by Mary Beard
First published 2007
Mary Beard takes readers into the streets of ancient Rome to examine the triumph, the elaborate ceremony that celebrated every major military victory. Successful generals rode chariots through the city to Jupiter's temple on the Capitoline Hill. Soldiers marched behind them while prisoners, captured treasures, exotic animals, and plants from conquered lands paraded ahead. Some displays lasted multiple days. Beard investigates both the ceremony's magnificence and its troubling aspects. She analyzes mishaps like Julius Caesar's broken chariot axle and Pompey's elephants getting stuck in an arch. She examines how prisoners sometimes upstaged their captors. The author argues Romans both celebrated and questioned military glory through these spectacles. She explores how the triumph influenced later rulers and generals. Beard addresses the challenge of reconstructing these ancient ceremonies from fragmentary evidence in art and literature. Her work reveals the triumph's central role in Roman culture while examining how historians piece together the past from incomplete sources.
Genres: history, non-fiction, ancient-history, academic
Vibes: thought-provoking
Tropes: historical
Setting: Capitoline Hill, Rome
Period: Ancient
448 pages · Hardcover · Belknap Press