
Benjamin M. Sullivan |
Review of Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 2007. Pp. 434. ISBN 978-0-674-02613-1. |
The triumph (Latin triumphus) was the Roman victory ritual
par excellence, its celebration the greatest height to which a
political Roman of the Republic could aspire. With captives and
plunder on display and accompanied by a formidable retinue, a
general who had led his army to victory in a major battle entered
the city of Rome by the "Triumphal Gate" (used exclusively for the
purpose) and processed through its streets to the Temple of Jupiter
on the Capitol. Strange rites, the origins of which were already obscure by the
late republican period, awed spectators and participants alike:
clothed in elaborate, archaic costume, the
general held a laurel branch in one hand and an ivory scepter in the
other while his soldiers chanted insulting or obscene songs to ward
off evil. Standing behind him in his chariot, a slave held a golden
crown over his head and whispered, "look behind you; remember that
you are mortal." In The Roman Triumph, Mary Beard attempts to
revise every element of the standard scholarly reconstruction of the
triumph, often radically.[1]
Professor of Classics at Cambridge
University and a renowned student of Roman religion, she
is as qualified as anyone now writing in English to undertake the
task. That said, readers of MWSR should be aware at the
outset that her book is not primarily a military historical study
but an account of an important Roman ritual in its political, social,
and cultural milieux. Just as much, it is an extended critique of
how modern scholars have interpreted that ritual.
Beard's avowed purpose in writing the book is to prove her
conviction that, more often than not, scholars have gone about
studying the triumph the wrong way. Much of the book is thus devoted
to questions of methodology, yet she hopes it will appeal to
non-specialists. She arranges it loosely in four parts: the first
chapter is a case study; the second and third examine the place of
the triumph in Roman culture generally and the reliability of the
evidence for it; chapters four through eight are studies of
particular aspects of the ceremony and what they reveal about
"triumphal culture"; the final chapter surveys the triumph over
roughly a millennium of practice.
Because of the lack of reliable sources for archaic
Rome, Beard concentrates for the most part on the late Republic and
early Empire. This is in marked contrast to many earlier studies:
the fullest previous English treatment of the triumph, by H.S.
Versnel, deals mostly with the ceremony's archaic origins.[2]
The first part uses one triumph as a touchstone. In 67 BCE, Cn.
Pompeius Magnus ("Pompey") was granted an extraordinary command to
clear the Mediterranean of increasingly brazen pirates. Dividing the
coasts into thirteen regions each under a commander subordinate to
himself, Pompey worked with stunning efficiency. Within three
months, he had crushed the pirates and swept their fleets from the
sea. The next year, Pompey received another extraordinary command,
this time to carry on the war against King Mithridates VI of Pontus,
who had posed a very real threat to Rome's security since the
mid-90s. Pompey checked and isolated Mithridates, and by 63 the king
was dead by his own hand. Meanwhile, Pompey had driven south to
annex Syria and capture Jerusalem, extending Roman control over
enormous swathes of land from the Black Sea to the Levant. The
richness of the plunder from these campaigns was staggering: the
inventory of Mithridates' furniture alone took the Romans thirty
days to complete.
In 61, Pompey celebrated at Rome with a triumph commensurate with his
successes. He displayed so much loot that the procession lasted two
days instead of the usual one. But Beard stresses that the actual
events of the triumph were only one part of the story. Pompey struck
coins to commemorate it and monumentalized it in the theater complex
(the first permanent stone theater at Rome) he dedicated in 55.
These tangible memorials were effective: more than a century later,
Pliny the Elder would complain that this triumph marked the end of
the old Roman austerity, and in the early sixteenth century CE, an
adviser to the Medici suggested a detailed recreation of Pompey's
triumph to fill out a program for the feast of John the Baptist. Yet
Beard maintains that the most important memorials were the written
accounts of the triumph, and the examination of these forms the core
of her study. These accounts, however, are not always what they
seem:
The triumph of Pompey is not simply, or even primarily, about what
happened on September 28 and 29, 61 BCE. It is also about the ways
in which it was subsequently remembered, embellished, argued over,
decried, and incorporated into the wider mythology of the Roman
triumph as a historical institution and cultural category. Like all
ceremonies … its meaning must lie as much in the recollection and
re-presentation of the proceedings as in the transient proceedings
themselves. Its story is always in the telling. The exaggerations,
the distortions, the selective amnesia are all part of the plot--as
this book will show (41).
In the next section, Beard argues that the descriptions of triumphs
by Roman historians and scholars often say more about their authors'
own preoccupations than the actual practice of the ritual. The
influence of the "invention of tradition" school[3]
is apparent
in the argumentation here and throughout. To summarize briefly, its
practitioners contend that traditions are often manufactured during
periods of rapid social change; Beard applies their methods to the
ancient testimonia on triumphs, which, problematically, were written
mostly in the imperial period, while the triumphs they describe date
to the republican period, sometimes centuries earlier. The signal
development in this process of invented tradition happened under
Augustus: after the triumph of L. Cornelius Balbus in 19 BCE, no one
triumphed in Rome apart from the emperor or his close relatives. The
ceremony itself now became relatively rare and imperial narratives
of republican triumphs were themselves attempts to piece together
what amounted to an antiquity. After all, even of the surviving
notices of Pompey's triumph, only Cicero's was contemporary with it
and Cassius Dio wrote his important account nearly three centuries
later. There is good cause to be skeptical, since Cicero himself (Brutus
62) complained about "invented triumphs and too many consulships" in
the histories of Roman aristocratic families. Good documentary
evidence does survive (in particular the so-called Fasti
Capitolini, an inscribed list of triumphing generals covering
the period from Romulus to Balbus, erected in the Augustan period),
but Beard argues (too skeptically) that even this epigraphic record
is the work of compilers with agendas of their own and may not have
been consulted by later writers.
The book's third section examines the significance of specific
aspects of and rules governing the ceremony, breaking away the
attractive but thin shells of the standard scholarly
reconstructions. Considering the role of captives in the triumph,
for example, she shows that their display could arouse ambivalence
in spectators, since by attracting their sympathies the prisoners
sometimes outshone the general himself and blurred the line between
victor and victim. Moreover, the ceremony could even serve as a rite
of passage to "Romanization": P. Ventidius Bassus triumphed in 38
BCE for his victory over the Parthians, but had himself been led as
a captive in the triumph that Cn. Pompeius Strabo (Pompey's father)
celebrated for his successes in the Social War (91-87).
Beard next convincingly dispenses with some extravagant art
historical theories about the works of art displayed in triumphs.
Less convincing is her dismissal of the evidence for the accounts
that triumphing generals deposited in the state treasury, which
detailed the quantity and quality of booty retrieved. In a chapter
different in execution from the others in this section, Beard
scrutinizes Cicero's campaign to secure senatorial approval of a
triumph for his efforts as governor of Cilicia and Cyprus in 51-50
BCE. By working out a chronology and establishing the events "as
they actually happened," she shows that the process of determining
the right to triumph was a messy one and did not conform to the
rules that the legally minded scholars of the nineteen century
sought to impose upon the evidence. (Beard handles this material so
deftly that one wishes she had included more essays into history of
this more traditional kind.) She then compares Cicero's unsuccessful
efforts with Livy's descriptions of senatorial debates about
procedure regarding the right to triumph in the third and second
centuries, concluding that these were more "Ciceronian" than
previously imagined: rather than hewing to an inflexible set of
legal rules, the senate's decision-making was often ad hoc.
Beard argues that, trying to make sense of the earlier evidence,
Livy adjusted his materials to conform to the more "Ciceronian"
practice of his own time. I prefer to see Livy's accounts as
reflective of mid-Republican reality, but no matter: her critique of
the rigid legal formalism of earlier scholarship marks significant
progress.
Another chapter considers the importance of the victorious general
in the triumph. Earlier scholarship was concerned primarily with
origins: thus the triumphing general was thought to imitate Jupiter
himself, Rome's early Etruscan kings, or (Versnel's solution) both
god and kings. However, Beard maintains here and in the next chapter
(on the often indistinct boundaries between the triumphs and
"triumph-like" ceremonies) that theories about the origins of the
triumph are often flimsy, since the evidence for archaic Rome is so
thin and its interpretation so tendentious.
In the final section, after first considering the significant
changes under Augustus (again, mostly improvised rather than legally
formal), Beard continues her critique of the study of archaic
origins and again casts doubt on reconstructions of the earliest
triumphs. Finally, she asks when the triumph ceased to be a living
ritual. Unlike rituals such as animal sacrifice, no law ever banned
the practice of triumphing, and it continued into the Christian
Empire, albeit in sometimes outlandish new forms. Beard considers
candidates for the "last triumph" ranging from the celebration of
Maximian and Constantine in 312 CE to that of Belisarius in 534.
However, there is no clear rupture and she even suggests the triumph
of Titus and Vespasian in 71 may have been "more of a 'revival' than
living tradition, more afterlife than life" (328).
If there is a major flaw in the book, it is that, for all her
incisive analysis, Beard offers relatively little synthesis. J.G.
Frazer comes in for much criticism, even derision, for his theory
that the triumphing general copied the insignia and dress of the
archaic Italic kings, who had assimilated themselves to Jupiter
himself.[4]
But one misses Frazer's piercing anthropological insights or the
attempts at synthesis of scholars such as Versnel, who like Frazer
argued (if more soberly) from archaic evidence to ritual meaning.
Nevertheless, at the level of the specialist, the book must be
counted a resounding success. Beard's revisionist arguments will not convince
all scholars, but even dissenters will have to take them very seriously. Non-specialists, however, will likely find the
extended methodological discussions frustrating. Even so, all the
relevant material is included. Moreover, the lavish illustrations
and fascinating accounts of the triumph's post-classical
Nachleben alone make this book worth owning for all.
The American School of Classical Studies at Athens and The
University of California, Irvine
bsulliva@uci.edu
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