Una testa di Nettuno al Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Taranto. Dalla lettura iconografica alle testimonianze del culto di Poseidon/ Neptunus nella colonia greca e romana

Abstract

Abstract
This paper deals with a marble male head found in 1970 in via Abruzzo at Taranto and currently stored in the National
Archaeological Museum of the city. In the first section Luca Di Franco proposes a stylistic and typological analysis of
the sculpture, resulting in a substantial reassessment of both its chronology and its interpretation. Previously referred
to a 4th-century funerary sculpture, the head can now be recognized as part of a larger than life-size statue of Neptune
dating to the Late Republican or early Augustan period (40-20 B.C.). The historical context and the diffusion of the
model in the Roman world are considered as well. In the second part of the paper, Lorenzo Mancini outlines the status
of knowledge about Poseidon/Neptunus cult in the Spartan colony and the Roman city of Taranto (colonia Neptunia
and municipium Tarentum). In fact, most of the archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence related to the cult belong to the same chronological period of the head from via Abruzzo, whose position in the topographical frame
of the Roman settlement is also analyzed in detail. Finally, the available data lead to a new hypothesis connecting the
dedication of the statue to the activity of some of the most renowned personalities of the end of the Roman Republic,
whose relationship with Taranto is well known.

Keywords: Taranto; Magna Graecia; Poseidon/Neptunus; Roman sculpture; Greek cult.