The Roman Triumph (original) (raw)
The present paper will present the significance of Roman triumphs and the purpose behind it in the history of Rome .Triumph refers to a conclusive success following an effort or confrontation and imposing ceremonial performed in honor of a victor .Any triumphal procession ; a pompous exhibition , a stately show or peagant .Mary Beard remarked that the Roman triumph was the victory ritual par excellence ,its celebrates the greatest height to which political Roman of the republic would aspire .Instances of the Roman triumphal victories included as Mary Beard put it ,Pompey had dealt decisively with two of the greatest dangers of Rome security and boasted a range of conquest that justified comparison with King Alexander himself hence (the title the great,(2007:7).Triumphal procession had celebrated Roman victories from the very earliest days of the city .Or so the Romans themselves believed tracing their origins of the ceremony back to their mythical founders Romulus and other early kings .The triumph was about display of success .Many of these occasions were memorized by Roman writers who recounted .The logic of the triumph was a celebration of victory over external enemies only: however on the war between Ceasar and Pompey , civil war could in a sense be defined as a war that would have no triumphs ;Mary Beard(2007:123).
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The Roman Triumph: Participation, Historiography and Remembrance
This paper constitutes an inquiry into the nature of the Roman triumph with a particular focus on the role of the city's inhabitants to whom it was supposedly addressed since the time of Romulus. Holding a triumph offered an invaluable venue in which triumphant generals ceremoniously expressed recent military success. With the advent of the Late Republic, it increasingly became a vessel with which these generals, increasingly sometimes at very short intervals, confirmed their own individual power and solidified their social base on which that power mostly depended. Participation in the ceremony, which entailed endemically social norms, was universal in that different genders and age groups could become a part of it. Although the practice gradually fell into disfavor after Augustus so as to give way to other public processions, due to constant interaction with triumphal scenery, the Roman authors, even those who might have never witnessed a triumph in their lifetime, wrote about past triumphs with cherry-picked or anachronistic details, resulting in the formation of an equivocal historiography on the subject. This paper was first written for the ARHA 517 class, taught by Assoc. Prof. Inge Uytterhoeven, in the Fall of 2019. Discussions stemming from class as well as the research inspired the topic.
This article examines how the victors in late Republican Rome expressed and celebrated military success in civil war. It is argued that the Senate and the victorious generals turned to the traditional triumph as a means to embrace civil war victories within an accepted frame of external conquest. It is further argued that the triumphal procession, in its capacity as a well-established spectacle performed as a role-playing between Roman victors and foreign losers, proved an inadequate means to give voice to Romans conquering other Romans. Novel forms of expressions were hence exploited: the memorial and the calendar. The memorial was alien to the Roman culture and did not succeed in winning acclaim. The calendar proved a more effective means. Both Caesar and Octavian were able to use the fasti anni as a medium to articulate their success in civil war, commemorating even their victories at Pharsalus and Philippi.
Triumph and Civil War in the Late Republic, Papers of the British School at Rome 81, 2013, 67-90.
Papers of the British School at Rome 81, 67-90., 2013
Many of the wars of the Late Republican period were largely civil conflicts, and there was thus a tension between the traditional expectation that triumphs should be celebrated for victories over foreign enemies and the need of the great commanders to give full expression to their prestige and charisma, and to legitimate their power. Most of the rules and conventions relating to triumphs thus appear to have been articulated as the development of Roman warfare brought new issues to the Senate’s attention. This paper will examine these tensions and the ways in which they were resolved. The traditional war-ritual of the triumph and the topic of civil war have both received renewed interest in recent scholarship. However, attempts to define the relationship between them have been hampered by comments in the ancient evidence that suggest the celebration of a triumph for victory in a civil war was contrary to traditional practices. Nevertheless, as this paper will argue, a general could expect to triumph after a civil war victory if it could be represented also as over a foreign enemy (the civil war aspect of the victory did not have to be denied); only after a victory in an exclusively civil war was this understood to be in breach of traditional practices.
The Decline and Fall of the Ancient Triumph
Der römische Triumph in Prinzipat und Spätantike, 2016
This chapter argues that although victory remained absolutely central to royal ideals and imagery, there was a crucial change between the late Roman and the early medieval western worlds. Though key features remained (processions etc.) there was a decisive shift of emphasis towards Christian celebration presided over by the church; towards thanksgiving rather than praise; and towards Old Testament imagery. It is argued that a key phase of this shift took place after the Justinianic wars of the mid-sixth century. This change is explained in terms of the renegotiation of the ideological bases of power caused by Justinian's wars and the end of the Roman Empire. In this more Christian mode of thought, credit for victory was not appropriately given to mortal warriors, however skilful. Finally, the developments in the nature of 'triumphal' rulership are ascribed to a change in the 'geo-political' nature of the West and perhaps to a difference in the types of warfare being waged. 1 McCormick 1986. Not the least task of the present paper is to attempt to say something significant and additional to McCormick's monumental volume.
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