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The Roman Triumph

The conquering hero as show-off

Mary Beard
Belknap Harvard, 448pp, £14.40,

Frederic Raphael

Wednesday, 14th November 2007

Frederic Raphael

Caesar’s own greatest triumph was celebrated in 46 BC when it seemed that he had no enemies left to defeat, but spin required that its magnificence should not seem to crow over fallen Roman citizens. All the same, one of the tribunes refused to stand as Caesar was wheeled past his seat, a hint of the resentments that would culminate in Caesar being knifed (as the soap-opera plot required) at the foot of Pompey’s statue.

Caesar’s last triumph was a cardinal moment. Previously, patrician grandees used such occasions to ‘give back’ to the Republic what its armies had gleaned under their command. Buggins’s turn allowed one victorious general after another his moment of triumph. But with the coming of the empire, only the emperor himself could be seen as the benefactor of the Roman people. What had once celebrated a national triumph was appropriated as an advertisement of the imperial regime. Buggins still sat in the Senate, but never again in a triumphal car.

With snappy scorn, Professor Beard approaches the unevenly evolving process of what ‘Roman men (and I mean men)’ got up to when on their highest horses. While she is very good on the way in which the triumph became showbiz and, with its monumental parades, headlined arches and rented eulogists, prefigured the modern spin-doctored Historical Event, her refusal to be impressed becomes itself triumphant. Rather as Ovid parodied the triumphal vocabulary in affecting subjection only to love’s chariot, Beard mocks the long tramp of Roman militarism.

Her whole drive is to mount a feminist triumph over those 320 triumphators and anyone who dares to question her intellectual imperium. Hence the train of amici whose important names warn off the critical; hence the bibliographical intimidation (odd that Paul Veyne, and his magnum opus on bread and circuses, should be uncited); hence the blurb that reminds us not only of her Cambridge chair, but also of her proconsular control of the TLS classics section: who crosses Beard, we are warned, would better cross the Rubicon. If only her prose marched with a classier step, if only the clichés, excessive adverbs, repetitions and solecisms had been dismissed the service, how wholeheartedly she might be cheered on her way! As it is, one tribune at least feels obliged to remain seated.