Volume 54, Number 20 · December 20, 2007
Dark Victories
By Garry Wills
The Roman Triumph
by Mary Beard
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 434 pp., $29.95
A triumphus was a victory procession through ancient Rome granted to generals after a successful military campaign. There is more evidence for the performance of this ceremony than for any other Roman ritual. It was a thing constantly talked about in Roman antiquity. You might expect, then, that a vast body of learning would have been formed around the custom. Unfortunately you would be right. 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.
Review, 3167 words
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