Rabun Taylor

Death, the Maiden, and the Mirror: Ausonius's Water World

A series of ekphrastic passages from Ausoniuss Mosella famously describe the picturesque river and its inhabitants: human, animal, and divine. The crux of their meaning, it is argued, lies in a simile comparing those who play on the rivers surface to a young girl who, Narcissus-like, has mistaken her reflection for a real companion. The mirror, and the reflective river itself, are understood as a dual metaphor for the poem, which may be read in either of two directions: toward mundane satisfaction with sensory appearance (surface), or toward understanding (depth), which promises greater rewards but also greater dangers.

Roman Oscilla: An Assessment

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