction
z
JOHN OKSANISH
1
1
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Vitruvian Man: Rome under Construction. John Oksanish, Oxford University Press (2019).
© Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190696986.001.0001
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. Vitruvius, man? 31
2. History from the ground up: Vitruvius’s “textual” monuments 59
3. The body in brief: De architectura and the limits of somatic synopsis 94
4. Introducing the architectus 119
5. Bodies as behavior: Corpus architectorum 144
Epilogue: Alternate realities— a palimpsestic corpus 185
Appendix: Summary of contents of De architectura 191
Works cited 207
General Index 227
Index Locorum
Greek Authors And Works 239
Latin Authors And Works 243
Vitruvian Man: Rome under Construction. John Oksanish, Oxford University Press (2019).
© Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190696986.001.0001
Preface and Acknowledgments
I once had the pleasure of eating lunch with a scholar of Roman his-
toriography who was a visiting scholar at Yale when I was working on the
dissertation on which this book is loosely based. I offered that among the
many challenges of writing about De architectura from a literary and rhetor-
ical perspective was that I regularly encountered the very same problems that
Vitruvius himself had claimed to encounter when writing De architectura.
Just as Vitruvius noted that most of his sources on architecture were not
Roman but Greek, so too I found myself adapting a vast and disparate
array of scholarly sources to new purposes. Many of these sources had been
produced on the European continent, where interest in Vitruvius had been
strong for at least two decades but where scholarly traditions, conventions,
and priorities were somewhat different from those with which I was most
familiar. Similarly, Vitruvius’s subject matter, architecture, meant poking my
head in several other of our disciplinary silos— for example, art history, ma-
terial culture, and archaeology. It seemed to me that, when Vitruvius spoke
in the prefaces to books 4 and 5 of De architectura about gathering the wan-
dering particles and inchoate tidbits of the discipline into a coherent body
of work, he may as well have been speaking for me. This is to say nothing of
the raised eyebrows that I received from colleagues in the discipline who ev-
idently did not see much value in Vitruvius except perhaps as a repository of
architectural miscellany unsupported by the material record (or, at least, its
canonical narratives). It was also clear that these attitudes toward Vitruvius,
at least in the recent Anglo- American tradition, had prejudicially denied De
architectura fair treatment from the literary- critical tools that other technical
and scientific works (De rerum natura, De oratore) had enjoyed for some time.
The textual ecumenism of the New Historicism was not enough, it seems, to
have rescued Vitruvius from the shipwreck of marginal Latinity to which the
adoption of Ciceronian classicism had consigned him.
Vitruvian Man: Rome under Construction. John Oksanish, Oxford University Press (2019).
© Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190696986.001.0001
viii Preface and acknowledgments
Fortunately, the winds have changed since I began my writing in earnest on
De architectura in 2006. Vitruvius now requires (somewhat) less introducing
than he did then, since Continental interest in Vitruvius has finally found a
counterpart across the channel and across the pond. My own work on the
topic has benefited not only from these broader forces, but also from the
interventions and support of fellow scholars. First and foremost, Christina
Shuttleworth Kraus has been a more generous and supportive reader and
critic of my work than I could have deserved or imagined; the keenest of
interlocutors during and after the composition of my doctoral thesis, she
more than anyone is to be credited for this book’s strengths. Mary Boatwright
and, especially, Kirk Freudenburg also deserve thanks as additional readers on
that thesis, the latter also for entertaining my thoughts on the intersection of
Vitruvius and Horace.
Opportunities to present papers on Vitruvius at conferences on De
architectura and other, related topics have provided invaluable catalysts
for crystalizing my thoughts on the topics discussed herein. Audiences at
Amherst, Columbia, Yale, Ohio, Johns Hopkins, and UMass- Amherst, as
well as at meetings of the Society for Classical Studies (both under the new
and former moniker) and the Classical Association of the UK have likewise
offered valuable feedback. Special thanks are owed to Ian Ruffell and Lisa
Irene Hau, who ran a successful panel at the Celtic Conference in Classics
VII (Bordeaux), at which I first aired my thoughts on Vitruvius’s treatment of
caryatids, and who graciously allowed me to reserve those thoughts— which
might otherwise have appeared in the collection resulting from the panel,
Truth and History in the Ancient World: Pluralising the Past (Routledge,
2016)— for the present volume. Likewise my thanks go to Christina S. Kraus
(again) and Marco Formisano for an invitation to speak in New Haven for
the Marginality, Canonicity, and Passion conference, in the proceedings of
which (Oxford University Press, 2018) I develop ideas that are treated more
briefly in the introduction and chapter 1 of this book. I also thank Marco
Formisano and Serafina Cuomo for an invitation to speak in Berlin as part of
the 2013 conference Vitruvius in the Round. Portions of my contribution to
the special issue of Arethusa that resulted (= Arethusa 49.2 [2016]) appear in
chapter 3, and I am grateful to Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing
me to reprint them here.
Others who have read this work, in whole or in part and at various stages
of development, include (in no particular order) Katharina Volk, Eric Adler,
Sinclair Bell, James Ker, Katherine Clarke, and Jelle Stoop, along with Wake
Forest colleagues past and present, Mary L. B. Pendergraft, Michael Sloan,
Preface and acknowledgments ix
T. H. M. Gellar- Goad, Amy Lather, Laura Veneskey, Robert Ulery, Cary
Barber, and James T. Powell. Insightful criticism from the anonymous readers
at Oxford has much improved the final result, and I am especially grateful to
Stefan Vranka for his patient encouragement over the many years that it has
taken to bring this project to fruition. The copyeditors and production team
at Oxford have been indispensable, and my brother James A. Oksanish lent
his keen eye to proofreading portions of the manuscript. All remaining errors
are entirely my own.
For their time, interest, and overall encouragement, I am also deeply
grateful to the following: Glenn Most, Luca Grillo, Yelena Baraz, Andrew
Riggsby, Tony Corbeill, Alice König, Nicolas Wiater, Jim O’Hara, Jane
Chaplin, Steven D. Smith, Hunter Gardner, Richard Thomas, Elizabeth
Keitel, Marios Philippides, Brian Breed, Kenneth Kitchell, Ayelet Haimson
Lushkov, Pramit Chaudhuri, Gareth Williams, John Marincola, Victor Bers,
Egbert Bakker, Michael Peppard, Rogan Kersh, Michele Gillespie, John
A. Ruddiman, Mary Foskett, and Dean Franco.
This project enjoyed financial support from the National Endowment for
the Humanities (for chapter 4), and the Wake Forest University Humanities
Institute, which is also funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Wake Forest generously provided a semester’s leave. The Office of the Dean
of the College at Wake Forest, the MacDonough Family Faculty Fellowship,
and the Provost’s Office provided additional support for the preparation of
the manuscript and for the purchase of necessary research materials.
Finally, it is not too much to say that this book would not have been pos-
sible without the encouragement of my wife, Devon Healy MacKay, my chil-
dren, and my parents. They have tolerated much that is otherwise inexplicable
in the name of Vitruvius.
