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DOI: 10.1177/0142064X13495132

2013 36: 17Journal for the Study of the New Testament Allan T. Georgia

Roman Ritual of PowerTranslating the Triumph: Reading Mark's Cruci?xion Narrative against a

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DOI: 10.1177/0142064X13495132

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Translating the Triumph:Reading Mark’s CrucifixionNarrative against a RomanRitual of Power

Allan T. Georgia

Fordham University, USA

Abstract

Traces of the Roman triumph have been identified in the procession narratives in Mk11 and 15, but how its themes should be understood to function in Mark’s telling hasnever achieved consensus. Reading these narratives alongside evidence for the Roman

triumph demonstrates how the ritual logic of the triumph allowed Mark to exploit thedegradation of Jesus’ passion, undermine the performance of Roman power and portray

Jesus as a king, and a threat to Rome. The Roman triumph paradoxically magnifiedtriumphal victims, presented kings as ideal victims, and drew a close parallel betweenthe victim’s kingly status and the conqueror’s grandeur. Mark employs the logic of

the triumph to transform Jesus’ status as victim into an assertion of his authority,so that Jesus’ execution by Roman agents emerges as a ritualized assertion of Jesus’Davidic kingship. In this article, Mark emerges as a cultural bricoleur who co-opts Roman

spectacle in order to naturalize Rome’s dominant language, symbols and practices,thereby translating them to the purposes of gospel.

Keywords

Bourdieu, Chariton, Mark (Gospel), ritual, Rome, triumph

Introduction1

In his book Christ is the Question, Wayne Meeks (2006: 76-77) imagines thesituation of early followers of Jesus coping with his death: ‘They faced a massive

1. I would like to thank Michael Peppard, John Penniman and Stephen Ahearne-Kroll for theirinsightful comments in the preparation of this article.

Corresponding author:

Allan T. Georgia, Fordham University, 441 East Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Article








18 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 36(1)

hermeneutical dilemma: interpret or despair. The movement did not despair. Forthe earliest formative remnant of them the paradoxical notion that God’s anointedvice regent was ignominiously killed became the generative center of their beliefs.’ This sense of the ‘hermeneutical dilemma’ of early Christians has occu- pied New Testament scholarship for more than a century, and has dictated theway that this literature is understood to interface with its cultural milieu. Thecultural milieu that has been understood to lie behind the New Testament text hasusually been that of the nascent Jewish literary culture in which the NewTestament was nurtured, or the sub-literary and popular Greek literature that wasmost similar to the context of its composition.

However, during the 1980s, and especially after the landmark essay by DavidAune (1983) on Roman court and cult ceremonial as a source for the liturgical

arrangement of the Apocalypse of John, Rome and Roman religious ritualemerged as an increasingly significant resource for contextualizing the NewTestament.2 The implicit importance of ritual for conceptualizing the practices,expositions and narratives of the New Testament raised a whole series of previ-ously unconsidered questions. One of the less noticed readings that developed inthis new venue in scholarship suggested that the narratives of Jesus’ triumphalentry into Jerusalem and procession to crucifixion in Mk 11 and 15 are describedin parallel to the Roman triumph—the civic ritual that celebrated victoriousRoman generals as gods, who paraded their tyrannical adversaries, as well asspoils and plunder from foreign nations, through the city to the temple of JupiterOptimus Maximus. This suggestion was certainly creative, but it failed to con-vince many.

Nonetheless, the Markan narrative can be shown to parallel the Roman tri-umph, not in terms of a narrative parallel, but with respect to the ritual move-ments, symbolic categories, and performative logic employed in the Romantriumph. When one considers the discussion of triumphal themes by Greek-speaking Roman subjects and attends to the accounts of the triumph of Titus and

Vespasian in Josephus’s Jewish War 7.5.4-6, which reflected the immediate con-text of Mark’s Gospel, it becomes more plausible still. Mark’s narrative exhibitsan eclectic bricolage of appropriated cultural and religious source material that borrows the logic of the Roman triumph, which paradigmatically imagined arepublican, Roman general celebrating the defeat of a tyrannical, kingly adver-sary, in order to innovate an ingenious choreography for the procession of a

2. The broad influence of Rome on the New Testament and early Christianity has been consideredin a number of studies. See Cuss 1974; Jones 1980; D’Angelo 1992; Brent 1999; YarbroCollins 2000; Carter 2001; Friesen 2001; Meggitt 2002; Heyman 2007; and Kim 2008. Theinfluence of Price 1984, Zanker 1988, Galinsky 1996 and Ando 2008 has also been significantfor New Testament scholarship.








Georgia 19

victorious victim of Roman power, whose royal majesty is confirmed by his being made an ignominious spectacle.3

Approaches to Jesus’ Processions in Mark 11 and 15Mark’s imitation of Roman triumphal themes has tended to be considered as amocking parody that intentionally subverts Roman authority. Schmidt (1995:1-2), who proposed the most sustained reading of the passion narrative in Mk15.16-32 alongside the Roman triumph, considers the crucifixion narrative inMark to be an ‘anti-triumph’ that works ‘to suggest that the seeming scandal ofthe cross is actually an exaltation of Christ’. He claims that the ritual supplies the best unifying scheme of the details in Mark, which he sees—following Gundry

(1993: esp. 1-26)—as an extended apology for the cross. As such, Schmidt(1995: 1) parallels the events of Mark’s narrative to what he deems to be theritual’s constituent parts. These include the gathering of the army, the dressing ofthe victor, the leading of the victim and the spoils, the march to the CapitolineHill and the sacrifice of the victim or victims. Schmidt (1995: 6) admits that the parallels he draws between Mark’s narrative and the Roman triumph vary instrength of credibility, but he insists that the details are too deliberate to beaccounted for otherwise.4 Even so, this analysis has been largely ignored.5

Other scholars follow Schmidt’s instinct, but tend to relocate the triumphalthemes elsewhere in Mark’s narrative and construe them without the strictures of

3. The sense of ‘logic’ here is that discussed by Pierre Bourdieu in The Logic of Practice.Bourdieu (1990: 86) remarks, ‘practice has a logic which is not that of the logician… [Thislogic] is able to organize all thoughts, perceptions and actions by means of a few generative principles, which are closely interrelated and constitute a practically integrated whole, only because its whole economy, based on the principle of the economy of logic, presupposesa sacrifice of rigor for the sake of simplicity and generality and because it finds in its“polythesis” the conditions required for successful use of polysemy.’ Bourdieu explains this at

length to describe the way that this ‘logic’ governs symbolic systems that rely equally—albeitcounter-intuitively—on both structured unity and fuzzy irregularity to achieve a ‘practicalcoherence’. Bourdieu acknowledges that this makes analysis of practice difficult, but insiststhat this coherence is innate in how these symbolic systems (like those of Roman ritual andearly Christian narrative) are generated.

4. He notes: ‘It is noteworthy that the most obvious allusions are made at the beginning of thenarrative, perhaps signaling to Mark’s audience that there is more to come for those “onthe inside” (cf. Mk 4:11).’ This kind of conceptual inconsistency exhibits the difficulty ofSchmidt’s argument for the parallels he raises.

5. Yarbro Collins (2007: 725) remarks in her definitive commentary on Mark that Schmidt’s

parallels are ‘far-fetched’. With regard to the presentation of the passage as an ‘anti-triumph’and specifically in his argument that the verb e0ca&gein is used ‘commonly in the NT andelsewhere to denote a procession involving the accompaniment of a key figure by others’(cf. Schmidt 1995: 8), Yarbro Collins claims that this is a misrepresentation of its use in the NT passages he cites (Mk 1.32; 2.3; 4.8; 5.27-28; 7.32; 9.17-20; 12.15-16).









deliberate parallel. Many of these studies diverge from Schmidt’s approach andfind this imagery resonating in the scene of Jesus’ so-called triumphal entry toJerusalem in Mk 11.1-11. Tatum (1998) reads the triumphal entry as a mockeryof Roman triumphal imagery through the polyvalent significance of the ass thatJesus rides. He calls attention to the ass as a messianic referent and an oft-used piece of anti-Jewish/Christian imagery, exemplified in the Alexamenos graffitoand the legend from Against Apion, where Josephus refutes the claim that theJerusalem temple housed the head of an ass.6 Tatum (1998: 133) acknowledgesthe resonance with the Roman triumph, and remarks on the return to one’s cityas a central characteristic of the Roman practice. He writes, ‘here the conqueringgeneral enters not the vanquished city but returns to appropriate his own city ofRome’. Unfortunately, Tatum does not develop this insight further. Catchpole

(1984) reads the entrance not as a literal triumph, but as a member of a ‘familyof stories’ detailing a celebrated entry into a city by a heroic figure.7 He suggeststhat Mark’s account includes various shared elements with these kinds of narra-tives, including a victory ascribed to the hero, ceremonial entry, acclamations ofthe hero with invocations of God, entry to the city climaxing at a temple, andfinally a cultic act (Catchpole 1984: 321). Catchpole (1984: 334) insists that theaccount in Mark has been ‘welded into a single whole’ by the combined forcesof an already-existing Jewish pattern and Mark’s ‘post-Easter Christologicalconviction’. Duff (1992) contradicts the notion that the narrative in Mark is tri-umphal in any sense, claiming that it is at best a comedic appropriation of triumphal symbolism. Duff (1992: 67-68), drawing significantly on the parallel toZech. 14, sees in Mark’s depiction a comedic anti-climax where, in 11.11, Jesus‘entered Jerusalem and went into the temple and, after looking around at every-thing’, abruptly leaves the temple and the city.8

Brent Kinman (1999) has sought to expand the presuppositions of this projectand characterize the entry narrative as a parousi/a, or celebratory welcome,examples of which appear throughout ancient texts where dignitaries, royals and

conquerors are narrated to be approaching cities. Kinman (1999: 281) writesthat, ‘the arrival of a royal or other dignitary was an occasion for an ostentatious

6. Against Apion 2.80 reads: ‘Within this sanctuary Apion has the effrontery to assert thatthe Jews kept an ass’s head ( In hoc enim sacrario Apion praesumpsit edicere asini caput

collocasse Iudaeos), worshipping that animal and deeming it worthy of the deepest reverence.’All translations are from Thackeray 1928; cf. Barclay 2007.

7. Scholarship on this point is assessed by Yarbro Collins (2007: 514-16).8. Mark 11.11: Kai\ ei0sh=lqen ei0j 9Ieroso&luma ei0j to_ i9ero_n kai\ peribleya&menoj pa&nta, o0yi/aj

h) /dh ou) /shj th=j w( /raj, e0ch=lqen ei0j Bhqani/an meta_ tw~n dw&deka. Yarbro Collins (2007: 515)helpfully suggests that this symbolic reading overemphasizes ‘an alleged “ritual of appropriation”’.Given Duff’s restriction to Mk 11, this issue of generalization seems fair; however, it has to be noted that non-generalized appraisals of Roman triumphs tend to presume a specificity ofknowledge and consistency among triumphs that we cannot account for.







Georgia 21

display designed to court the favor and/or placate the wrath of the visiting celeb-rity’. To substantiate this claim, Kinman (1999: 281-83) draws up a substantiallist of historical examples of these parousi/ai, including those of Attalus(Polybius 16.25.1-9), Mithridates (Diodorus Siculus 37.26; Cicero, Letters to

Atticus 5.16), Demetrius (Plutarch, Life of Demetrius 8.4-9.1) and Alexander(Josephus, Antiquities 11.8.4-5).9 Yarbro Collins (2007: 516) follows Kinman bycalling attention to the narrative of Vespasian’s parousi/ai in Josephus’s Jewish

War 7.4.1 as a distinct entrance from the depiction of the triumph of Vespasianand Titus in 7.5.3-6.10 In Vespasian’s parousi/a at Rome, the city’s inhabitantsreceive the general in a grandiose manner. The city saw him as their savior fromthe social upheaval of the previous two years, and addressed him as such. Thissection even incorporates the cultic fluidity of temple space, with the city itself

playing the role of the temple: ‘The whole city, moreover, was filled, like a temple, with garlands and incense. Having reached the palace, though with difficulty,owing to the multitude that thronged around him, he offered sacrifices of thanks-giving for his arrival to the household gods.’

The diversity of these narratives illustrates the general importance that spec-tacles of power held in antiquity. It is all the more difficult to imagine thatparousi/a narratives, such as those in Josephus or in the imagery in the post-entry narrative in Mk 12.10-11 that alludes to Ps. 118 (117), could be imaginableapart from their military apogee in the Roman triumph, since these texts werewritten in the immediate shadow of Rome’s triumph over Jerusalem.11 Moreover,the citations of the Psalms throughout Mk 11–16 complicate the logic of the practice at play here, by bringing their own ritual echoes into this text andspecifying the regal victim of the triumphal procession as explicitly Davidic.Ahearne-Kroll (2007) has persuasively argued that Mk 10–12 associates Davidwith Jesus deliberately to downplay the militaristic aspects of Davidicmessiahship, while the implicitly ritual voice of David in the psalms of lament patterns the passion narrative in Mk 14–16.12 Drawing non-martial associations

between Jesus and the most supremely royal figure of the Jewish tradition in this

9. Kinman only addresses historical counts of these narratives, without considering narrative or poetic evidence.

10. Yarbro Collins sees this parousi/a theme as also informed by the employment of Ps. 118(117), which Joseph Blenkinsopp (1961: 59) identifies as the thanksgiving of a public liturgythat ‘was probably written for a royal entry or parousia in the first place’.

11. The example of Titus and Vespasian’s triumph brings this connection into dramatic relief. We

have a textual and pictorial account of the triumph of Titus and Vespasian in Josephus’s Warof the Jews 7.5.4 and in a series of surviving marble reliefs on the Arch of Titus on the Via

Sacra in Rome. The arch represents unique material evidence for both the Roman triumph aswell as early Jewish temple culture. See Beard 2007: 42-46 as well as Magness 2008.

12. Especially 2007: 137-38 and 168-69.









narrative of Roman domination suggests that the category of kingship itself is being maneuvered here by Mark for some underlying purpose.

This line of scholarship has strongly suggested that something is going onhere that models itself after Roman displays of power, but these accounts pointto no literary explanation that brings these divergent tropes together. Clearly, ifthese tropes were intended as narrative parallels, they failed in their execution.However, the sense that triumphal themes still function in Mk 11 and 15 remainseven among scholars who are not convinced that the narrative makes this explicit.That this sense persists despite the irresolvability of their approaches suggeststhat a cohesive explanation of how the triumphal motifs function in the Markannarrative is still needed.

Uncontrollable Gaze and Ritual Polysemy in the Roman

Triumph

Since Mark has been read alongside narratives of victorious procession, thefunction and logic of the Roman triumph has undergone its own reassessment;recent studies have sought to move past a ‘script’ of the ritual and its elements,and have refocused attention on its role as a symbolic mechanism of civic life inRome. This re-setting of the scholarly agenda has brought to bear how little wecan say categorically about the Roman triumph. Stroup (2007: 31) remarks that,working largely from literary evidence, ‘we know [the triumph] was big. Weknow it was popular. We know it was important. But we just don’t know exactlywhat it was.’ Beard (2007: 118) similarly cautions against codified definitions ofthe Roman triumph and comments, ‘many of the basic “facts” and practicaldetails … are hard, if not impossible to pin down’. It variously entailed the cel-ebration of military victory, the lauding of a conquering general and assertion ofhis (momentary) divinity, the humiliation of a foreign land, the brutal executionof the defeated general, leader or king, as well as a cultic component spanning

the city, and it oriented topographically toward the temple of Jupiter on theCapitoline Hill, where the triumphator would celebrate with a sacrifice. But theseelements should be understood as the recollections of observers that survive ascarved in stone and inscribed on pages; we do not have access to Roman tri-umphs—we only have evidence of how various peoples experienced Roman tri-umphs and how subjects and citizens of Rome memorialized them.13

13. Stroup (2007: 39) is careful to remind us that rhetoric and ritual, as well as military prowessand religious realities, are all tied together in the Roman triumph, abstracting its movements

into the realm of memory and perception. She says, ‘just as the “ritual triumph” in its preciseconflation of victory and return, transforms violence into religion, the “rhetorical triumph,”in its deliberate focus on the spectacular and reintegrative functions of the event, transformsreligious ritual into a public memory waiting to be “viewed”—that is, read —again and againand again’.







Georgia 23

Beard’s influential study focuses on the ritual context that structured the tri-umph, as well as the participation of observers in dictating what the triumph did .She imagines it as a practice of dynamic cultural exchange rather than an indi-vidualized celebration of Roman victors. The Roman triumph was not a deco-rous rehearsal of Roman power, but rather a staged performing of martialRomanness in the view of civilians who were increasingly aloof from the worldthat Rome was conquering.14 As Josephus narrates the conclusion of Vespasianand Titus’s triumph ( Jewish War 7.5.6), ‘For the city of Rome kept festival thatday for her victory in the campaign against her enemies, for the termination ofher civil dissensions, and for her dawning hopes of felicity.’ Additionally, itserved to showcase the global realities precipitated by Roman domination. Inthis way, Beard focuses on what Butler (1997: 25) identifies as the ‘material’

aspect of ritual performance. Butler writes, ‘ritual is material to the extent that itis productive, that is, it produces the belief that appears to be “behind” it’. Thevisual materiality of the triumphal ritual produced the ‘belief’ in Roman power,imperial divinity, and the global scope of Roman authority, but insofar as thismateriality was constructed by foreign objects, people and symbols, the triumphitself became a complex of cultural exchange that could be exploited by Romansubjects even as they were exploited by Roman authorities.

Josephus, whose account of the triumph of Vespasian and Titus is the mostclosely relevant triumphal account to the Markan context, portrays the material-ity of the triumph in visual terms by presenting it primarily as a performativespectacle. His account begins:

It is impossible adequately to describe the multitude of those spectacles (tw~nqeama&twn e0kei/nwn to\ plh=qoj) and their magnificence under every conceivableaspect (th\n megalopre/peian e0n a( /pasin oi]j a) /n tij e0pinoh/seien), whether inworks of art or diversity of riches or natural rarities; for almost all the objects whichmen who have ever been blessed by fortune have acquired one by one—the wonderand precious productions of various nations—by the collective exhibition on that daydisplayed the majesty of the Roman empire (tau=ta e0pi\ th=j h9me/raj e0kei/nhj a)qro/ath=j 9Rwmai/wn h9gemoni/aj e) /deice to\ me/geqoj) ( Jewish War 7.4.5).

This re-enactment of victory and performance of war suggests the central rolethat the visibility of defeat served, but it also illustrates how spectacle resulted inthe symbolic ambiguity between the victor and victim. No matter the force ofdomination evident in rehearsing these victories, the unquestionable result ofRomans celebrating their victory was to give center stage to the victims of

Roman military prowess in the precincts of Rome itself.

14. Stroup (2007: 36) suggests that Josephus’s ‘strangely cinematic description’ illustrates the‘singular ability of the triumph to “make memory” in its representation of the original victoryfor a public that had not witnessed it firsthand’.








The choreography of such presentations was intentional at one level; Romewas served by being seen as victorious over powerful and threatening barbarians.However, even the performers of ritual cannot control the visage of those observ-ers who are also participants. Beard (2007: 136) presents this as a central dilemmafor triumphal celebrations: ‘this problem underlies all mass spectacle: how doyou control the gaze of the viewer?’ For all its efficiency in scripting the world,ritual also translates its script into viewability, and thus initiates a mimeticsequence of presentation and representation that subjects the spectacle to view-ers who necessarily introduce their own hermeneutic. This is not an uninten-tional by-product of ritual practices—it is constitutive of its logic. Bell (1992:184) remarks that ‘symbols and symbolic actions not only fail to communicateclear and shared understandings, but the obvious ambiguity … of symbolism

may even be integral to its efficacy’. Memorialization via spectacle was alwaysout of the control of the victor once it was enacted, and thus its persuasiveness asa positive memorial was never certain for the triumphator. Moreover, the manu-facturing of this celebration of Roman victory was never entirely hidden fromthe viewer, who would not be able to ignore its fabricated elements. Östenberg(2009: 5) goes so far as to suggest that the triumph was primarily an imitativespectacle, even in its exhibition of Roman power. She writes,

[I]n the theatrical context of representation, imitation, and performance, [even] thetriumphator played but one role in the game; he was no god, no king, but dressed up asgod and king for the day, acting in the shadowland between reality and representation.The triumphator, as everything else, was imitation.

Every triumphal spectacle, then, depended on an unfixed logic that was char-acterized by a symbolic polyvalence and a tendency for its categories, move-ments and subjects to bleed across boundaries. In some sense, the Roman triumphwas intended to be a rehearsal of the defeat of foreign powers, and thus the cap-

tives of the conquest play an important role as representatives of those who had been defeated, as they were carted through Rome in front of the victorious gen-eral who had defeated them.15 But the necessarily exotic nature of these defeatednations entailed a doubled-spectacle that could not help but portray the victorand victim in fluid terms. The grandiosity of the victor mirrored and was

15. For Rome to rehearse its power over the world in this way signals a central function of thesekinds of rituals, namely, to actualize in performance and realize in concrete terms its imperialauctoritas. This theme is developed in Lucan’s Pharsalia 1.283-91: the brewing civil war

has Julius Caesar reflecting that no triumphal procession awaits his return in Rome wherethe growing envy of Pompey’s supporters will force Caesar to forsake the (rightful) task ofconquering foreign nations to confront Pompey in a war that will yield no triumphs. Beard(2007: 123) points to this passage and suggests that ‘civil war could, in a sense, be defined as“war that would have no triumphs”’.







Georgia 25

mirrored by the splendor of the defeated king and the spoils of his kingdoms. Bythis ritual doubling, the Roman triumph was able to revel in its expansive globaldominance while at the same time helping to naturalize otherwise unfamiliar people and cultures. Östenberg (2009: 9) has argued that ‘the triumph possessedcharacteristics that made it particularly suited to construct worldviews …Following each foreign campaign close in time, the triumphal procession was infact the public ritual that presented the outside world to Rome.’

The task of a Roman triumphator in presenting himself as a glorious victorrequired that he represent the splendor of those whom he had defeated. It was espe-cially advantageous when the defeated was a proud king or monarch whom a virtu-ous republican general had put in check. We can take note that, in Caesar Augustus’s Res Gestae 4.3, his triumphs are only numbered in terms of the ‘nine monarchs or

children of monarchs’ who were led before his triumphing chariot (Cooley 2009:62). The royalty of triumphal victims was the ideal way to signify the relationship between Roman power and the nations that it defeated. Beard (2007: 121) notes:

Kings were seen as the ideal adversaries of Roman military might. They dominated theimaginative reconstructions of historical triumphs; and the inscribed triumphal Fasti in the Forum specified carefully when the celebration had boasted a royal victim, byadding the king’s name to the usual formula of defeat—‘de Aetolis et rege Antiocho’,‘over the Aetolians and King Antiochus.’ No other category of enemy was picked out

in the inscription in this way.16

Execution was the all but inevitable end for kings who were led as the humiliatedcaptive of a triumphing general.17 This was certainly the case for the triumph thatJosephus narrates, where in 7.5.6 he writes:

16. This confrontation between Rome and the shamed Hellenistic and Eastern kings seems tohave been the most important force in developing Roman republican ideals. Erskine (1991)argues that it was Rome’s confronting and villainizing of Hellenistic kings that reified Roman

anxieties about kingship and singularized the Roman ideal, republican self-image, even asRome’s subjects routinely considered themselves to be ruled by the Roman basileu&j.

17. This was either symbolically or actually achieved, depending on which narrative accountsare considered. However, two additional dynamics dictate the relationship between regalvictims and the role of triumph as a shaming of kingship. The first is the unusual reflectionof triumphal shame found in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria 1.2.19-52, where Cupid is depicted as thetriumphing general who is leading the author, newly captured, in his own divine triumph. Thistelling by Ovid is later imitated in a lost poetic depiction of the capture of Jupiter describedin Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones I, 2. The other is termed by Beard (2007: 114) as the‘Cleopatran solution’, for the way in which rulers on the brink of defeat might kill themselves

rather than suffer the indignities of being led as a captive in the triumph. Horace (Carmina 1.37.29-32) narrates this in his ‘Cleopatra Ode’: ‘Fiercer she was in the death she chose, asthough / She did not wish to cease to be a queen, taken to Rome / On the galleys of savageLiburnians / To be a humble woman in a proud triumph (deliberata morte ferocior: / saeuis

Liburnis scilicet inuidens / priuata deduci superbo, / non humilis mulier, triumpho).’








The triumphal processions ended at the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus (to\n new_ tou= Kapetwli/ou Dio/j), on reaching which they halted; for it was a time-honoredcustom to wait there until the execution of the enemy’s general was announced(me/xrij a) \n to\n tou= strathgou= tw~n polemi/wn qa&naton a0paggei/lh| tij). Thiswas Simon, son of Gioras, who had just figured in the pageant among the prisoners(pepompeukw_j e0n toi=j ai0xmalw&toij), and then, with a halter thrown over himand scourged meanwhile by his conductors, had been haled to the spot abutting onthe Forum where Roman law requires that malefactors condemned to death should beexecuted (no/moj d’ e0sti 9Rwmai/oij e0kei= ktei/nein tou\j e0pi\ kakourgi/a| qa&natonkategnwsme/nouj).

The dynamic of execution as the te/loj of the triumph became a rhetorical com-monplace, so that the momentary, festal authority of the triumphing general andthe life of his conquered victim were intertwined; both ended at the conclusionof the triumph. Cicero ( Ad Verres 2.5.77), in a prosecutorial oration againstVerres, a former governor of Sicily, writes,

[W]hy even those who celebrate a triumph and keep the enemy leaders alive for sometime so that the Roman people can enjoy the glorious sight of them being paraded in thetriumphal procession and reap the reward of victory [send their captives to prison] …And the day that ends the authority of the conqueror also ends the life of the conquered.

In ritual terms, the powers of the victor and the victim in Roman triumphs neces-sitate such close proximity that both lose their separability. For observers of theritual they became intertwined with, and interdependent on, one another.

Reflecting the Triumph in Greek Narrative Fiction

Claiming that Mark eccentrically employed Roman triumphal imagery todescribe Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and procession to the cross is a difficult case

to make. Without any corroborating examples of narratives engaging triumphalthemes in a non-explicit way, there is no context for seeing how other Romansubjects responded to the spectacle. Moreover, with only historical examples ofparousi/a (as in Kinman’s exempla discussed above), the literary design ofMark plays no part in how the triumphal themes are employed beyond a straight-forward historical description. The nascent Greek narrative tradition to whichMark and his readers contributed was accustomed to treading carefully aroundRoman power and was preoccupied with reconceptualizing the inheritance ofGreek heritage in light of Roman political domination.18 The development of

ancient narrative, and specifically the Greek novel, not only coincided with the

18. The classic discussion of this dynamic is Bowie 1970. See also the essays in Schmitz andWiater 2011, Swain 1996 (esp. 65-134) and Whitmarsh 2004.







Georgia 27

development of early Christian literature, but it also felt Roman power in a simi-lar way. The negotiation of the inheritance of the past and the strictures of the present presented a common dilemma to all Roman subjects, even where the par-ticulars of their cultural expression might differ. Whitmarsh (2005: 9) has notedthat ‘the removal of some of the hysteria surrounding the historiography of theearly Church … has meant that Christianity can now be discussed as part of thesame cultural and intellectual landscape as the pagan culture of the Roman east’.

Chariton’s novel Callirhoe, perhaps the first Greek novel written in the earlyRoman Empire, includes an elaborated parousi/a narrative that overlaps withthemes of the Roman triumph in ways that signal its broad symbolic importancefor how Roman spectacles influenced the literature of this period.19 Beginning in8.6, Chaereas is returning home from Egypt, having reunited with Callirhoe after

defeating the Persian navy, and has now severed ties with all of the powerfuldespots with whom he had consorted in the previous portions of the novel. Withthe action having been accomplished in the East, their return to Syracuse makesthem appear completely foreign; Chaereas seizes the opportunity to present aspectacle and orders his captains to decorate the warships, and Chaereas’s ship isdecked with Babylonian tapestries. Adhering to typical parousi/a narratives,Hermocrates, Chaereas’s father-in-law and historical commander of theSyracusan navy against the Athenians, sends a rowboat out to meet the ships; people gathering around the harbor saw Chaereas’s ship and tent and ‘thought itcontained not people but some valuable cargo, and they made various guesses,suggesting everything except the truth’.20 The text goes on to narrate the unveil-ing: ‘All were puzzled and straining their eyes when suddenly the tapestries weredrawn aside, and Callirhoe was to be seen, clothed in Tyrian purple and recliningon a couch of beaten gold, with Chaereas sitting beside her in the uniform of ageneral.’ Thus, the function of this return is essentially triumphant, but instead ofreturning with spoils and captives that they achieved through victory, the heroand heroine of the novel themselves are the triumphant victors and the spoils

being brought back after conquering a dominating barbarian land.The presentation of foreign gifts continues, very much in line with the kind of

presentation and celebration of the barbarian ‘other’ found in Roman triumphs.The text explains:

Chaereas went up to Hermocrates and his father and said, ‘Accept from me the wealthof the Great King.’ At once he ordered the unloading of a vast quantity of silver andgold; next he showed the Syracusans ivory and amber and clothing and all kinds ofvaluable material and artwork, including a couch and table of the Great King, so that

19. On the dating of Callirhoe and its influence on Greek narrative in the imperial period, see theintroduction in Goold 1995 as well as the comments in Reardon 2008: 17-21.

20. All Greek text and quotations are from Goold 1995.









the whole city was filled, not as previously after the Sicilian war with the poverty ofAttica, but, paradoxically, with the spoils of Media in a time of peace (8.6.12).

Chariton makes the implicit dramatic irony of their return explicit; at a time of

peace, Chaereas treats Syracuse and Hermocrates to a trove of spoils that out-does the ‘poverty’ of Athens who had been defeated by Hermocrates in an actualwar. It is a victory without a war and a triumph whose captives are the victors.

As the scene continues, Chaereas narrates their story; he calls for his ‘fellowGreeks’ (he is also accompanied by Egyptians) to be made citizens of Syracuse,and the crowd shouts in assent. So, despite the paradox of Chaereas and Callirhoe being the spoils of their own victory, the story nonetheless is able to include thetriumphal trope of the naturalized captives into the story: a decree is passed, the

three hundred Greeks take their seat in the assembly (at which Chaereas is nar-rating his story), and Hermocrates distributes land to the Egyptians.The final practice evident in parousi/a narratives, as well as in Roman tri-

umphs, is the approach to the temple and the performance of cultic or prayerfulacts. Chariton concludes his novel in just such a ritual setting, but he does so witha kind of silent dignity and even delicacy that is itself unusual among such nar-ratives. Instead of giving a grand, sacrificial act into the hands of the hero, it is a prayer of resignation and acceptance of her travails that is put onto the lips ofCallirhoe, the true heroine of the novel. The crowd listens to Chaereas’s story

with rapt attention, but as it concludes, Callirhoe stops to offer a prayer of thanks-giving and supplication:

While the crowd was in the theater, Callirhoe, before going home, went to Aphrodite’stemple. She grasped the goddess’s feet, placed her face upon them, let down her hair,and kissing them said, ‘I thank you, Aphrodite! You have shown me Chaereas oncemore in Syracuse, where as a girl I set eyes on him as you desired. I do not reproachyou, Lady, for what I have suffered: that was my fate. I beg you, never again part mefrom Chaereas, but grant us a happy life, and death together’ (8.8.15-16).

In Chariton’s novel, the use of triumphal imagery in the return of Chaereasand Callirhoe to Syracuse serves to present an idealized Greek past in terms ofRoman spectacles of power. The dominant contemporary conceptualization of aparousi/a narrative available to Chariton (as to Mark) would have been theRoman triumph, which, as Stroup suggests, was widely known, depicted,described, and inscribed throughout the ancient world. Schwartz (2003: 390) has pointed to the way in which the Greek novels are verbally silent about Rome

itself, although ‘it loomed in the mental geography of their authors and audi-ence’. Rome is ‘present in its absence from Chariton’s novel’, according toSchwartz, and the presentation of the barbarian is both subject to Roman valuesof what was barbaric, as well as reflective of the Greeks themselves as newly‘barbarianized’ subjects of a new political order. There is thus not a little irony in







Georgia 29

Chaereas capturing spoils that are the cultural property of the hegemonic Persiancourt. Moreover, this reading suggests that the cultural understanding ofGreekness and Romanness, of subject and subjector, is unfixed. Chariton solvesthis issue by creating a ‘buffer’ between barbarianism and Greekness in the roleof Greek paideia among urban elites, all of whom submit to Greekness of a cer-tain form, and thus rise above the level of the barbarian (Schwartz 2003: 390).

Conceived as it is within a historicized fictional framework, this resolutionworks for Chariton’s project, which is mostly concerned with the role of love inthe codification of the social order. The more confined subject of the passion nar-rative in Mark is playing at much higher stakes, and thus the proximity of subjectand subjector is more dramatically portrayed, with greater variance between thedepiction of the subjected who is to be portrayed as king. The question is this: as

Chariton’s novel appropriates triumphal tropes in its own way, what emergeswhen Mark is read not as a parallel of Roman triumphal accounts, but rather as aliterary engagement with the ritual logic of the triumph?

Mark’s Narrative Fissures and the Triumphal Death of Jesus

Bourdieu understands ‘the logic of practice’ as signifying the variable and poly-semic meanings that attach to social practices, rituals and enactments.21 Theresulting depiction of ‘practice’ is a cohesive world of subjectively construedmeanings for the way in which human societies organize, choreograph and per-form their social existence. Bourdieu imagines a theory of how people constructthe objects of their knowledge that in turn comprise the structuring dispositions(or habitus) that limit and define human practices. Ritual is practice that exhibits both constructed objects and their necessary structuring dispositions. Bourdieu(1990: 87) describes how ‘ritual practice performs an uncertain abstractionwhich brings the same symbol into different relationships by apprehending itthrough different aspects, or which brings different aspects of the same referent

in to the same relationship of opposition’. In theoretical terms, Bourdieu gives aname to the slippage of the viewers’ gaze to which Beard alludes.

The attempt to make sense of Mark’s employment of triumphal motifs willrely on the theoretical arrangement that Bourdieu describes. This is to say, aslong as the Roman triumph functioned as a mechanism to present Roman hege-mony, reciprocally the ‘logic’ of the event was vulnerable to being turned around,de-centered and otherwise ‘apprehended through different aspects’. This readingwill thus engage precisely with the ‘uncertain abstraction’ to which Bourdieurefers, and, unlike the optimistic reading of Schmidt (1995), a parallelized resemblance is not necessary. On the contrary, as Bourdieu (1990: 88) suggests,

21. Primarily in Bourdieu 1990, Bourdieu 1977, but see also Bourdieu 1992 (esp. 105-26).









[T]his uncertain abstraction is also a false abstraction which sets up relationships based on … ‘overall resemblance’ … This mode of apprehension never explicitlylimits itself to any one aspect of the terms it links, but takes each one, each time, as awhole, exploiting to the full the fact that two ‘realities’ are never entirely alike in all

respects but are always alike in some respect, at least indirectly.

As we have already seen in Chariton, it is possible for the role of the victor andthe captive to dissolve into one another where the theme of triumph is beingadopted in a literary text. Mark’s Gospel takes this conceptual doubling to anextreme level in the depiction of the person and acts of Jesus as both proud kingand defeated subject. Through this reading, some of the dilemmas that persist ina more direct narrative parallel of Mark and Roman triumphs are resolved by the

practical logic that brings together disparate textual moments into a ritual unity.Mark 11 and 15 develop the practical logic of the Roman triumph to depict Jesusin a polysemic way, as victor and victim, in each text.

Mark 11.7-10 sets the triumphal stage. Jesus’ processional seat is prepared(though crucially translated through the prophetic image of the kingly rider onthe pw~lon), and ‘many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spreadleafy branches that they had cut in the fields’.22 The word stiba/j does not con-vey the sense of ‘palm frond’ as traditionally associated with Palm Sunday,although even this ritual ambiguity itself relies on polysemic symbols to convey

the purpose and meaning of the action in Mk 11. Here, the Davidic imagery usedto characterize Jesus in the preceding narrative has its symbolic payoff. Jesus,who is ‘son of David’ to blind Bartimaeus (Mk 10.47), and who draws from theritual imagery of the Davidic psalm to rebuke the chief priests, scribes and eldersat the conclusion of the parable of the tenants (Mk 12.10-11), concretizes hiskingly role by presenting his own Davidic royalty.

Jesus’ mocking regalia in Mk 15 introduces Jesus both as triumphal victim andas a victor, with the soldiers’ abuse allowing the text to co-opt Roman derision into

a vehicle for king-making. Even so, this triumphal echo in Mk 15 cannot be per-ceived without acknowledging its double in Mk 11, when Jesus enters Jerusalemand its temple as a celebrated victor. The unity of these texts is signaled by a sharednarrative schism, and the ritual logic of the triumph serves to knit the breachestogether. Mark 11 has Jesus haltingly enter the temple, only to leave it abruptly,returning back to Jerusalem after only a brief, three-verse interlude.23 But, this halt-ing reversal is mirrored in Mk 15. The soldiers dress Jesus to mock him in Mk15.18, but v. 20 reads, ‘after mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloakand put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.’ So, in the

text, the robe and crown were put on Jesus solely for the act of mocking him, and

22. Mk 11.8: kai\ polloi\ ta_ i9ma&tia au0tw~n e) /strwsan ei0j th\n o(do&n, a) /lloi de\ stiba&dajko&yantej e0k tw~n a)grw~n. All translations of Mark are from the NRSV.

23. Cf. Duff 1992: 67-68 cited above.








Georgia 31

then the soldiers take care to re-dress him before leading him out to be crucified.The reversal is abrupt and deliberate, but its awkwardness serves the dual nature ofthe narrative. It is as though the author of Mark needs Jesus to appear in purple, butinserted it into the narrative at the last minute; the continuity of the narrative is broken in order to reference this motif, and in its thematic brokenness, it calls tomind the other , broken triumphal entrance in Mk 11.

This textual doubling continues to affect how the logic of the triumph bears onthe movements of Jesus throughout Mk 11 and 15. In fact, the directionality of both leads to an intriguing conclusion about how Mark’s narrative intentionallyrelies on the polysemy of ritual to reconceive how holy sites are depicted in theGospel.24 One of the few uniform ritual elements of Roman triumphs among tex-tual witnesses seems to be their orientation toward a cultic site: the procession

followed the Via Sacra to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus atop theCapitoline Hill, where the triumphal victim is led and (at least according to someauthorities) executed. Religious space is fraught in the Gospel of Mark—indeed itwas fraught for most Jews in Judea, both before and after the Jewish War. Butespecially in Mark, the temple is a place of contested religious authority; it is alocus of political conflict and an ambiguous signifier of sacredness in the Gospel.For Jesus’ first, hesitating triumphal entry into Jerusalem in Mk 11.11 to end insuch an abrupt narrative reversal suggests a subsequent revision of its cultic orien-tation. This is compounded only a few verses later; after his abrupt departure andreturn in Mk 11.15, he is not only back in Jerusalem, but also back in the temple.It would seem that Jesus returns explicitly to confront the moneychangers in thetemple and to exclaim a prophetic denunciation: ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of rob- bers’ (Mk 11.17). However, this is not Mark’s final reference to the temple.

Mark 13.2 contains the Markan report of Jesus’ prophecy about the destruc-tion of the temple, but this early tradition differs drastically from the templeChristology of the other Gospels, for here Jesus says simply ‘do you see these

great buildings (oi0kodoma&j)? Not one stone will be left here upon another; allwill be thrown down.’ There is no attempt to signify Jesus as the temple, or hisresurrection as the rebuilding of the temple. Instead there is a dismissal of theefficacy and permanence of the temple: it is destined for destruction, and thetemple sign, as it were, becomes untethered to the physical building, which becomes more and more decentralized as the Markan passion narrative develops, beginning with the narrative reversal in Mark 11.11.25 The final dissolution of the

24. Elsner (2007) argues that evidence of ritual-centered viewing should compel historians toreconceptualize how visual presentations of all sorts existed in the ancient world, and in turnthe way that the experience of sacrality was forged by visuality.

25. Donahue (2002: esp. 446-52) has argued this same point regarding an ‘anti-temple’ themethroughout Mk 11–15, though Yarbro Collins (2007: 761-62) suggests that this is misplaced,and that Jesus’ actions imply that ‘the temple and its cult are to be renewed, not abolished’.








temple is achieved in the narration of Jesus’ death. Mark 15.37-38 reads, ‘thenJesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple wastorn in two from top to bottom.’ The temple has been dissolved, the ritual curtainhas been ripped in two, and the ritual work of God now takes place elsewhere.

Golgotha is the new cult site in Mark; it is the culminating place of Jesus’ roleas triumphal victor and the altar for his execution as triumphal victim. And herewe see Mark’s ingenuity as translator in full force. The Capitoline Hill, where allRoman triumphs end, is played here by this new place—called by the Aramaictlglg —but the Gospel writer is careful to include a Greek translation: krani/outo/poj, ‘the place of the head’. Here it signifies its ritual role by mimicking the place and mirroring the etymology of the prototypical holy hill of triumphs, theCapitolium of Rome.26 Jesus’ roles as both priestly victor and defeated victim are

conflated, mixed up and amalgamated into a single ritual event.27 The result ofthis logic, torn piece by piece by the bricoleur who conceived this narrative end,is of Jesus as both victim and victor, or ritual enactor and ritual subject, but in both directions and in both ways as the triumphator. The slippage between the proud captive of a Roman triumph and the triumphing general has been exploitedin Mark’s Gospel to invest within Jesus the role of both. Thus the author of Markdiscovers through the logic of the Roman triumph a means by which to turn theshameful death of crucifixion into an assertion of Jesus’ own self-achieved roy-alty and messiahship. After all, those whom Rome deems worthy enough to parade, mock and berate are kings, rivals and threats.

This ritual duality is given poignant signification by the remark made by thecenturion on guard, which perfectly illustrates the ritual doubling of this narra-tive. After the account reports the tearing of the temple curtain, the scene callsattention to the centurion. It states that the centurion ‘stood facing him’(o9 kenturi/wn o9 paresthkw&j e0c e0nanti/aj au0tou=), and ‘saw that in this wayhe breathed his last’.28 The author of Mark cobbles together, from Roman raw

Within the framework of the triumphal reading of Mark, this renewal can be construed tofunction in terms of Jesus’ triumphal death, or at least located in that ritual space.26. That this word is construed in Aramaic may suggest the significance of the term as a signal or

intentional sign among the readers of the Gospel of Mark. However, the larger question of howMark employs Aramaic terminology cannot be definitively discussed with reference to thissingle instance. Schmidt (1995: 10-11) has also seen the parallel between Golgotha and theCapitoline Hill and has suggested that, whether it was intentional or not, the readers of Markwould certainly have recognized an implied signification of Golgotha with the CapitolineHill. He does not, however, draw any significance out of the ritual function of the temple andthe role of the execution of the captive, as described in the quotation from Josephus above.

27. The priestly role of the Roman triumphal victor is implied in his approach to the Temple ofJupiter Optimus Maximus, but, apart from this context, Jesus’ conception as a priestly figurewho offered himself was not unimaginable to early Christians, as Hebrews (esp. 9.23-28)demonstrates.

28. Chronis (1982: 110) has suggested that the phrasing of this passage itself implies a ritualistic posture. He writes, ‘Mark’s description of the position of the centurion vis-à-vis the dying







Georgia 33

materials, a means by which to turn the shameful death of crucifixion into anassertion of Jesus’ own self-expressed kingship.29 Peppard (2011: 131) presentsthis scene as Mark’s narrative crux:

Up to this point, Mark had narratively characterized Jesus as a counter-emperor, a‘son of God’ whose rise to power in the cosmos had mimicked imperial power ona kind of parallel cursus and triumphus. Now the course ends with a mockery andsubversion of the triumph. But with the Roman centurion’s cry, the parallel tracks ofanalogy and reality converge and intersect, like a cross: the acclamation of the armywas in reality a necessary element of imperial power, and the death of an emperor wasin fact the time when his exalted status was finally evaluated.

If Mark describes a parousi/a of any sort in the passion narrative, the words of

the centurion in this final case must be considered paradoxically to signify bothJesus’ victim and victor status, and in the centurion’s statement the practice-logicof this narrative brings its consummative force. The apotheosis inherent in theRoman triumph is no less operative here, except that it is achieved through thedouble ritual complicity of Jesus as triumphal sacrificer and sacrificial victimexecuted as the captive king. It is the logic of the Roman triumph that allows forthis effect in the text, which exploits the slippage between captive and triumpha-tor to turn Jesus ironically into both, for the centurion as well as for the Markan

audience. The centurion’s words here veritably define narrative irony: ‘truly thisman was God’s son!’The author of Mark’s Gospel has been depicted in this article as a bricoleur ;

by forging a story out of available resources, he bends a genre and contorts itsreferent.30 This text of Jesus’ death is not conceived out of whole cloth. It never

Jesus, e0c e0nanti/aj au0tou (15.39), may possess a subtly cultic force. It utilizes, at any rate,one of the idiomatic expressions for entering the temple, for standing “in the presence” or

“before the face” of God.’ Yarbro Collins (2007: 765) criticizes Chronis’s analysis by pointingout that ‘many of the usages of the phrase in the LXX occur in narrative contexts describing battles. So the spatial description of the centurion … if it has any symbolic or metaphoricalforce at all, may well signify the initial role of the centurion as an enemy of Jesus or as onewho afflicts him’. In light of my reading, these two senses of the confrontation betweenenemies in a ritualistic setting serve to situate Golgotha-cum-Capitolium as a cult setting.

29. The use of ou3twj in Mk 15.39 makes it difficult to pin down the sense of this verse, andthere has been considerable debate about how to understand this phrase. Donahue (2002:449) remarks, ‘the objection that a Gentile Roman soldier could not have meant what Markmeans misses the point, since Mark is writing for Christian readers around 70 C.E. and the

Markan Passion narrative is full of literary ironies’. Yarbro Collins (2007: 769) engages the plausibility of a more straightforward reading of the centurion’s words based on the portents, but ultimately suggests that the statement should be understood as dramatic irony.

30. Attridge (2002: 6), in his Society of Biblical Literature presidential address, calls attention tothe ways in which genre forms of early Christian narratives may ‘be more fluid; the genericmarkers less clear-cut’.








could have been. Beard (2007: 111-14) points out that Rome marveled at what itmust have been like to be a captive in the Roman triumph. She cites as anexample the only extant Roman description of the triumph from the perspec-tive of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria 1.2.19-52, where Cupid is depicted as the tri-umphing general who is leading the author, newly captured, in his own divinetriumph. Jesus’ role in this narrative is exceptional in imperial literature and,to some degree, unprecedented. Crucifixion narratives are often brief, fear-some and concerned with the victim only as a case study—a morbid curiosity.Where heroic figures do begin to be portrayed in the guise of sufferingcrucifixion (outside of Christian martyrological literature), it is an opportunityfor their salvation, and the narrative of crucifixion itself is unembellished.31 Goodacre (2006: 34) has pointed out that ‘it is easy to forget that Mark’s nar-

rative of the crucifixion is not only the first extant narrative of Jesus’crucifixion, but one of the first narratives of any hero’s death by crucifixion’.32 Given the theological project inherent in Mark’s Gospel, what is being nar-rated here has no literary antecedent and no conceptual framework in whichto forge its explanation of Jesus’ messianic death—a death that would ulti-mately provide a new model for a series of similarly crowned triumphant-victims to imitate and develop.

Benjamin (1968: 253-64), who himself exploits the triumphal motif in his‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, suggests that history itself cannot help but preserve the kinds of cultural exchange that comprise it. He writes:

[W]hoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession …For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which hecannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the effortsof the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toilof their contemporaries (256).

Mark’s Gospel responds to its hermeneutical dilemma by channeling its despairinto an interpretive innovation: it naturalizes dominant language, symbols and practices, translating them to its own purposes. Mark uses the resources thatwere at hand, and the cultural tools of Rome were exploited because they were both powerful and had a universal effect. Mark’s engagement with Roman ritualwrestles with the paradox of a rich cultural inheritance and a poverty of symbolic

31. Although, in another point of reference between early Christian literature and the Greeknovel, see Xenophon of Ephesus’s Anthia and Habercomes 4.2.2-7.

32. Goodacre points to the crucifixion/freeing of Sandoces in Herodotus, Histories 7.194.1-4 asthe earliest crucifixion account, but the text is not as concerned with the subject of Sandocesas Mark’s Gospel is with Jesus.








Georgia 35

capital. It should not surprise us that a minority community coping with a needto make sense of their lingering hope after Jesus’ death would mine Rome’s sur- plus of cultural resources.33 Mark’s narrative demonstrates the way in whichritual made Roman power manifest to the world, but equally, and at the sametime, vulnerable to imitation, appropriation and adaptation.

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