The Roman Triumph
by Mary Beard
448pp, Harvard, £19.95
A great procession sets off from the Field of Mars, the grassy meadow around which the Tiber makes a great arc. Rome's citizen army, returned from yet another victorious campaign, parades through the streets of the city. The soldiers follow an ancient route flanked by temples dedicated after previous victories, through the great circus, on into the forum until, to catcalls and fanfares, and leading barbarian kings and great piles of booty, they escort their general up to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. Impassively he stands in his chariot, a wreath held over his head, and behind him a slave whispers, again and again, "Remember you are mortal." Easy to forget, since he wears the clothes of a god.
Or not ... for almost every detail of this picture - familiar as it is from sword-and-sandal epics and Asterix books - is, according to Mary Beard, up for grabs. Yes, the triumph was a vivid and central part of Roman culture. In fact, she argues, it was in some ways more central than we have ever realised. Triumphal imagery and triumphal language bled into the Roman games and seeped into the ceremonies that marked the election of a consul or the arrival (or through deification, the departure) of a new emperor. Triumph was inscribed into the architecture of arches, theatres and temples, and also sarcophaguses and tombs. It penetrated epic and erotic poetry and comic drama too. But almost every detail of this great ceremony is maddeningly difficult to seize upon. Everything on which we were agreed turns out to be just that little bit more difficult to demonstrate than anyone ever imagined.
Beard has in her sights three processions. The first is that long historical sequence of actual celebrations. The second is a series of rich and extravagant accounts of triumphs, what she calls "rituals in ink" although they include a mass of images too, such as the Arch of Titus. Third, there is a long procession of classical scholars, who follow Beard's chariot with placards hung around their necks detailing their wild conjectures, hypotheses and claims about what the triumph "really meant".
It would be convenient if each could be examined separately, but the processions keep colliding in the winding, narrow streets of Roman cultural history. The actual triumphs are known to us only through the representations, and these are difficult to disentangle from the dense foliage of scholarly exegesis. Beard prunes ferociously. The evidence for the triumphal route is alarmingly inconsistent. The slave in the chariot whispering to the general is a modern composite, compiled of late testimony, no one piece of which tells exactly this story. The clothes borrowed from the god, the chariot itself are insecure. So is much more.
Once the factoids are swept away we are left with modern attempts to create some sort of general rule-book for triumphs. How many enemies did you need to kill? What sort of general could celebrate? Who decided? Ancient writers made many claims, but their generalisations stand up no better than those of the moderns. It does not help that when a Polybius or a Livy or a Josephus sets out to describe a particular triumph, he focused on what was remarkable, extraordinary, controversial and bizarre. And who was to say what was "normal" and what excessive?
Our witnesses concentrated on the most spectacular stagings of the triumph. Some of the most entertaining parts of Beard's boisterous demolition invite us to imagine the second and third-rate triumphs, the lines of not many captives, the displays of hardly any booty, the rather petty squabbles over spoils between generals and the soldiers on whom they depended for their cast of thousands on the big day. Grander theories fall even flatter. Was the triumph some collective rite of passage from war to peace? Was the general a sort of temporary god? Was this an ancient trace of Etruscan kingship? No, not really, probably not. Too much has been built on too little.
The first really rich rituals in ink were penned during Rome's great overseas expansion, the conquest of the Mediterranean world in the second century BC. One of the many pleasures of reading this bold and exciting book is the luxuriant evocation of performance after grand performance. Many of those stories begin with the Roman senators arguing ferociously over whether this or that general should be allowed to triumph, inventing in the process ancient rules and precedents to bolster their cases. By the time of the latest accounts, the emperors guarded the ceremony jealously, celebrated it rarely and turned it to their own dubious purposes. Rule breaking was almost the point. So searching for "the normal triumph" is pointless.
Beard is interested in the risks of triumphing. Triumphs could go wrong, could prompt ridicule or arouse hatred; prisoners might seem nobler than their captors, generals might become less glorious and more petty in the process. Yet 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 is professor of ancient history at the University of St Andrews.