History:The title could be misleading, perhaps suggesting a respectful survey of "the glory that was Rome". Except that that is unlikely to have been written by Mary Beard.
Professor of Classics at Cambridge, classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and regular commentator in newspapers and journals, she takes a bracingly questioning approach to the study of the ancient world. Her range of interests - from a history of the Parthenon to an intriguing biography of the Victorian classical archaeologist Jane Harrison - combined with an evident desire to communicate the fascination of classical scholarship have won her a great non-specialist readership.
Here she's examining the phenomenon of the "triumph", the ceremonial procession of a Roman general through the city of Rome to celebrate a major victory. Drawn in a chariot through the thronged streets, accompanied by his captives, his eye-catching spoils and his troops, he made his way to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill, where he would offer a sacrifice. More than 300 such triumphs were held during the city's 1,000-year history, including very famous occasions held in celebration of Pompey and Julius Caesar. Described in lavish detail by Roman authors - of various periods - and visually recreated in sculpture and triumphal arches, their imagery significantly influenced both the enactment and depiction of the victorious celebrations of later military leaders, from Renaissance princes to Napoleon. Mantegna's cycle of paintings, The Triumphs of Caesar, is just one of the many later reinterpretations of the ritual.
Despite the fact that "reception studies" are currently the growth area in Classics - and that's not an oxymoron - Beard is not particularly concerned with contemporary echoes of triumphal ritual in military and political culture. Instead she's setting out "to challenge many of the ways Roman ritual culture is studied and the spurious certainties and prejudices that dog it". She's examining the triumph as "a uniquely telling object lesson", focusing as much on "how we know" as "what we know".
"The competitive individualism of the triumph, its associations with many of the most prominent names in Roman public life, as well as its links to the powerful narrative of imperialism and Roman military success gave it a rhetorical charge," she writes. That narrative of imperialism is full of ambiguities, she argues, and makes a welcome defence of Roman culture against simplistic characterisations of it as obsessed with military glory, violence and imperial domination.
AN EXAMPLE OF ambiguity that she returns to throughout the book - and possibly overstates - is the danger that a triumph could backfire on a general: that its extravagance might be - and often was - disapproved of or perceived as hubristic; that the exotic prisoners, often from royal eastern families, could upstage the triumphing general, reversing the status of victor and victim. Or the spectacle could simply go wrong, with a chariot wheel coming off beneath Julius Caesar, or Pompey's team of elephants being too large to squeeze through the gate leading to the Capitol and having to be replaced by the more humble horse.
She reminds us repeatedly that the triumph was the subject of moralising comment - from Cicero, Pliny and Seneca - as well as admiration, and that it prompted critical thinking among writers on the "dangerous ambivalence of success and military glory" - though they might not have phrased it like that.
At its best when examining primary evidence in impressive detail, highlighting discrepancies and the unreliability of hyperbolic descriptions written by Roman authors decades after the event, this study authoritatively guides the reader through the process of scholarly research. At every turn Beard happily strips away misconceptions and hypotheses, emphasising the fragility of the facts. The itinerary of the triumph can't be established, nor its legal or constitutional basis, nor its historical development from its beginnings in early Rome, nor its suggested ritual function as a ceremony of purification. Most significantly, she is sceptical about its possible Etruscan origins. While she does briefly consider its putative Greek origins - as an echo of the myth of the triumphal return of Dionysos (Bacchus/Liber) from the east - and the etymological link between the Latin triumphus and Greek thriambos, she argues that the whole question of origins "is wrongly posed". It is "a cultural trope". It is, of course, but that could be because it's a subject whose interest hasn't been diminished by its imponderability.
The book's structure suggests that individual chapters had a previous existence as stand-alone papers on various aspects of the triumph. This might explain a certain amount of unnecessary recapitulation of its central points, especially on the disjunction between the triumphal ceremony as performed and as written ("the ritual in ink"), which "challenges the simplicity of a linear chronology". Her rich observations on historiography throughout are diluted by reiteration, and might be more effectively presented in a separate, concluding chapter. Yet while it may not become Beard's most widely read work, 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 is a journalist and critic, and is the editor of Irish Theatre Magazine
The Roman Triumph By Mary Beard Harvard University Press, 434pp. $29.95