Rabun Taylor
The University of Texas at Austin, Classics, Faculty Member
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Research Interests: Psychology, Space and Place, Distributed Cognition, Greek Theatre, Theatre Theory, and 8 moreAncient Greek and Roman Theatre, Embodied and Distributed Cognition, Roman theaters, Roman Architecture, Understanding Architectural Space, Theater and Performance Studies, Architecture and Public Spaces, and Arethusa
Research Interests: Space and Place, Distributed Cognition, Greek Theatre, Theatre Theory, Ancient Greek and Roman Theatre, and 7 moreEmbodied and Distributed Cognition, Roman theaters, Roman Architecture, Understanding Architectural Space, Theater and Performance Studies, Architecture and Public Spaces, and Doors, Thresholds, and Closure Systems in Roman Public and Domestic Architecture
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The link provides access to the website (created with Adam Rabainowitz) that publishes the stratigraphy: much of the book is available on Google Books.
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What is an oscillum? As it is used today, the term oscillum (oscilla in the plural) refers to two distinct but related things in the Roman world: in one case an artifact, in the other a historical construct. According to standard modern... more
What is an oscillum? As it is used today, the term oscillum (oscilla in the plural) refers to two distinct but related things in the Roman world: in one case an artifact, in the other a historical construct. According to standard modern usage it was an object of marble worked in relief on both sides, probably painted, and suspended by a hook from the architrave or ceiling of a colonnaded portico.1 It tends to take one of three forms: tondo (a thin disk), pinax (a framed rectangle), or pelta (a broad, lunate shield). Small marble theater masks, usually hollowed out in the back, have sometimes been found in the company of conventional oscilla, most famously at the House of the Golden Cupids at Pompeii (fig. 1). All these objects are frequently depicted hanging from fictive colonnades or garlands in Pompeian frescoes. The reliefs appearing on oscilla are mostly typical Roman genre scenes dominated by Dionysiac and theatrical themes; occasionally a mythological vignette will appear in highly abbreviated form. Marble oscilla of the Roman west (a few have also been found in Athens) came into vogue only in the first century ce. and declined in popularity after the mid second century. Clearly their various forms were deemed interchangeable by the time they began to appear in permanent materials. But their eclecticism is not meaningless. Indeed, we should see their popularity in domestic contexts as a commodif?cation of a variety of ritual traditions on the Italian peninsula which extended back for centuries, and which shared one common feature: their meaning was defined or enhanced by the act of suspension. Although the scholarship on oscilla is not robust, a number of article-length studies, a dissertation, and a short monograph have appeared on the topic.2 These have been concerned not only with the oscillum as a material artifact, but with the Latin word oscillum from which the modern term is derived?a word so obscure that literary commentators in late antiquity could only speculate about it. To distinguish between the archaeological artifact, which is never directly referenced in any ancient text, and the lexicographic one, I will designate each by typeface: the former in roman, the latter in italic. My intention is not to establish an absolute distinction, but merely to place emphasis on one designation or the other. Since the nineteenth century, there has been a strange gulf between art historians, who tend to sidestep the literary construct too quickly, and the students of religion such as Franz Altheim and Jean-Louis Voisin, who deal at length with the literary sources and the various claims to ritual origins for oscilla but hardly acknowledge the existence of a physical corpus of suspended objects, let alone the extant representations of them in a variety of media.3 The question of origins This article investigates a range of possible primary functions?most of them ritual in nature?that underlie the more overtly semantic and aesthetic secondary 1. Marble plaques are not the only class of objects called oscilla. Railler lays out the problem of definition succinctly: "l'emploi indiscrimin? de ce terme comporte quelques inconv?nients, quand le m?me mot en vient ? d?signer des bas-reliefs de marbre du 1er s. ap. J.-C, des masques ou poup?es suspendus aux arbres dans de vieux cultes italiques, de petits m?daillons de terre cuite du IVe s. av. J.-C.
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When considered in light of contemporary seismological and volcanolo-gical research, an abundance of literary, archaeological, and epigraphic information can illuminate the natural and historical circumstances marking a series of natural... more
When considered in light of contemporary seismological and volcanolo-gical research, an abundance of literary, archaeological, and epigraphic information can illuminate the natural and historical circumstances marking a series of natural disasters that beset coastal Campania between 62 CE and the early 80s. During this time, towns extending from Neapolis east and south to Salernum suffered damage from several earthquakes. The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 subjected the entire zone to damage as well, but outside the core pyroclastic zone the effects were variable. The quakes seriously affected Neapolis and its territory, yet the city survived and prospered due in part, it is argued, to an unusual and fortuitous antiseismic feature of its urban fabric. The volcanic eruption dealt a grievous blow to the local landscape and economy but Neapolis again demonstrated its resilience, providing assistance to the emperor's relief commission and refuge to many who escaped the eruption. In the aftermath of 79 this city may have undergone a mild form of colonization, selling the emperor agricultural land for future veteran settlement in areas where recovery could be expected and establishing a permanent suburban neighborhood, perhaps more than one, for refugees.
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Before the construction of continuous embankments in the late nineteenth century, Rome was perpetually forced to adapt to the wayward Tiber River. The world’s most populous ancient city enjoyed an infrastructure of unparalleled... more
Before the construction of continuous embankments in the late nineteenth century, Rome was perpetually forced to adapt to the wayward Tiber River. The world’s most populous ancient city enjoyed an infrastructure of unparalleled complexity and functionality, but these properties also made it uniquely vulnerable. Creative solutions were periodically devised to mitigate moderate flooding. But major floods were beyond remedy; they repeatedly destroyed wharves, cut bridges and aqueducts, spoiled food stores, and spread pestilence. Surviving fragments of the famous Severan marble plan represent riverfront districts, and they can tell us much about the city’s coexistence with the Tiber at a single moment in time. But when carefully overlaid on G.-B. Nolli’s celebrated—and accurate—eighteenth-century map, they reveal that in the intervening centuries the river in the southern sector of the city, always the most active wharf district, swerved westward by almost its entire width. More startling still, much of that shifting evidently happened not long after the marble plan was completed around 205 C.E. The southern river wall of the Aurelianic defensive circuit, dating to the 270s, and mapped by Nolli along the shoreline of the Marmorata district, floats out over the water when aligned with the marble plan. Other evidence of major floods and displacement of the riverbed in the third century—including the relocation of at least two detached bridges, one of them significantly misaligned with the modern current—suggests that the riverine landscape and its urban interventions were predicated on the ephemerality of the Tiber’s course and boundaries. The result was a conceptual “soft zone” of pliable, provisional urban fabric along the river frontage that exercised both subtle and drastic influences on Rome’s urban development.
Research Interests: Cartography, Classical Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Urban History, Rome, City of, and 14 moreHistory of Cartography, Urban Studies, Rivers, Topography of Ancient Rome (Archaeology), Imperial Rome, Historical Cartography, Ancient Rome, Severan Age, Ancient Roads, Ancient Cartography, Roman Archaeology, Ancient and Roman Roads, Aurelian Wall Circuit, and Forma Urbis Marble Plan
In C. Kosso and A. Scott, eds., The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing, and Hygiene from Antiquity through the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
Research Interests: Archaeology, Classical Archaeology, Roman Religion, Greek Archaeology, Ancient Greek Religion, and 20 moreGreek Myth, Ancient Greek History, Greek religion (Classics), Greco-Roman Mythology, Roman numismatics and archaeology, Ancient Greek Numismatics, Ancient Roman Numismatics, Ancient Greek and Roman Art, Naples, Greek mythology, Ancient Greek Mythology, Greek and Roman Art and Architecture, Neapolis, Roman Art, Greek and Roman Archaeology, Cultural History of Naples and Campania, Sanctuaries in Ancient Rome and Italy, Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology, Roman Archaeology, and Graeco Roman Religion
... Inspired by Rabun Taylor's article [1], which proposes that Hagia Sophia's original vaulting system consisted of an upper dome supported by a fenestrated drum, the present team of authors, which... more
... Inspired by Rabun Taylor's article [1], which proposes that Hagia Sophia's original vaulting system consisted of an upper dome supported by a fenestrated drum, the present team of authors, which includes both engineers and scholars of Byzantine Greek, undertook to analyze ...
Research Interests: Civil Engineering, Earthquake Engineering, Byzantine Studies, Byzantine History, Byzantine Architecture, and 11 moreByzantine Archaeology, Structural Earthquake Engineering, Constantinople, Justinian I, Emperor, Roman Architecture, Byzantine art, Structure Analysis, Hagia Sophia, Late Antique and Byzantine Archaeology, Architecture and History of Art, Justinian, and Byzantine history and archaeology
AND THE SHRINE IN THE ROMAN FORUM ... Janus, like so many ancient gods who lacked the grace of a story, was a messy concrescence ... 2Cicero notes that iani are transitiones perviae, and sug-gests that the name ab eundo . . . est ductum... more
AND THE SHRINE IN THE ROMAN FORUM ... Janus, like so many ancient gods who lacked the grace of a story, was a messy concrescence ... 2Cicero notes that iani are transitiones perviae, and sug-gests that the name ab eundo . . . est ductum (Nat. D. 2.67). See Bomer, ...
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T he first dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, perhaps the greatest structural and artistic innovation in Justini-an's church, is lost to us forever. Its precise shape and size are not recorded in the written or visual... more
T he first dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, perhaps the greatest structural and artistic innovation in Justini-an's church, is lost to us forever. Its precise shape and size are not recorded in the written or visual records; nor does an approximation of it survive in architectural ...
Research Interests: Late Antique and Byzantine History, Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Architecture, Late Antique Archaeology, Byzantine Studies, and 8 moreByzantine History, Late Antique Art and Archaeology, Constantinople, Greek and Roman Art and Architecture, Roman Architecture, Hagia Sophia, Roman Archaeology, and Justinian
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Abstract The southern Tyrrhenian coast of Italy was the locus of the only known cults of the Sirens in antiquity. While a famous sanctuary of the Sirens was situated on the Sorrentine Peninsula at the southern end of the Bay of Naples,... more
Abstract The southern Tyrrhenian coast of Italy was the locus of the only known cults of the Sirens in antiquity. While a famous sanctuary of the Sirens was situated on the Sorrentine Peninsula at the southern end of the Bay of Naples, the cities of Neapolis and Terina seem to have ...
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Abstract The architectural terracottas of Cosa, found in great quantities around the town's temples, were sorted into an elaborate morphology in the 1950s. This morphology is often cited as a basis for the chronologies and... more
Abstract The architectural terracottas of Cosa, found in great quantities around the town's temples, were sorted into an elaborate morphology in the 1950s. This morphology is often cited as a basis for the chronologies and histories of the temples and as a model by which to ...
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... INTRODUCTION AND PRIMARY SOURCES The Aqua Alsietina (fig. 1), sometimes calledAqua Augusta, and its initial raison d'etre, the Naumachia Augusti, are in many ways the most mysterious of all Rome's major waterworks. We owe... more
... INTRODUCTION AND PRIMARY SOURCES The Aqua Alsietina (fig. 1), sometimes calledAqua Augusta, and its initial raison d'etre, the Naumachia Augusti, are in many ways the most mysterious of all Rome's major waterworks. We owe what little we ...
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Page 1. American Journal of Archaeology 108 (2004)22366 223 Hadrian's Serapeum in Rome RABUN TAYLOR Abstract Doubts persist about the identity and origins of the colossal temple on the Quirinal Hill in Rome, of which only... more
Page 1. American Journal of Archaeology 108 (2004)22366 223 Hadrian's Serapeum in Rome RABUN TAYLOR Abstract Doubts persist about the identity and origins of the colossal temple on the Quirinal Hill in Rome, of which only small fragments remain. ...