I Just Want To Sum Up How I Am Feeling Today

[Realistbear]

“io triumpe”

________________________

"Triumph” is a word with umph. Victorious arms thrown in the air, enemies and rivals cast to the ground – a triumph is nothing if not complete. It has become the ultimate expression of success (“A triumph” shouts the billboard), the ultimate celebration of adversity overcome (“A triumph of the human spirit”). Our word derives from the Latin triumphus, the term the ancient Romans used for a ritual victory celebration, one of the most common emblems of Roman culture in the modern popular imagination. The Romans called this ritual a “triumph” because the victorious troops cried “io triumpe” as they marched through the streets.

[Bearback Mountain]

You savage.

[Nomadd]

“io triumpe”

Well, as an uber-bear of many years, I've certainly found myself a lot happier these last few months. Still, let's put all this in perspective - falls of 10% are nothing compared to the rises of 300% that have taken place in many parts of the UK over the last 10 years. In other words, the crash has got a lot further to go yet. In other words, I still expect to be getting happier each day for the next 3-5 years at least. Oh the joy of cheap rent in a falling market.

Nomadd

[OnlyMe]

Decimation is another good old fashioned Latin derived word.

It comes after decimalisation in the dictionary. Might do in real life too.

[Moo]

Still, let's put all this in perspective - falls of 10% are nothing compared to the rises of 300% that have taken place in many parts of the UK over the last 10 years. In other words, the crash has got a lot further to go yet. In other words, I still expect to be getting happier each day for the next 3-5 years at least. Oh the joy of cheap rent in a falling market.

"Wot 'e sed".

We've just had El Alamein, but we're still a long way from taking signatures on Luneburg Heath.

[babesagainstmachines]

Looking at your sig RB, you have been too bullish on the housing market...

[Maggot_with_halitosis]

"io triumpe"

Someone open the window, please

[ae589]

You savage.

[Guest Steve Cook]

Someone open the window, please

[Guest Steve Cook]

Jeezz, there are some funny b*ggers on this site.

cheers me up every time I come on....

Edited March 28, 2008 by Steve Cook

[Minos]

Jeezz, there are some funny b*ggers on this site.

cheers me up every time I come on....

It is the funniest site on the interwebthinggy. I never knew there were so many nutters in good old blighty.

[fluffy666]

It is the funniest site on the interwebthinggy. I never knew there were so many nutters in good old blighty.

Ever been to a pub?

[Minos]

Ever been to a pub?

Yes, far too often in the past but not so much lately. They are usually full of chavs and wannabees. Prefer to do my drinking in other, warmer countries these days.

[OzzMosiz]

Well, as an uber-bear of many years, I've certainly found myself a lot happier these last few months. Still, let's put all this in perspective - falls of 10% are nothing compared to the rises of 300% that have taken place in many parts of the UK over the last 10 years. In other words, the crash has got a lot further to go yet. In other words, I still expect to be getting happier each day for the next 3-5 years at least. Oh the joy of cheap rent in a falling market.

Nomadd

Lets be real, the 300% rise was not all bad. Houses in 1996 were undervalued. So some rise was not unexpected in hindsight. But yes, the continued inflation of prices is a p*** take.

10% fall equates to a 40% fall (100K to 400K = 300% rise ; 10% drop = 360K ; rise is now 260%)

[Leonard Hatred]

It is the funniest site on the interwebthinggy. I never knew there were so many nutters in good old blighty.

The funniest site on the interweb is The Daily Mash. Very HPC relevant, too - the newest story is BANKS USE MAN-EATING TIGERS TO DETER NEW BORROWERS

[grey shark]

Vindication is so sweet ............

[Bearback Mountain]

The funniest site on the interweb is The Daily Mash. Very HPC relevant, too - the newest story is BANKS USE MAN-EATING TIGERS TO DETER NEW BORROWERS

It is an awesome site is that, I'm sure they visit here, everything mirrors what is said in here daily except with a twist A' La the Viz and Private Eye.

[Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz]

Lets be real, the 300% rise was not all bad. Houses in 1996 were undervalued. So some rise was not unexpected in hindsight. But yes, the continued inflation of prices is a p*** take.

10% fall equates to a 40% fall (100K to 400K = 300% rise ; 10% drop = 360K ; rise is now 260%)

Undervalued? On what basis? In comparison with the price of a Big Mac??????????????

[Minos]

The funniest site on the interweb is The Daily Mash. Very HPC relevant, too - the newest story is BANKS USE MAN-EATING TIGERS TO DETER NEW BORROWERS

If only the banks had done that years ago we wouldn't be in this mess.

[dredwerker]

“io triumpe”

Well I learnt something there:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle3004230.ece

Roman defeat in victory

Humiliation, decadence and the memento mori; how Roman males longed for a triumph

William Fitzgerald

Mary Beard

THE ROMAN TRIUMPH

434pp. Harvard University Press. £19.95 (US $29.95).

978 0 674 02613 1

"Triumph” is a word with umph. Victorious arms thrown in the air, enemies and rivals cast to the ground – a triumph is nothing if not complete. It has become the ultimate expression of success (“A triumph” shouts the billboard), the ultimate celebration of adversity overcome (“A triumph of the human spirit”). Our word derives from the Latin triumphus, the term the ancient Romans used for a ritual victory celebration, one of the most common emblems of Roman culture in the modern popular imagination. The Romans called this ritual a “triumph” because the victorious troops cried “io triumpe” as they marched through the streets; but the meaning of the cry is obscure to us and would have been so to the troops themselves.

One ancient theory derived it from the Greek word thriambos, an epithet of Dionysos (Bacchus), but linguists argue that this etymology must have passed first through Etruscan to end up as triumpus; others connect it with the refrain “triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe” in an obscure archaic Roman hymn, in which it may be a call for divine epiphany. Even its grammatical form is disputed. Is triumpe a vocative, an imperative, an Etruscan nominative, or an exclamation? All have been suggested. The etymology of triumphus is only one of the disputed or obscure aspects of this most Roman of institutions, and if Mary Beard’s new book, The Roman Triumph, can be considered the definitive treatment, it is not because she solves any of the canonical problems.

In fact, Professor Beard makes it clear that there never can be a complete account of the triumph, and that almost everything we thought we knew about it is questionable. Looking beyond the impossible task of reconstruction, she offers us a different approach to the study of ancient society in this wide-ranging study of “triumphal culture” in Rome. Beard argues that ancient accounts of the triumph should not be thought of as sources but as theories, driven as much by preconceptions and contemporary agendas as are modern scholarly studies, and she expands our vision beyond the triumphal procession itself to take in the preliminaries and the aftermath, the descriptions, memorials, images and metaphors of triumph that together make of ancient Rome “a triumphal culture”.

Not every Roman military victory was celebrated by a triumph. A triumph was awarded by the Senate (or not) on the request of the general, who had to make a case that his victory merited this supreme honour. It has been calculated that about 300 triumphs took place in the 1,000 years of the city’s history. Every Roman politician aspired to a triumph, and practically every Roman politician who reached the consulship (and many who did not) would have had the chance to command an army, somewhere in the Roman Empire or beyond, and so to earn a triumph. Military service and command were not optional for a Roman politician, nor did they involve a particular choice of career; militarism lay at the heart of Roman culture and was integral to the life of just about every Roman male. Even Cicero, Rome’s pre-eminent orator, launched a mighty campaign to win a triumph, on the basis of some not altogether glorious manoeuvrings while he was Governor of Cilicia. We can follow this (unsuccessful) campaign in some detail, through Cicero’s voluminous and fascinating correspondence. From what his friend Caelius writes to him shortly after he arrives in Cilicia it is clear that thoughts of a triumph were at the back of any Roman governor’s mind: “If we could only get the balance right so that a war came along of just the right size for the strength of our forces and we achieved what was needed for glory and a triumph without facing the really dangerous clash – that would be the dream ticket”. In his speech Against Piso Cicero mocks Piso’s philosophically high-minded lack of interest in applying for a triumph and represents the desire for one as the acceptable, even approved, face of ambition.

Beard shows us that even Cicero’s letters, that most detailed account of the day-to-day existence of Rome’s elite, leave us in the dark about the criteria for a triumph. Valerius Maximus, writing in the time of the Emperor Tiberius, articulates a grisly “triumphal law”, according to which a minimum of 5,000 enemy troops had to be killed in a single battle for a triumph to be celebrated; but this law is not mentioned in any surviving account of triumphal debates. Beard sees Valerius as behaving no differently from modern historians who try to impose regularity and rules on a fluid reality. Just what qualified a general to celebrate a triumph was negotiable, though it seems that the first initiative lay with the troops, whose acclamation of the general as “imperator” was often seen as the first step on the road to a triumph. It has been speculated that a passage in Plautus’ comedy Amphitruo may be a parody of the traditional language in which requests for a triumph were expressed or granted: “The enemy defeated, the victorious legions are returning home, the mighty conflict brought to an end and the enemy exterminated. A city which brought many casualties to the Theban people has been defeated by the strength and valour of our troops and taken by storm, under the authority and auspices of my master Amphitruo, especially”.

Most of the existing scholarship on the triumph has struggled to reconstruct the details of the ceremony from the often contradictory bits and pieces of evidence scattered through texts and images of different kinds and periods. The triumphal route, the order of the procession, the general’s dress, his chariot and the insignia of triumph, as well as the origins of the ceremony, have all been studied and debated. Beard shows that the composite picture traditional in modern reference works and histories is based on very shaky foundations. She demonstrates in some detail, for instance, that it is impossible to reconcile the various accounts of the triumphal route; the only point about which there is general agreement is that it ended with a steep climb up to the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter.

The final climb must have been quite a challenge for a procession which included not only enemy captives and Roman troops but floats, models and pictures representing cities captured and battles won and, above all, loot. The triumph encouraged Roman writers to flights of extravagant description. At Pompey’s triumph of 61 BCE (his third!), we are told that the booty displayed in the triumph included 75,100,000 drachmae of silver coin, thirty-three crowns of pearl, countless wagonloads of weapons and a huge gaming board made of precious stones holding a golden moon weighing thirty pounds. The triumph provided the opportunity to list and count (bullion, statues, captives, weapons), to describe the outlandish and the exotic, and to revel in the power of Imperial Rome.

Or to deplore its decadence. For, with the triumphal procession, novel forms of foreign extravagance flowed into the city: lute girls, harpists, cooks, sideboards and one-legged tables all feature prominently in disapproving ancient descriptions. Some of this loot took the form of Greek statues and other works of art, which would generate a competitive mania for collecting in Rome’s elite. It is this cultural effect of the conquest of the Greek world that led Horace to remark that “captive Greece took the savage victor captive”, a paradox of the kind that, as Beard shows, was characteristic of triumphal writing.

The triumph was not only a ritual of success, it was also a ritual of humiliation. A general triumphed over an enemy, and the humbled enemy had to be paraded for all to see. In the triumphal procession the enemy leader and a selection of enemy troops, suitably loaded with chains and other insignia of defeat, preceded the triumphing general in his chariot. But this spectacle of humiliation was inherently fragile. Obviously the triumphing general wanted to display the conquered as worthy adversaries, and contemporary accounts stress that the captives in the procession were chosen for their stature and beauty. But a particularly dignified leader, unbowed in defeat, could upstage the general following in his chariot. Beard’s frontispiece shows Jugurtha doing just that to the triumphing Marius in Tiepolo’s sumptuously dramatic “The Triumph of Marius”. Horace’s poem celebrating the defeat of Cleopatra by Octavian (the future Augustus) ends with the Queen committing suicide so as to avoid being led in triumph at Rome. Horace exploits the flexibility of Latin word order to end his poem with the line “no lowly woman in the triumph”, shifting the triumph from victor to vanquished. What, he asks, constitutes the true triumph, the true heroism? Spectacular triumphal backfires came in other forms too: Roman authors reported occasions in which the miserable captives had awakened pity rather than Schadenfreude in the spectators, who were led to reflect on their own troubles, or on the possibility that they too might find themselves in the position of the defeated.

Roman audiences might identify with the captives, but it was crucial that the captives displayed in a triumph should not actually be Romans. This caused problems in the waning years of the Republic, when so many victories were won in civil wars. Lucan’s epic poem on the civil war between Pompey and Caesar describes it aptly as a “war that could have no triumphs”. Octavian’s victory over Cleopatra was really the climax of a civil war in which the enemy was led by Mark Antony, and Octavian’s celebration of a triumph helped to disguise that fact.

Balancing the enemy captives and bringing up the rear of the triumphal procession were the victorious general’s troops, chanting the mysterious “io triumpe”. Less mysterious were the rude chants that the triumphing troops were licensed to direct at their general. Suetonius gives us a sample of what Caesar’s troops contributed: “Romans, watch your wives, the bald adulterer’s back home. You ******ed away in Gaul the gold you borrowed here in Rome”. Traditionally these chants have been seen as “apotropaic”, designed to ward off envy and the evil eye in the moment when the successful general was most vulnerable. This is consistent with what is perhaps the best-known aspect of the traditional picture of the triumph, the slave who supposedly stood behind the general in his chariot to remind him that he was not a god, by repeating the words “Look behind. Remember that you are a man”. In the film Quo Vadis? the slave’s words receive an unintended comic twist when they are delivered to a triumphing Marcus Vinicius as he ogles a pretty girl in the crowd (nothing wrong with Marcus Vinicius!). Beard points out that the slave and his cautionary words have been cobbled together out of bits and pieces of evidence from different contexts and periods and that no single text gives us the whole picture. She is similarly sceptical about the modern theory that the triumphing general impersonated the god Jupiter Best and Greatest, dressed in the clothes of his cult statue and with his face similarly painted red. The impersonation of the god, the admonitory slave and the apotropaic songs all make a tempting package, but the evidence for the triumphator’s impersonation of Jupiter is very slender. What we can say is that Roman authors of the late Republic and early Empire were particularly concerned with the line between the human and the divine, and with the problematic concept of the divine human. Eventually, the emperor would be hailed as a god and receive divine honours, but this would be a slow and difficult process.

Like the emperor, the triumphing general raises the problem of how to balance his status as godlike, and so exceptional, with that of the servant of his community. In the early years of the civil strife that would eventually bring Augustus to power as the first Roman Emperor, the poet Lucretius used triumphal imagery to make a subversive point about the ideal relation between the heroic individual and his community. Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, his epic poem expounding the principles of Epicurean philosophy, casts Epicurus as a triumphing Roman general who, having dared to campaign against the religious fear that is oppressing mortals, brings back as the spoils to be displayed in his triumph the knowledge of “what can be and what cannot”, giving us the wherewithal to resist fear of the gods. “So religion, cast beneath our feet, is trampled in its turn and his victory raises us to the heavens.” Epicurus’ “triumph of the mind” has this advantage over that of the Roman general: it is the community, not the triumphing general that is raised to divine status.

Beard argues that the controversy surrounding the deification of humans in this period is the context in which to understand ancient references to the divine status of the triumphing general, and that they do not offer any support to theories about the primitive origins of the triumph in notions of divine kingship. Must we then resign ourselves, in the face of Beard’s scepticism, to confessing our ignorance about the precise details of this colourful and iconic ritual, and acknowledge that we don’t know where it came from and what it meant? Beard argues that ritual is not like that – invariable, monolithic and tied to an original meaning. Ritualized behaviour is distinguished by its participants as separate from everyday non-ritual practice, but it may be improvisatory and variable. Rules, origins and traditions (almost always less ancient than we suppose) are retrospectively crystallized under the pressure of contemporary need. The meaning of a ceremony lies “as much in the recollection and re-presentation of the proceedings as in the transient proceedings themselves. Its story is always in the telling. The exaggerations, the distortions, the selective amnesia are all part of the plot”. A good example of how origins are retrospectively invented for customs is the ancient theory that the god Dionysos invented the triumph (as so often, linking Rome with Greece). Stories of Dionysos’ arrival in Greece from the Far East date back at least to Euripides’ Bacchae (c408 bce). But in the context of Alexander’s campaigns in India (326 bce), Dionysos’ return from spreading his rites in the Far East was remodelled as a victorious return from India, complete with troops and captives, so supplying Alexander with a divine precedent. Then, after Rome conquered Greece and assimilated much of Alexander’s Empire, the Return of Dionysos became the Triumph of Dionysos, Roman style, and Dionysos was credited with inventing the Roman triumph. This development provides a nice demonstration of how the flow of influence may run backwards rather than forwards, as Beard argues in this and many other cases.

So much for the origins of the triumph, but what about its end? Modern tradition has it that the last triumph was celebrated in Constantinople, rather than Rome, by the general Belisarius in 534 CE, after a victory over the Vandals in Africa. Appropriately, it was a very unconventional affair. No Christian celebration, after all, could end with the customary sacrifice in the Temple of Jupiter. Beard cites a number of triumphs that might, depending on what view you hold of the triumph, be considered the last, but she is rightly more interested in the decisive change which came about with the rule of Augustus. From Augustus on, only the emperor or members of his family were allowed to celebrate a triumph, and the triumph came to serve almost as the equivalent of a coronation ritual. An equally important development was the fact that Augustus adopted the insignia and symbols of the triumph to mark his novel status. Among his titles was imperator (origin of our word emperor), that title with which a victorious general was acclaimed by his troops as the first step towards a triumph. With Augustus, the triumph moved into the symbolic realm.

Early in her book Beard asks, “Can we get beyond the easy . . . conclusion that such rituals . . . acted to reaffirm society’s key values? Or beyond the more subtle variant that sees them rather as the focus of reflection and debate on those values . . . ?”. Mary Beard certainly gets us beyond the easy conclusion, though by the end it’s still not clear what might lie “beyond” the more subtle variant, or whether we want to go there, given that this rich and provocative book offers such a full account of what it means to call ancient Rome “a triumphal culture”.

________________________

Edited March 28, 2008 by dredwerker

[redgenieuk]

“io triumpe”

________________________

"Triumph” is a word with umph. Victorious arms thrown in the air, enemies and rivals cast to the ground – a triumph is nothing if not complete. It has become the ultimate expression of success (“A triumph” shouts the billboard), the ultimate celebration of adversity overcome (“A triumph of the human spirit”). Our word derives from the Latin triumphus, the term the ancient Romans used for a ritual victory celebration, one of the most common emblems of Roman culture in the modern popular imagination. The Romans called this ritual a “triumph” because the victorious troops cried “io triumpe” as they marched through the streets.

RB, we share the same humor.

[drrayjo]

Roman defeat in victory

Humiliation, decadence and the memento mori; how Roman males longed for a triumph

William Fitzgerald

So I go months with no Roman history lessons and that's now the second in 24 hours.

The first? History Channel's "Town That Time Forgot" where the most memorable section related to Julius Caeser's first reports of Britons;

"They do not eat wheat and instead consume only milk and meat. They shave their whole bodies, save the hair on their upper lip and head, which they grow long. One wife is shared between 10 or 12 men".

We were Atkins-dieting, body-shaving, moustachioed-hippy, inverse Mormons.

Thank Jupiter for the Romans.

[geneer]

Well, as an uber-bear of many years, I've certainly found myself a lot happier these last few months. Still, let's put all this in perspective - falls of 10% are nothing compared to the rises of 300% that have taken place in many parts of the UK over the last 10 years. In other words, the crash has got a lot further to go yet. In other words, I still expect to be getting happier each day for the next 3-5 years at least. Oh the joy of cheap rent in a falling market.

Nomadd

ermm...just so you know, 50% falls would wipe out 150% of that 300%. or some such.

[Guest grumpy-old-man]

ermm...just so you know, 50% falls would wipe out 150% of that 300%. or some such.

hello geneer.

the hpi tables have turned now, spinning in reverse.

[kool4caats]

Lets be real, the 300% rise was not all bad. Houses in 1996 were undervalued. So some rise was not unexpected in hindsight. But yes, the continued inflation of prices is a p*** take.

10% fall equates to a 40% fall (100K to 400K = 300% rise ; 10% drop = 360K ; rise is now 260%)

I don't think that's quite right.

Say current prices are 300%, 10% of that is 30%.

So a 10% fall would erode 30% of the last rise,

66.6% fall would erode 200% of the last rise, and therefore take us back to the last low. Could happen, but imagine the consequences!

Edited March 28, 2008 by kool4caats