Mary Beard’s new book “The Roman Triumph” (Belknap Press, 448 pages, $29.95) needs some italics in its title. The book isn’t about the “Roman” triumph; that is, it isn’t about the motley achievements — gladiatorial and otherwise — which have come to us courtesy of Russell Crowe and other famous Romans. It’s about the Roman “triumph,” a kind of lavish parade held in honor of a conquering general upon his return to Rome. Think of Admiral George Dewey celebrating his victories in the Spanish-American War with a parade that wended its way through New York, en route to a triumphal arch built especially for the occasion at Madison Square. Or, better, of Napoleon sauntering through Paris bedecked with the loot he plundered from the Italians.

Of course, neither could match the Romans when it came to doing things up gaudily. When, in 61 B.C.E., Pompey the Great returned from victory in the east, he trundled through Rome surrounded by live captives in traditional costume, heaps of jewels, precious bric-a-brac, and 75,100,000 drachmae of silver coin — considerably more than the annual tax revenue of the entire Roman world at the time. To cap it off, he had his chariot pulled by a team of African elephants.

For part of the route, at least. At the gates through which the parade was to pass before a final ascent of the Capitoline hill, the elephants got stuck. There really wasn’t any way to coax the beasts through, so the parade had to be stopped while the elephants were swapped out for the more traditional — and more svelte — team of horses. But not even this immunized the conquering general against embarrassing gaffes. When, in 46 B.C.E., Caesar celebrated the first of a series of triumphs, the axle of his chariot broke — as luck would have it, in front of a Temple of Good Fortune — and he nearly toppled out. The parade stopped until somebody got hold of a spare.

Ms. Beard does a fine job of using stories like these to show what a delicate exercise in stagecraft these triumphs were. There was always a threat that the returning hero — and, by extension, Rome itself — would be upstaged. Engineering miscues were one part of
the problem, the spectators another. When the conquered King Perseus was marched down the streets of Rome with his children, “too young to be aware of the scale of their misfortunes,” the typically blood-thirsty crowd’s moral sentiments poured forth. The Romans, the historian Plutarch tells us, were moved to pity and “fixed their gaze on the young ones and many ended up crying. The spectacle was a mixture of pleasure and pain”—at least until the children had gone by.

Ms. Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge and an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, which describes her as a “wickedly subversive commentator on both the ancient and the modern world.” The problem with this description is not that it’s false: Ms. Beard has written some wonderful, indeed wickedly subversive, books on the ancient world. The problem is that it’s hard — and not wise — to be wickedly subversive all the time. There is something Roman — probably even something triumphal — about this designation. And it surely does Ms Beard no favors, for it makes it hard to find this book, which is long on workmanlike scholarship but short on revelation, anything other than dreary and disappointing.

In fact, the most subversive thing about “The Roman Triumph,” is that it declines to place the Roman practice in the context of our own culture of political spectacle. Whatever one thinks of the war in Iraq, the president’s “Mission Accomplished” speech was truly Caesarian, save for the fact that it took place on an aircraft carrier and not in the center of Rome. I could not believe that Ms. Beard passed on the opportunity to draw the connection, for she would have been well within her rights, and she is not known for holding her tongue. “However tactfully you dress it up,” she wrote in the London Review of Books shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, “the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.”

No amount of fancy footwork has allowed Ms. Beard to quickstep her way out of these “wickedly subversive” comments. They recently resurfaced in these pages, alongside equally ugly comments by Italian playwright Dario Fo, in a discussion of Norman Podhoretz’s new book “World War IV.” Some counsel, though, might be taken from the Romans themselves, who knew the dangers of braggadocio — in word and in deed. That’s why they counseled reticence, particularly at those moments we are most given to squawk. Moments, in fact, like these triumphal parades. If we can believe certain ancient historians, the conquering general was accompanied by a slave whose job it was to whisper this sage advice: “Remember, you are but a man.”

Mr. Boyle is an assistant professor of classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.