Scipio was neither active nor successful as a politician, although elected to prestigious roles after Zama. He celebrated his triumph over Hannibal (201). This peculiarly Roman religious ritual is explained and its conventions listed: there had been few in the war, so this was a great occasion. Scipio was not opposed to the war against Philip which Flamininus won at Cynoscephalae (197), nor did they differ over ‘philhellenism’. In 199, Scipio was elected (1) censor and (2) leading senator, princeps senatus. (2) was a one-man post for life; its main privilege was to speak first. As for (1), two censors held office for a limited period; eligibility and duties are explained. Close study of Livy suggests Scipio spoke rarely in the senate during the 190s; his censorship was certainly uneventful and non-controversial. He was consul again in 194. He visited the east (193); his conversation with Hannibal at Ephesus is defended.

This chapter examines Propertius’ poetics of space, particularly as it relates to Roman imperialist rhetoric. Beyond the relatively obvious metapoetic images of height and lowliness, it suggests that Propertius employs a range of other spatial metaphors in his construction of a poetic self-image, drawing notably on the language of boundaries and boundlessness, centre and periphery; here, elegiac poetics capitalises on what the author terms the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ aspects of imperialist discourse, whereby Rome expands to fill the world, but also subsumes or draws in the products and characteristics of all other nations. In his more confident moments, the elegist represents himself not merely as echoing or collaborating with, but as surpassing the achievements of Augustus himself. A similar symbolic rivalry may be seen in Propertius’ self-representation as triumphator; the author links this in turn to the poet’s references to monumental architecture, particularly the ecphrasis of the Temple of Palatine Apollo in 2.31, which may be understood as a figurative monument to the power of poetry, dependent on but not identical with its counterpart in the physical landscape of Rome.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

In the sixteenth century, the Hapsburg dynasty leveraged burgeoning technologies of print to appropriate an antique Roman ceremony known as the triumph. In collaboration with leading artists and scholars of the day, Hapsburg rulers created documents of triumphal performances that were also themselves performative documents, casting the Hapsburgs as inheritors of imperial Rome, while reimagining the idea of empire itself for a newly globalized world. By looking at three case studies that frame the life and reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1549), I argue that the Hapsburgs drew on new capacities to reproduce text and images to localize their arguments through verbal and visual cues that appealed to audiences’ regional pride and emergent national imaginaries. By virtue of these performative documents – when their complex rhetorical cues were effective – diverse reading publics throughout the transatlantic Empire could participate in political rituals translated across language, space, and time.

While the first two-thirds of the book focus on the immiserating aspects of bondage, this fourth part recognises its pleasures. Looking back to the trope of the slave or soldier of love in Roman elegy as a rejection of the values of Roman imperialism, this chapter shows how relations of domination, bondage and resistance have infused amorous lyric for two millennia. It examines another lacuna – the missing foot in elegiac distich – in relation to castration, and the effeminisation of the lyric speaker. In Ovid’s elegies the female beloved is momentarily the triumphator who drives her captive lover before her like a slave, before the domination of the female beloved by the male speaker is reasserted through sadistic violence. An examination of Marlowe’s prosody shows how he re-queers this speaker, intermingling militarism and eroticism, masculine heroism and effeminate otium, paradoxically challenging the authority of Augustan and Tudor sexual norms through failure.

Caesar’s famous intervention in the Catilinarian Debate of 63, too often viewed as fundamentally opposed to the Senate's authority, instead illustrates the kind of "patrician republicanism" discernable in his early career. His failed proposal for permanent imprisonment seems to have been intended to avoid the kind of popular backlash against the Senate’s authority that was inevitable if the laws protecting citizens against execution without the People’s authorization against were blatantly violated by that body. His advice was ultimately rejected, but his view of the matter would be vindicated by Cicero’s expulsion in 58. Caesar’s praetorship and successful Spanish command brought further clashes with Cato, whose development of his favored tactic of the filibuster in these years shows that he did not as a rule carry the majority of the Senate, while Caesar’s own pursuit of military glory and cultivation of a "popular" though not aggressively populari persona was consistent with long-standing republican tradition.

This chapter explores the central image of currus (chariot), and its top-of-line model, quadriga (the four-horse car), which occupy the most commanding position within the rhetoric of Roman transportation. Already a symbol of unique power and prestige due to its built-in, inherited features, this Roman vehicle takes most distinct shape in two powerful and complementary forms, the four-horse currus triumphalis, in which generals proudly paraded in the triumphal procession, and the currus circensis, the breakneck-fast racing vehicle of Roman chariot-racing. The chapter analyzes the rhetoric of currus in oscillation, alternating between examinations of some its winningest portraits of victory (on the battlefield and in the circus), on the one hand, and uncovering a series of unsettling representations of the danger and violence it claims to transcend. Visions of victorious currus in Ennius, in the story of Ratumena, and in Cicero are counterbalanced by an investigation of ‘chariot-talk’ in Plautus, explorations of the meaning of winning in Roman didactic, and telling versions of the story of Phaethon.