Triumph in the Decentralized Empire

Triumphs were everywhere in late antiquity, and nowhere. The language, gesture, trappings, and conduct associated with the ritual are frequently attested, even as the necessity of their association with specificities of that ritual broke down. As a related matter, in the fourth century the city of Rome ceased to be the essential center of politics or the necessary center of an imperial sacred topography. This decentralization, as it is often called, had particular import for those aspects of politics dependent on a symbolic and communicative system conducted through rituals of mass participation, witnessing and interaction, of which the triumph was surely one. The chapter commences by analyzing forms of decentralization and their consequences for the conduct of politics, before turning to the reduplication of ceremonial action in both capitol and elsewhere as a particular solution to the new spatial dynamics of political communication in the period

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Decentralization · Empire · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Globalization, Historical Perspectives, and International Relations · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Law

• Warfare in the Roman World

  Open Access•A D Lee•Warfare in the Roman World•2020

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