Books 2010: io triumpe

Books 2010: 55

nonfiction

55. Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph, Harvard, 2007.

Beard has written an elegantly comprehensive book about all the things we don't know about the triumph, and why it is unlikely we can ever know them. She outlines the theories of others both about what the triumph was, and what it was for, and why these are implausible, logically inconsistent, or overly optimistic in their reconstructions.

Sadly, despite Beard's skilled survey of both evidence and arguments, she falls rather short of elucidating her own argument in clear terms: her statement that the institution of the 'triumph' constituted a space - a not uncontested space - for the working-out of the Roman construction of the desirability of martial success and the tension between glory and mortality, success and humiliation, is a statement which despite its prominence in the opening pages comes to seem less than central - indeed, even tangental - to the book as a whole.

A work that points out with keen-eyed scholarship how fleeting and how much based on shifting sands are our views - our tendentious certainties - about the triumph in representation and in actuality is a fine achievement. But in claiming that the truth of the past is largely unknowable, Beard has sidestepped rather neatly putting her own theories to the test.

We know the past is a constructed thing, an arguable narrative full of not enough hard evidence, claimed 'facts', suppositions, imaginative leaps and twisty implausible logic. In the end, though, you have to take the leap of "I think" and build your own narrative from the handful of broken jigsaw pieces that remain. As Peter Jones wrote in the Telegraph, shortly after the book's publication: I must admit that I wish Beard had not played scholarly hard-to-get and had had a stab (fingers crossed, perhaps) at what she thought triumphs were all about. That is what professors are for, isn’t it?

But an interesting book, nonetheless.

Books 2010: io triumpe

Books 2010: 55

nonfiction

55. Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph, Harvard, 2007.

Beard has written an elegantly comprehensive book about all the things we don't know about the triumph, and why it is unlikely we can ever know them. She outlines the theories of others both about what the triumph was, and what it was for, and why these are implausible, logically inconsistent, or overly optimistic in their reconstructions.

Sadly, despite Beard's skilled survey of both evidence and arguments, she falls rather short of elucidating her own argument in clear terms: her statement that the institution of the 'triumph' constituted a space - a not uncontested space - for the working-out of the Roman construction of the desirability of martial success and the tension between glory and mortality, success and humiliation, is a statement which despite its prominence in the opening pages comes to seem less than central - indeed, even tangental - to the book as a whole.

A work that points out with keen-eyed scholarship how fleeting and how much based on shifting sands are our views - our tendentious certainties - about the triumph in representation and in actuality is a fine achievement. But in claiming that the truth of the past is largely unknowable, Beard has sidestepped rather neatly putting her own theories to the test.

We know the past is a constructed thing, an arguable narrative full of not enough hard evidence, claimed 'facts', suppositions, imaginative leaps and twisty implausible logic. In the end, though, you have to take the leap of "I think" and build your own narrative from the handful of broken jigsaw pieces that remain. As Peter Jones wrote in the Telegraph, shortly after the book's publication: I must admit that I wish Beard had not played scholarly hard-to-get and had had a stab (fingers crossed, perhaps) at what she thought triumphs were all about. That is what professors are for, isn’t it?

But an interesting book, nonetheless.