Vitruvian Man: Rome under Construction by John Oksanish

Abstract

166 PHOENIX wind of philosophical, phenomenological, and anthropological theorists, from household names to the recent and the obscure. Approaches to Lucretius goes up to the boundaries of Lucretian studies and throws a fetial spear beyond them. The essays are in parts challenging, in parts rewarding, sometimes both. The book’s meticulous Index Locorum is a welcome choice for a singleauthor -focused volume. I wish more contributors (beyond Goldschmidt and O’Rourke) had followed the practice common elsewhere in Roman-poetry studies of distinguishing between poet and persona. Women penned only three of the thirteen chapters; although this does not quite make for a “brolume,” it does undersell the important work on DRN by women across disciplines, and perhaps begs for a sequel volume in which feminist and other theories are given prominence. Wake Forest University T. H. M. Gellar-Goad Vitruvian Man: Rome under Construction. By John Oksanish. Oxford University Press: New York, NY. 2019. Pp. ix, 251. Eighteen years ago, my monograph on Vitruvius was a unicum in the English-speaking world, appearing when study of the Roman author’s first-century b.c.e. treatise on architecture was mostly confined to continental Europe.1 During the intervening years work on Vitruvius by Anglophone scholars, especially classicists, has increased significantly, with Vitruvian Man: Rome under Construction by John Oksanish being a recent notable example of the determination to rescue Vitruvius from obscurity. Oksanish makes it clear at the outset that his is a literary reading of De architectura, which concentrates on “the author constructed by the text” (4).2 His method is to examine both the text itself, particularly the prefaces of its ten books, and the literary world from which that text emerged. Reading De architectura as a “rhetorical performance of expertise rather than an invitation to practice” (10) accounts for Oksanish’s lack of interest in what Vitruvius has to say about design and construction, the subtitle of the book notwithstanding. The first of five chapters, “Vitruvius, Man?,” addresses the question of Vitruvius’ identity. The very limited biographical information found in the prefaces is far less relevant to Oksanish’s aims than the textuality of the treatise, which, if properly excavated, yields an “imago” (36) of Vitruvius’ own design. This imago Oksanish identifies with an ancestral imago of Ennius, whose simulacrum Vitruvius evokes in his ninth preface as a figure for the enduring fame of this first Latin poet, invoked along with other writers he admires (9.pref.16). Ennius was amicus and adviser to Scipio Africanus. By thus indirectly claiming Ennius as his “ancestor” Vitruvius writes himself into Augustan history as an analogous adviser to the princeps. Oksanish finds literary background in Cicero’s glorification of Ennius in Pro Archia and Sallust’s description of ancestral imagines as incitements to virtue in the Bellum Jugurthinum. 1 I. K. McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London 2003) 4. 2 M. F. Nichols, Author and Audience in Vitruvius’ De architectura (Cambridge 2017), the first monograph on Vitruvius by an English-speaking classicist, also focuses on De architectura as text. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 167 Chapter Two, “History from the Ground Up: Vitruvius’s ‘Textual’ Monuments,” opens with Suetonius’ account of the maiestas imperii inherent in Augustan building programs (Aug. 28–29), in which Oksanish finds an echo of Vitruvius’ dedication to the princeps (1.pref.). Praise of Augustan building includes similar emphasis on these buildings’ majesty and their authority as lasting memorials of the new ruler’s res gestae —architectural achievements on which Augustus’ own Res gestae would itself lay considerable emphasis (RG 34). According to Oksanish, De architectura was itself composed as a monumentum, which, like the monumentum of Horace (Odes 3.30), will outlast any that is built. Related claims valorizing texts as lasting vehicles of commemoration in both Livy and Tacitus are investigated. Discussion of monumenta leads to the caryatids Vitruvius invokes in Book 1, which are meant to demonstrate why history is one among the nine disciplines with which he says an architect must be familiar , since history allows him to account for the use of ornaments like caryatids in his work. Demonstrably inaccurate as “history,” the point of Vitruvius...