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It is a sign of progress, no doubt, that we in the West appear to have lost the knack of celebrating our military victories effectively. Back in 1982, a parade to mark the retaking of the Falklands was memorable principally for a bust up between Mrs Thatcher and the Archbishop of Canterbury. More recently, when George Bush jetted onto an aircraft carrier and proclaimed “mission accomplished” in Iraq, he gave a hostage to fortune that haunts him still. Generals nowadays boast, not of how many enemies they have killed, but of how few. The brute facts of war (of what it is and what it causes) seem to have become an embarrassment even to the military themselves.

How very different it was in ancient Rome. No half-measures or moral qualms, we like to imagine, for a famous general such as Pompey the Great. When he celebrated a victory, he did it in style. On one occasion, he had himself wheeled through the streets in a chariot pulled by elephants. On another (a procession staged, rather like President Bush’s landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, to celebrate the toppling of a notorious Near Eastern tyrant), he dazzled fellow citizens by parading whole cartloads of bling, hosts of exotically costumed prisoners and a portrait-bust of himself fashioned entirely out of pearls. The word the Romans used to describe such extravaganzas remains to this day firmly embedded within most European languages. Whenever we speak of “triumphs”, we are paying posthumous homage to the power and glamour of those ancient victory celebrations.

But were they, as students of Roman imperialism have always tended rather to assume, merely the unqualified expressions of a lust for conquest and domination? “It is warrior states that produce the most sophisticated critique of the militaristic values they uphold.” So argues Mary Beard, in a book that manages to be simultaneously both brilliantly subtle and splendidly swaggering. Throughout it, she subjects our sources for the Roman triumph to merciless dissection, exposing with a pathologist’s scalpel how beneath all its outward sheen there lurked profound insecurities and ambivalences. “Petty sacrilege,” wrote Seneca, “is punished; sacrilege on a grand scale is the stuff of triumphs.” It is with this witty and subversive quip that Beard opens her book, and it sets the tone for what follows: a sustained questioning of everything that we ever thought we knew about the triumph.

For even Pompey’s career as a triumphator, it turns out, was not immune to the occasional blip. The elephants drawing his chariot proved too large to fit through a set of gates on the route; his obsession with showcasing loot was dismissed by his disapproving peers as the grossest vulgarity. Beard’s glee in highlighting such disappointments is palpable; and yet still she has not exhausted her talent for deconstruction. For, as she points out, the fact that Pompey’s triumphs are among the best documented of any in Roman history cannot conceal the slightly perturbing detail that only one of our sources was actually an eyewitness to them. Distortion, exaggeration, myth: all must necessarily cast their shadows over any history of the famous ceremony.

Beard does not shrink from the implications of this. Indeed, she positively revels in them. Her aim, she freely acknowledges, “is to celebrate, rather than to straighten out or compress, the historical intricacies” – and celebrate them she certainly does. Sometimes she brings to her sources the robust common sense of a Dr Johnson, pointing out, for instance, how incredibly difficult it would have been for anyone to stay upright in a triumphal chariot for long, so shoddy was the suspension. Sometimes she applies to an ancient text the kind of close analysis that is customarily buried away in the dustiest and most scholarly of articles, but which, in The Roman Triumph, serves to afford the kind of delight that Doctor Watson must often have felt while listening to Sherlock Holmes.

In short, rather like Courtesans and Fishcakes, James Davidson’s book on ancient Athens, Beard’s study of the triumph is that rara avis, a work of original and often dense scholarship that can be enjoyed by readers far beyond the purlieus of classics departments. A difficult trick to pull off, of course – and all the more so, bearing in mind Beard’s theme, which is much concerned with the perils of overreaching. Just like any Roman general riding in his triumph, she has set herself to appeal to radically opposed constituencies: her own peers, and the profanum vulgus. On the back of her dust jacket, commendations from two very different authors appear: one a professor at Columbia University, and the other Robert Harris. Fitting tributes to a book that is, in every sense of that complex word, a triumph.

THE ROMAN TRIUMPH by Mary Beard
Harvard UP £19.95 pp434

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