Mary Beard - The Roman Triumph [2007][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: October 30, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0674026136 | ISBN-13: 978-0674026131 | Edition: Text is Free of Markings
It followed every major military victory in ancient Rome: the successful general drove through the streets to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill; behind him streamed his raucous soldiers; in front were his most glamorous prisoners, as well as the booty he'd captured, from enemy ships and precious statues to plants and animals from the conquered territory. Occasionally there was so much on display that the show lasted two or three days.

A radical re-examination of this most extraordinary of ancient ceremonies, this book explores the magnificence of the Roman triumph--but also its darker side. What did it mean when the axle broke under Julius Caesar's chariot? Or when Pompey's elephants got stuck trying to squeeze through an arch? Or when exotic or pathetic prisoners stole the general's show? And what are the implications of the Roman triumph, as a celebration of imperialism and military might, for questions about military power and "victory" in our own day? The triumph, Mary Beard contends, prompted the Romans to question as well as celebrate military glory.

Her richly illustrated work is a testament to the profound importance of the triumph in Roman culture--and for monarchs, dynasts and generals ever since. But how can we re-create the ceremony as it was celebrated in Rome? How can we piece together its elusive traces in art and literature? Beard addresses these questions, opening a window on the intriguing process of sifting through and making sense of what constitutes "history."

Reviews
In this highly individual book Mary Beard plays havoc with conventional ideas about the Roman triumph, while at the same time scrupulously presenting the evidence with which we can make up our own minds. It is the most important statement to date by a major historian of Roman culture.
--William V. Harris, Shepherd Professor of History, Columbia University

Occasionally one comes across a work of history which lights up a whole era as if by a lightning flash. Mary Beard's new book falls into this rare category. By focusing on the specific ritual of the triumph, she brilliantly illuminates the Roman world in all its aspects - military and political, social and literary, religious and geographical - and also reminds us how much of our own language and culture of success is drawn from this gaudy and often bloody spectacle.
--Robert Harris, author of Imperium

From the first (uncertain) moment when Romans came to think of triumph as a bundle of victory rites that could be repeatedly improved upon, generals fought and lobbied for their moment in the limelight. Enemies, rivals and spectators could not resist being drawn into the show. Beard's Roman Triumph will exercise a similar fascination on its readers.
--Greg Woolf (The Guardian 2007-12-22)

Beautifully written, brilliantly insightful, this book is highly recommended to all those Romanists, professional and amateur, excavators and tourists, who want to get under the skin of the empire-builders of ancient Rome.
--Neil Faulkner (Current Archaeology 2008-02-01)

[Beard] is immensely knowledgeable, and lays forth one of the paradoxes of history (and not only ancient history, one may add). This is that the more we know, the less certain we can be of anything...This is a fascinating book which offers another paradox. By showing how much that we thought we knew is uncertain, Mary Beard teaches us far more than any confident account of the triumphal ceremony ever could.
--Allan Massie (Literary Review 2007-11-01)

Conjectures and conclusions grow from and around the triumphus like kudzu. It takes the mighty vorpal sword of Mary Beard to clear a path through this jabberwocky jungle, snicker-snack. She stands in the great tradition of myth-puncturing Latin classicists--scholars like Richard Bentley, Basil Gildersleeve. A. E. Housman. or Ronald Syme--when she points out that almost all the established views on the triumph are dubious or plain wrong...Her prose, for all its learning, is jaunty. Her book is, in short, a triumph.
--Garry Wills (New York Review of Books 2007-12-20)

A book that manages to be simultaneously both brilliantly subtle and splendidly swaggering. Throughout it, [Beard] subjects our sources for the Roman triumph to merciless dissection, exposing with a pathologist's scalpel how beneath all its outward sheen there lurked profound insecurities and ambivalences...[It] can be enjoyed by readers far beyond the purlieus of classics departments...A book that is, in every sense of that complex word, a triumph.
--Tom Holland (Sunday Times 2007-11-11)

At every turn Beard happily strips away misconceptions and hypotheses, emphasizing the fragility of the facts...It's hard to imagine a more perceptive and questioning study of a central cultural practice that lasted into the Christian era, and was constantly being subverted, extended, and absorbed into representations of empire and even of divinity.
--Helen Meany (Irish Times 2007-11-17)

Thorough, minutely detailed and closely argued...[Beard's] account certainly brings us closer to the complex and fascinating reality than any Rome according to MGM or Paramount.
--Christopher Hart (Independent on Sunday 2007-11-18)

This rich and provocative book offers such a full account of what it means to call ancient Rome "a triumphal culture."
--William Fitzgerald (Times Literary Supplement 2007-12-07)

Brilliant, original and challenging, this book is a triumph in itself. (The Scotsman 2007-12-01)

[An] arresting and highly readable new book...A highly amusing as well as illuminating read...Overall, Beard is giving us a lesson in how to understand and study ritual. Its early students (not least Frazer, one of the founders of modern anthropology, in The Golden Bough), saw it as a strait-jacket, constraining behavior within tightly defined parameters. This book gives us the Roman triumph as a case study in the lessons of more recent anthropology. Parameters are broad: malleable enough for ritual to be used to attempt to justify behavior, and not just to dictate it...Instead of unchanging ritual, Beard gives us a world of invented precedent and "convenient amnesia," of substantial success but also manifold failure as individual Roman generals attempted to mold general practice to their own--usually political--purposes.
--Peter Heather (BBC History Magazine 2007-12-01)

In The Roman Triumph, many cherished assumptions are robustly interrogated or put to the sword...Beard takes us on a dizzying trip back and forth across triumphs and centuries (Pompey, Romulus, Nero, Augustus). Only after she has unpicked accounts of Pompey's triumph, and reflected on captives, spoils, rules and ritual, does she pause briefly to end at origins...Simultaneously a re-evaluation of the triumph, of Roman culture more broadly, and of the problems of scholarship on ancient societies, this is an ambitious project.
--Maria Wyke (The Independent 2007-12-14)

How much do we really know about Rome's supreme honor, and how much is myth and invention? Not much and quite a lot, it turns out. Beard's brilliant analysis locates the ritual in the shifting political, social and martial worlds of Rome. Illuminating moments abound.
--Marc Lambert (Scotland on Sunday 2008-01-06)

So you thought you knew about the Roman Triumph? Conventional wisdom states that triumphant generals in Rome painted their faces red. They rode in a chariot with a slave who whispered to them: "Remember that you are a man." For that one day, they impersonated the king of the gods, Jupiter Best and Greatest, wearing his costume, consisting of a purple toga and a tunic decorated with a palm-leaf pattern, a laurel wreath and other accessories...If you thought you knew some or all of these facts, Mary Beard's excellent book will prove you wrong...It makes healthily astringent (as well as fascinating) reading...The book can be heartily recommended.
--Jonathan Powell (Times Higher Education Supplement 2008-01-04)

This is no ordinary history. It is not a reconstruction but a deconstruction, a virtuoso display of how to interrogate one's sources. Not only that, it is written with sly subtlety, delightful humor and an agreeable absence of jargon.
--Christian Tyler (Financial Times 2008-01-12)

About the Author
Mary Beard has a Chair of Classics at Cambridge and is a Fellow of Newnham College. She is classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog “A Don’s Life”. She is also a winner of the 2008 Wolfson History Prize.