The Architecture of the Roman Triumph

Abstract

This book offers the first critical study of the architecture of the Roman triumph, ancient Rome's most important victory ritual. Through case studies ranging from the republican to imperial periods, it demonstrates how powerfully monuments shaped how Romans performed, experienced, and remembered triumphs and, consequently, how Romans conceived of an urban identity for their city. Monuments highlighted Roman conquests of foreign peoples, enabled Romans to envision future triumphs, made triumphs more memorable through emotional arousal of spectators, and even generated distorted memories of triumphs that might never have occurred. This book illustrates the far-reaching impact of the architecture of the triumph on how Romans thought about this ritual and, ultimately, their own place within the Mediterranean world. In doing so, it offers a new model for historicizing the interrelations between monuments, individual and shared memory, and collective identities.

Tokens and Social Life in Roman Imperial Italy

“…43 Millar, 2005 discusses the evidence for the latter on various other media. 44 For example, Beard, 2009;Östenberg, 2009;Popkin, 2016. 45 Rostovtzeff, 1905bOverbeck and Overbeck, 1996;Woytek, 2015: 480-4.…”

SIGraDi 2022. Critical Appropriations

“…From a primitive perspective, it creates shelter from weather events and predators. From an architectural historic perspective, it creates private and public space and in doing so provides a manifestation of environments that act as an extension of identity (Popkin, 2016). In other words, whether public or private space, architectural aesthetic, detail and organization provide a means to understand the social and cultural values of any given society.…”

“…One of the most significant of these, the Roman Forum, is the site where the Triumphal marches would close after various military conquests. It was a space of power and, more importantly, shows of power, immersing people into the political apparatus (Popkin, 2016). The private space of the villa also served political purposes, producing a space for discourse, political debate, knowledge creation and serving in many cases as a memory palace (Bergmann, 1994).…”

Visualising Ostia’s Processional Landscape Through a Multi-Layered Computational Approach: Case Study of the Cult of the Magna Mater

“…Archaeological and anthropological studies have identified that a clear relationship existed between moving rituals, the urban environment, and the participants involved with the ritual (Scheid, 1998;Demarest, 2006;Morton, Peuramaki-Brown, Dawson, & Seibert, 2014;Huet, 2015). Processions were highly interactive events, engaging with specific temples, cultic participants, and spectators in order to create a temporary shared ritual experience (Favro & Johanson, 2010;Popkin, 2016). A particularly significant factor of a procession, therefore, would have been its engagement with urban spectators.…”