CLARK : Triumph in defeat (fülszöveg)
Roman armies win wars—so the Romans tell us, and history confirms. As a result, the place of defeat in Roman culture has not been fully appreciated; with a few notable exceptions, Rome is better known for its military victories than for its setbacks. Romans will not always have known when and how—and sometimes if—they would ultimately achieve a victory, however, and therefore how they responded to their defeats will have been more significant to them than it is to us. In considering Rome's defeats, the primary purpose of this book is neither to correct for the possibilities of hindsight nor to ascribe an undue importance to those times when Roman armies met with a reverse. Rather, this study asks what responses to defeat can tell us about the definition of victory, and about the construction and maintenance of the authority behind that definition. Beginning 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, Jessica H. Clark examines both the successful production of victory narratives at Rome and the gradual breakdown of those narratives, both within the Senate and beyond. 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 constructed 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.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
