Denis Feeney writes:

Beard calls into question our assumptions not just about what actually happened when a triumph took place but also about its symbolic or ideological power. An important test case sets the scene: the book gets off to a cracking start with the triumph celebrated by Pompey the Great on his birthday in 61 BCE, together with its commemoration and reception in the following years. In her discussion, the only trick Beard misses is the play on Pompey’s name that some later writers enjoyed: it was almost identical to pompe, one of the normal Greek words for the Roman triumph, so that Pompey the Great, Pompeius Magnus, is as it were called ‘Mr Big Triumph’. The problems of evidence which will be so important in the rest of the book are on display from the start: Beard shows that the late and contradictory sources make it finally impossible to know, for example, what Pompey was wearing on the day or what was carried in his procession by way of booty.

(LRB 21 February 2008)

What were Roman triumphal processions really like, and what was their cultural significance? Maddeningly for scholars, what little evidence we have is often contradictory. In a meticulously researched and well-argued book, Mary Beard sets out to challenge what she calls the ‘spurious certainties’ surrounding the Triumph, whilst at the same time proposing new ways of studying ancient ritual in general.

Harvard | hardback 434 pp. |ISBN: 9780674026131