A few years ago Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins wrote a fascinating book about that most famous monument of imperial Rome, the Colosseum. They asked just what exactly went on there. Now Mary Beard has turned her attention to the most celebrated ritual in Roman life: the Triumph granted to a victorious general. It’s not only celebrated, but is something we know, or think we know, a lot about. For one thing, we have a list of Triumphs, the ‘Fasti Triumphales’, which she calls ‘an extraordinary achievement of Roman historical reconstruction and the backbone of many modern studies of the ceremony’s history’.

Literary Review

Nov 2007

Categories

Allan Massie

An Old-fashioned Kind of Spy

Character Building

Much More Useful than Writing Novels

Aesthete with a Cause

In Brigand Country

Law by Name, Lawless by Nature

He Took the Path of Most Resistance

Diary: Proust’s Progress

Pillaged People

Even So, He Had No Right to Beat Up Bibbles

A First-Rate Education

Toxic Relations

A Writer Who Needs to be Saved From His Admirers

Ruddy Old Gore

Border Patrol

25 Million and Counting

Byron Tells All

The Thistle Blooms

Kiss Me, Clodia

This Earth, This Realm, This Poland

Succession Planning

Vichy Business

Grain Store of Empires

Caught By Surprise

The Prince in the Tower