Triumph in Defeat: Military Loss and the Roman Republic

Although a great deal of historical work has been done in the past decade on Roman triumphs, defeats and their place in Roman culture have been relatively neglected. Why should we investigate the defeats of a society that almost never lost a war? In Triumph in Defeat, Jessica H. Clark answers this question by showing what responses to defeat can tell us about the Roman definition of victory. First opening with a general discussion of defeat and commemoration at Rome and then following the Second Punic War from its commencement to its afterlife in Roman historical memory through the second century BCE, culminating in the career of Gaius Marius, Clark examines both the successful production of victory narratives within the Senate and the gradual breakdown of those narratives. The result sheds light on the wars of the Republic, the Romans who wrote about these wars, and the ways in which both the events and their telling informed the political landscape of the Roman state. Triumph in Defeat not only fills a major gap in the study of Roman military, political, and cultural life, but also contributes to a more nuanced picture of Roman society, one that acknowledges the extent to which political discourse shaped Rome's status as a world power. Clark's work shows how defeat shaped the society whose massive reputation was-and still often is-built on its successes.

"The numerous and serious defeats incurred by the famous Roman military machine during the Republic have for the most part been subsumed into a story-the Romans' story-of eventual success. Triumph in Defeat extricates the defeats from that powerful teleology and examines the response to defeat in the interval before victory, revealing thereby the constructedness of Rome's reputation for invincibility. It is a valuable contribution to our understanding of Rome's management of its empire." --Cynthia Damon, University of Pennsylvania

"This stimulating and original work, situated at the intersection of narratology and military history, argues that defeat played a vital role in the senate's-senatorial historians'-construction of victory during the middle Republic. It offers a provocative new perspective on lost battles in Roman memory and Latin historiography as well as Republican imperialism." --Nathan Rosenstein, The Ohio State University

Jessica H. Clark is Assistant Professor of Classics at Florida State University.

Acknowledgements

List of Maps

Abbreviations and Note on Sources

Chronology

Introduction

Chapter 1: When in Rome: Remembering and Reevaluating Defeat

Chapter 2: Costs and Benefits: Winning the Second Punic War

Chapter 3: Managing Defeat: The Senate and the Triumph, 201-167

Chapter 4: Alternative Endings: Responding to Repeated Defeat, 156-130

Chapter 5: Bad Politics: Defeats, Nobility, and New Men, 120-102

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index