This book is a substantial addition to the growing interest in the performative character of rituals generally and processions beyond the Roman triumph (even if it is still included here) in particular. Fifteen chapters, the introduction included, span a period from sixth-century b.c.e. Athens to eighth-century c.e. Byzantium. At the end, three chapters offer analyses of early modern and contemporary rituals from the perspectives of anthropology, comparatist ritual studies, and, by Juan R. Ballesteros, history of reception. The overall chronological order is modified by some thematic groups.
All chapters offer compelling reconstructions or analyses of processions or groups of similar processions. Georgia Petridou reconstructs the ‘symbolic polyvalence’ of Peisistratos having himself led into the city of Athens by a tall maiden dressed up as Athena. Many viewers took this performance at face value and reacted with high emotional engagement. Seen from the perspective of ‘cultural pragmatics’, P. points to the priming of the audience by heralds that helped to understand the underlying ritual and semantic models, not least the ritual of the Pro(s)charistêria (14–31). Annalisa Lo Monaco follows this focus on women of different age groups. This more descriptive chapter’s interest is in Greek rituals and the ways in which age and social role of participating women are brought to the fore, above all through dress. Against this background, the only case of full nudity, Sparta, appears as a strategy of de-gendering (32–49).
Two subsequent chapters zoom in on imperial performances in the first century of the Roman Principate. Patrizia Arena (50–70) continues looking at female actors, analysing all instances of the presence of female members of the imperial household in funeral and bridal processions. She shows how these females (dead or alive) are on display to be judged by (male) spectators. The roles given to them were to be read as a communication about political choices (62). Soi Agelidis (71–88) analyses pompae funebres, using the analytical concepts of ‘symbolic politics’ and ‘condensation symbols’, which do not just refer to some imaginary or historical referent but convey a whole emotional atmosphere. She offers the reconstruction of an ideal type of a funeral from the moment of dying to the final burial (73–8). Analytically, she distinguishes between the fine-grained presentation of the relatives’ different positions to what she presumes to be an entirely collective emotional reaction on the part of the audience, both sides being bound to each other by a reciprocity of ‘presenting and perceiving’ (79, 84).
Ida Östenberg continues with funeral processions (89–110), reconstructing all cases of multi-day processions from distant destinations to Rome between the deaths of Marcellus (23 b.c.e.) and Germanicus (19 c.e.). She brings out how active participation by members of the imperial family on the one hand and local elites and populations on the other produce ‘collective rituals’ (101). Here, the very different composition of the participants from one place to another is stressed. The elaborate preparations for embalming, which enabled such extended rituals, are omitted. Connected by an interest in the presentation and affirmation of power, the subsequent chapter by Elena Calandra (111–24) looks back to Hellenistic precursors of imperial cult. The representation of Ptolemaic processions in late second-century b.c.e. Praeneste is seen as a bridge to rather than competition with Rome. While pointing to the novel element of imperial centrality and the bi-directionality of the centre–periphery relation, she does not further inquire into what the ‘imperial identity’ thus construed is.
Elena Muñiz-Grijalvo engages with that issue and plausibly establishes the contribution of processional rituals to an imperial practice of governing through images (125–41). Moving through provincial locations, they come to life and offer crucial members of local communities (e.g. ephebes as sebastophoroi, 131) the possibility of literally getting in touch with the emperor (M.-G. does not distinguish between imperial and ruler cult). Whereas the urge of the imperial period to include ‘all citizens’ makes sheer numbers a legitimising factor (134), here the differential closeness to the ritually present emperor strengthens local hierarchies. This chapter is set side-by-side with Héctor González-Palacio’s study of the use made of the institutional experience of processions by a very clever person caught between imperial roles, gender issues and aspiring children and competitors, namely the Byzantine empress Irene (141–53). It is presented in the form of a chronological narrative of her reign (780–802), which is strategically punctuated by processions dominated by her personal presence.
Sylvie Estienne addresses processions organised by people involved in the cult of Mater Magna in Rome (154–70). Alongside a valuable detailed reconstruction of the different processions, the author stresses that these are typically embedded in larger ritual performances (154). In the analysis, the different kinds of interaction from begging to the search for recognition by carrying statuettes (dendrophoroi, 163) come into view. According to Estienne, it is not alterity but Roman control, Roman rather than group identity, that is furthered. A specific kind of agency is also foregrounded in Alberto del Campo Tejedor’s chapter on soldiers mocking the triumphator (171–90). What from a structural perspective is the humiliation of the victorious humiliator is in the experience of observers enjoyable and for the involved soldiers a way to negotiate the relationship between the general’s power and the indispensability of the military personnel (187–8). In the final chapter on antiquity, Pedro Giménez de Aragón Sierra contrasts the fate of processions organised by the emperor or by members of the Christian clergy in Constantinople and Milan. In the Eastern capital, John Chrysostom failed with his idea to establish frequent popular Sunday processions between churches, in competition with emperor-led processions (which only from around 450 feature images of Mary, the mother of God, 193). In Milan, imperial triumphal processions fail to become a regular element of urban rituals, whereas Ambrose made ecclesiastical processions with relics flourish, and increased the number of pretexts and occasions throughout the final quarter of the fourth century.
Underlining the strengths of the final articles, José Carlos Mancha Castro’s detailed anthropological analysis of the contemporary urban celebration of the Holy week in Huelva (205–17) and José Antonio González Alcantud’s comparison of baroque Corpus Christi and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ royal processions performed in places all over Morocco (218–20) do at the same time highlight a weakness of the volume as a whole. The affordances of the interdisciplinary conference were not exploited to the fullest extent. It is in these final chapters that crucial issues are addressed. Concepts like ‘urban ritual drama’ and the imagined and desired city (207–8), the stress on change and multiplication of processions, their being just parts of much larger festivities, the differentiation between actors, the public street as a dynamic (rather than a topography as a static) space, the ambivalence of socialisation in diverse roles and egalitarianism (213), the infectious rumours caused by the invisibility of rulers (226), and the question of the lack (or multiplicity) of orders in societies (235–6) — all these ideas could have inspired the preceding analyses, thus sharpening the focus of the volume and putting the frequent remarks about images and the character of certain rituals as rituals of subjections of imperial subjects rather than community-building in sharper relief. This reviewer suggests readers should start from here.
