During the middle Republic, the Romans lost many battles, but they always won their wars. At least this is how Roman history is presented in the surviving narrative sources and reproduced in modern scholarly works. Yet the Romans did lose a lot of battles, suffering forty-three defeats in the second century alone, according to Jessica Clark. These defeats are the focus of her dissertation-turned-monograph, the first book-length work in English on Roman defeat since Nathan Rosenstein's Imperatores Victi (1990).

In the Introduction, C. states that she is not interested in Rome's military defeats for their own sake, but rather in the Roman communal response to defeats and loss, in particular asking ‘what responses to defeat can tell us about the definition of victory, and about the construction and maintenance behind that definition’ (1). The main thrust of the Introduction, and a theme that runs throughout the entire book, is that the Romans processed and dealt with defeats by integrating them into longer narratives of victory. All defeats were merely temporary ‘setbacks’ on the road to Rome's ultimate victory.

Ch. 1 offers a broad historiographical and theoretical survey. C. notes that Republican Rome is missing from discussions of how cultures deal with the legacy of war and collective loss, while scholarship on Roman commemoration and memory culture has tended to focus on Rome's victories rather than defeats. In both antiquity and modern times, the narratives of past wars strongly influence narratives of present conflict and the verdicts of victory or defeat. For the Romans, the narrative of the Second Punic War had a profound impact on the formation of narratives of subsequent wars (ch. 2). Rome's reaction to the Battle of Trasimene, whose sources provide the most detailed evidence for the Roman response to a major defeat, indicate the Romans' collective belief that the defeat was only a temporary ‘setback’ and that victory would be achieved within a few years. The subsequent response to the Battle of Cannae gave the impression that the Romans would do everything to continue fighting and avoid accepting defeat.

The next three chapters trace the chronological development in the way the Roman senate managed defeats and attempted to control war narratives in the second century b.c. In the generation immediately following the Second Punic War, 201–176 b.c. (ch. 3), the senate preferred to extend the commands of Roman generals who suffered defeat in battle in order to give them the opportunity to win a redemptive victory. Reckless and aggressive generals were, however, restrained, and diplomatic solutions sought whenever possible, because the senate wished to avoid unresolved conflicts that undermined narratives of victory. The most important marker of Roman victory was the triumph, and the senate was deeply concerned to present triumphs as definitive, credible indicators of decisive Roman victory. The senate's ability to control war narratives was challenged by repeated Roman defeats between 156 and 130 b.c. (ch. 4). Several major defeats were not followed by credible redemptive victories and were thus difficult to promote as ‘setbacks’ in a longer narrative of success. Wars in the West against ‘tribes’ provided fewer definitive moments and decisive battles around which to construct a victory narrative, while new conflicts against previously defeated enemies, for example in Greece and against Carthage, challenged earlier claims of victory and threatened to invalidate prior triumphs. The situation encouraged commanders to make bigger ‘statements’ — for example, ruthlessly sacking major cities — to make their victories appear more convincingly decisive. Nevertheless, triumphs increasingly failed to reassure the public that Roman victory was complete. C. argues that the sources’ near silence over Scipio Aemilianus’ triumph after the Numantine War reflects the insufficiency of his victory to erase the memory of numerous recent losses.

During the last two decades of the second century, Rome suffered more unredeemed defeats, some crushing, in several theatres (ch. 5). Increased senatorial frustration led to investigations, trials and punishment of defeated generals for negligent command. The senate tried to utilize the same narrative strategies to incorporate losses in stories of victory, mainly by continuing to award triumphs in the midst of military failures. Such triumphs without a plausible claim to victory further eroded senatorial credibility, which encouraged the rise of popular politicians such as Gaius Marius. C. concludes that the domestic political crises of the late second century can be attributed to the Romans' general failure to develop a commemorative space for defeat and communal loss other than to subsume them into larger narratives of victory, a strategy that proved untenable in the long run.

This is a very good book, which successfully demonstrates the need for a major rethinking of the political motives and cultural structures that shaped Roman foreign policy, and the first chapter points to even wider implications. By the conclusion, however, the reader is left feeling that more is promised than delivered. Indeed, after such a lengthy set up the analytical chapters feel occasionally rushed, especially chs 4 and 5. This is partly because of the problematic literary evidence C. is forced to deal with, especially after Livy's coherent narrative breaks off. The sources are handled carefully; nevertheless the fragmentary state of the evidence for the later second century limits efforts to examine the senatorial response to military crises in detail. The focus on the Roman senate as a more or less unitary body seems a bit narrow. Indeed, I have my doubts that the senate — that is to say, the senatorial élite — behaved in such a coherent manner to control war narratives. That later Roman sources, from hindsight, recast defeats as temporary ‘setbacks’ within the framework of victory is well demonstrated. That this reflects contemporary senatorial strategies for narrative construction is a shakier, albeit attractive and provocative, proposition. Lastly, the book is not an easy one to read. The prose is terse and at times hard to follow, and the full significance of arguments is not always made explicit. Yet the patient reader is rewarded with an original and challenging analysis touching on major themes in Roman mid-Republican history and historiography.