In this highly individual book Mary Beard plays havoc with conventional ideas about the Roman triumph, while at the same time scrupulously presenting the evidence with which we can make up our own minds. It is the most important statement to date by a major historian of Roman culture. -- William V. Harris, Shepherd Professor of History, Columbia University Occasionally one comes across a work of history which lights up a whole era as if by a lightning flash. Mary Beard's new book falls into this rare category. By focusing on the specific ritual of the triumph, she brilliantly illuminates the Roman world in all its aspects - military and political, social and literary, religious and geographical - and also reminds us how much of our own language and culture of success is drawn from this gaudy and often bloody spectacle. -- Robert Harris, author of Imperium

"Conjectures and conclusions grow from and around the triumphus like kudzu. It takes the mighty vorpal sword of Mary Beard to clear a path through this jabberwocky jungle, snicker-snack. She stands in the great tradition of myth-puncturing Latin classicists - scholars like Richard Bentley, Basil Gildersleeve, A. E. Housman. or Ronald Syme - when she points out that almost all the established views on the triumph are dubious or plain wrong... Her prose, for all its learning, is jaunty. Her book is, in short, a triumph." - Garry Wills, New York Review of Books "A book that manages to be simultaneously both brilliantly subtle and splendidly swaggering." - Tom Holland, Sunday Times"

Mary Beard has a Chair of Classics at Cambridge and is a Fellow of Newnham College. She is classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog "A Don's Life." Her many books include The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found and The Parthenon (both from Harvard).