THE ROMAN TRIUMPH
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
THE ROMAN TRIUMPH
MARY BEARD
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON, ENGLAND
Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2009.
Set in Adobe Garamond
Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt
Frontispiece: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo,
The Triumph of Marius, 1729.
A re-creation of the triumphal procession of January 1, 104 bce.
Jugurtha, the defeated king of Numidia, stands a proud prisoner in
front of the chariot—threatening to upstage the victorious general
Marius in the background. To left and right are the spoils of victory—
precious vessels and sculpture, including a bust of the goddess
Cybele with distinctive turreted headdress, just as Mantegna
had envisaged in his Triumphs of Caesar (Fig. 28).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beard, Mary, 1955–
The Roman triumph / Mary Beard.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-02613-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-674-03218-7 (pbk.)
1. Triumph.
2. Rites and ceremonies—Rome.
3. Processions—Rome.
4. Rome—Military antiquities.
5. Triumph in art.
6. Triumph in literature.
7. Rites and ceremonies—Rome—Historiography.
I. Title.
DG89.B43 2007
394Ј.50937—dc22
2007002575
Contents
Prologue: The Question of Triumph
1
1
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
7
2
The Impact of the Triumph
42
3
Constructions and Reconstructions
72
4
Captives on Parade
107
5
The Art of Representation
143
6
Playing by the Rules
187
7
Playing God
219
8
The Boundaries of the Ritual
257
9
The Triumph of History
287
Epilogue: Rome, May 2006
331
Plan
335
Abbreviations
336
Notes
338
Bibliography
394
Acknowledgments
418
Illustration Credits
420
Index
424
THE ROMAN TRIUMPH
p r o l o g u e
The Question of Triumph
“Petty sacrilege is punished; sacrilege on a grand scale is the stuff of tri-
umphs.” Those are the words of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, first-century ce
philosopher and tutor of the emperor Nero. He was reflecting in one of
his philosophical letters on the unfair disparity in the meting out of
punishment and reward, and on the apparent profit that might come
from wrong-doing.1 As we might gloss it, following the wry popular
wisdom of our own day, “Petty criminals end up in jail; big ones end
up rich.”
In referring to the “stuff of triumphs,” Seneca meant those famous
parades through the city of Rome that celebrated Rome’s greatest victo-
ries against its enemies (or its biggest massacres, depending on whose
side you were on). To be awarded a triumph was the most outstanding
honor a Roman general could hope for. He would be drawn in a char-
iot—accompanied by the booty he had won, the prisoners he had taken
captive, and his no doubt rowdy and raucous troops in their battle
gear—through the streets of the city to the Temple of Jupiter on the
Capitoline hill, where he would offer a sacrifice to the god. The cere-
mony became a by-word for extravagant display.
Seneca’s quip is uncomfortably subversive. For, by implication, it
questions the morality of some of those glorious victories that were cele-
P r o l o g u e
2
brated in this most lavish of all Roman rituals; and it hints that the
spoils on show might sometimes have been the fruits of sacrilege rather
than the just rewards of imperial conquest. It puts a question mark over
the triumph and triumphal values.
Roman triumphs have provided a model for the celebration of mili-
tary success for centuries. Through the last two millennia, there has
been hardly a monarch, dynast, or autocrat in the West who has not
looked back to Rome for a lesson in how to mark victory in war and to
assert his own personal power. Renaissance princelings launched hun-
dreds of triumphal celebrations. Napoleon carted through the streets
of Paris the sculpture and painting he had seized in Italy, in a pointed
imitation of a Roman triumph. It is a kind of ironic justice that the
Romans’ own masterpieces should find themselves put on parade in a
foreign city—just as the masterpieces looted from the Greek world had
been paraded through Rome two thousand years earlier. As late as 1899
the victories of Admiral George Dewey in the Spanish-American War
were celebrated with a triumphal parade in New York. True, no live cap-
tive or spoils were on show; but a special triumphal arch was built, in
plaster and wood, at Madison Square.2
Scratch the surface of these apparently self-confident ceremonies and
time and again “Senecan” doubts begin to emerge—in sometimes sur-
prising places. Donatello’s wonderfully sensuous bronze statue of David
(now in the Bargello in Florence) was probably commissioned by Cosimo
de’ Medici in 1428 after victory over some rival Italian potentates.3 David
is shown with his foot on the head of Goliath; on the giant’s helmet is a
scene of triumph, and in the triumphal chariot—in an imaginative vari-
ant we shall meet again—stands not a human general but a victorious
Cupid, the god of love. Donatello is directing us to the erotic charge of
his young David. But he is also pointing to the transitory nature of tri-
umphal glory: Goliath who blazoned the emblem of the triumph on his
armor is now himself the victim of his triumphant successor.4
In a completely different medium, a New Yorker cartoon gives similar
anxieties a humorous touch (Fig. 1). We shall shortly see that in ancient
Rome itself “triumphal arches” were not quite so closely linked to trium-
The Question of Triumph
3
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 1:
Boris Drucker, New Yorker cartoon, 1988. The anxious Romans are putting the finishing touches on an imaginary arch—a composite loosely based on the Arch of
Constantine in Rome and the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (Fig. 10).
phal processions as they have been in the modern world, and in the
modern imagination. But, anyway, here the cartoonist pictures a group
of Roman workmen finishing off just such a structure—when the dark
thought strikes them that Rome might not actually be victorious in
whatever war this arch is intended to celebrate. The joke is partly on
the dangers of anticipation, on “counting your chickens before they
are hatched.” But it is also on the fact that a triumph involves both
winners and losers—that those who triumph today may one day be tri-
umphed over.
This book will write those doubts and quizzical reflections back into
the history of the Roman triumph. Most modern accounts of the cere-
P r o l o g u e
4
mony stress the militaristic jingoism of the occasion, its sometimes brut-
ish celebration of conquest and imperialism. It is cast as a ritual which,
throughout the history of Rome, asserted and reasserted the power of
the Roman war machine and the humiliation of the conquered. Cleopa-
tra of Egypt is famously supposed to have killed herself rather than be
triumphed over. That is certainly one side of it. But I shall argue that
the very ceremony which glorified military victory and the values under-
pinning that victory also provided a context within which those values
could be discussed and challenged. It has too often been convenient to
dismiss Roman culture as unreflectively committed to warfare and im-
perial domination, and to regard members of the Roman political elite
individually as obsessed with achieving military glory. Of course, Rome
was “a warrior state.”5 The Romans were not a crowd of proto-pacifists.
But, as a general rule, it is warrior states that produce the most sophisti-
cated critique of the militaristic values they uphold. I hope to show that
this was the case with Rome; and that within Roman culture the tri-
umph was the context and the prompt for some of the most critical
thinking on the dangerous ambivalence of success and military glory.
On the usual calculation, the triumph was celebrated more than three
hundred times in the thousand-or-so-year history of the ancient city
of Rome. It made an impact far beyond the commemoration of vic-
tory, and on aspects of Roman life as diverse as the apotheosis of emper-
ors and the passion of erotic pursuit (“conquest,” that is, in the bed-
room, not on the battlefield). It has been the subject of study and hot
debate by scholars and cultural commentators from antiquity until the
present day.
This book is driven in part by curiosity—about the ritual itself and its
insistent presence in Roman literature, scholarship, and art, and about
the controversies and debates, ancient and modern, that it has raised.
Through an exploration of the triumph, I aim at the same time to com-
municate something of my own enthusiasm for the sophistication, nu-
ance, and complexity of Roman culture (notwithstanding my distaste
for much of what those sophisticated men—and I mean men—got
The Question of Triumph
5
up to). I also try to grapple with some of the biggest questions in the
understanding of ancient ritual in general and of the triumph in particu-
lar that, despite centuries of inspiring work, still get fudged or passed
by. In fact, the approach that I follow in the rest of the book is intended
to challenge many of the ways Roman ritual culture is studied, and
the spurious certainties and prejudices that dog it. This is a manifesto
of sorts.
Also at the heart of what I have written is a conviction that, at its best,
the study of ancient history is as much about how we know as what
we know. It involves an engagement with all the processes of selection,
constructive blindness, revolutionary reinterpretation, and willful mis-
interpretation that together produce the “facts” about the triumph out
of the messy, confusing, and contradictory evidence that survives. With
this in mind, I have taken care, where it is most relevant, to indicate if,
say, a key piece of evidence actually derives from a possibly tendentious
medieval summary of an ancient text or if it depends on accepting some
nineteenth-century “emendation” (put simply, clever “alteration”) of the
words transmitted to us in the manuscripts. Factors like this are usually
side-stepped, except in the most scholarly and technical academic arti-
cles—and sometimes even there. This book is intended not only for
those who are already expert in ancient Roman culture but also for those
who wish to discover it. I shall be making clear why some of the best-
loved “facts” about the triumph are nothing of the sort. But more im-
portant, I hope to convey to nonspecialists the intellectual pleasure—
and the sheer fun—of making sense of the ancient world from the com-
plex layers of different kinds of evidence that we have. This is a book
which, as mathematicians would say, shows its working.
The first chapter plunges into the middle of things. It takes a single
triumphal ceremony—the triumph of Pompey the Great in 61 bce—
and explores its celebration and commemoration in depth. It offers a
glimpse of the intriguing richness of the evidence for this ritual, from
the miniature images on Roman coins to the disapproving accounts of
austere Roman moralists; and it shows how far the impact of a single tri-
P r o l o g u e
6
umphal ceremony can extend. Chapters 2 and 3 stand back to reflect on
the general role of the triumph in Roman culture and to wonder just
how reliable (or reliable in what sense) is the evidence that remains. They show that we know both more and less about the triumph than we
might suppose. At the heart of the book, Chapters 4 through 8 home in
on particularly revealing aspects of triumphal culture—the victims, the
spoils, the successful general, the rules and regulations that determined
who was allowed to triumph, and the variety of triumphlike celebrations
that emerged in Rome and elsewhere.
The final chapter reflects on the history of the triumph. It goes with-
out saying that over a thousand years the character of the ceremony
must have changed drastically, as well as reactions to it. We should not
imagine that anything like Seneca’s clever quip could plausibly have
fallen from the lips of the men and women who observed any such ritual
in the fifth or fourth centuries bce. How those early Romans would
have responded and how their ceremony itself was conducted is now
practically irrecoverable. As I shall argue, most later Roman accounts of
primitive triumphal history—from clever reconstruction to elaborate
fantasies—tell us more about the period in which they were written than
the one they purport to describe. It fits appropriately with the approach
of the book as a whole that the “origins” of the ceremony are, intention-
ally, left till last. Please do not start there.
c h a p t e r
I
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
BIRTHDAY PARADE
September 29, 61 bce, was the forty-fifth birthday of Pompey the Great.
It was also—and this can hardly have been mere coincidence—the sec-
ond and final day of his mammoth triumphal procession through the
streets of Rome. It was a ceremony that put on show at the heart of the
metropolis the wonders of the East and the profits of empire: from
cartloads of bullion and colossal golden statues to precious specimens of
exotic plants and other curious bric-à-brac of conquest. Not to mention
the eye-catching captives dressed up in their national costumes, the plac-
ards proclaiming the conqueror’s achievements (ships captured, cities
founded, kings defeated . . .), paintings recreating crucial moments of
the campaigns, and a bizarre portrait head of Pompey himself, made (so
it was said) entirely of pearls.1
Over the previous six years, Pompey had dealt decisively with two of
the greatest dangers to Rome’s security, and boasted a range of conquests
that justified comparison with King Alexander himself (hence the title
“the Great”). First, in 67, he had dispatched the pirates who had been
terrorizing the whole Mediterranean, with the support of “rogue states”
in the East. Their activities had threatened to starve Rome of its sea-
borne grain supply and had produced some high-profile victims, includ-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
8
ing the young Julius Caesar—who, so the story went, managed to raise
his own ransom and then proceeded to crucify his captors. Pompey is re-
puted to have cleared the sea in an impressively (and perhaps implausi-
bly) short three months, before resettling many of the old buccaneers in
towns at a safe distance from the coast.
His next target was a more formidable opponent, and another imita-
tor of Alexander, King Mithradates Eupator of Pontus. Some twenty
years earlier, in 88 bce, Mithradates had committed an atrocity that was
outrageous even by ancient standards, when he invaded the Roman
province of Asia and ordered the massacre of every Italian man, woman,
or child that could be found; unreliable estimates by Greek and Roman
writers suggest that between 80,000 and 150,000 people were killed. Al-
though rapidly beaten back on that occasion, he had continued to ex-
pand his sphere of influence in what is now Turkey (and beyond) and to
threaten Roman interests in the East. The Romans had scored a few no-
table victories in battle; but the war had not been won. Between 66 and
62 Pompey finished the job, while restoring or imposing Roman order
from the Black Sea to Judaea. It was a hugely lucrative campaign. One
account claims that Mithradates’ furniture stores (“two thousand drink-
ing-cups made of onyx inlaid with gold and a host of bowls and wine-
coolers, plus drinking-horns and couches and chairs, richly adorned”)
took thirty days to transfer to Roman hands.2
Triumphal processions had celebrated Roman victories from the very
earliest days of the city. Or so the Romans themselves believed, tracing
the origins of the ceremony back to their mythical founder, Romulus,
and the other (more or less mythical) early kings. As well as the booty,
enemy captives, and other trophies of victory, there was more light-
hearted display. Behind the triumphal chariot, the troops sang ribald
songs ostensibly at their general’s expense. “Romans, watch your wives,
see the bald adulterer’s back home” was said to have been chanted at Jul-
ius Caesar’s triumph in 46 bce (as much to Caesar’s delight, no doubt, as
to his chagrin).3 Conspicuous consumption played a part, too. After the
ceremonies at the Temple of Jupiter, there was banqueting, occasionally
on a legendary scale; Lucullus, for example, who had been awarded a tri-
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
9
umph for some earlier victories scored against Mithradates, is reputed to
have feasted the whole city plus the surrounding villages.4
At Pompey’s triumph in 61 the booty had flowed in so lavishly that
two days, instead of the usual one, were assigned to the parade, and
(superfluity always being a mark of success) still more was left over:
“Quite enough,” according to Plutarch, in his biography of Pompey,
“to deck out another triumphal procession.” The extravagant wealth on
display certainly prompted murmurings of disapproval as well as en-
vious admiration. In a characteristic piece of curmudgeon, the elder
Pliny, looking back on the occasion after more than a hundred years,
wondered exactly whose triumph it had been: not so much Pompey’s
over the pirates and Mithradates as “the defeat of austerity and the tri-
umph, let’s face it, of luxury.” Curmudgeon apart, though, it must
count as one of the most extraordinary birthday celebrations in the his-
tory of the world.5
GETTING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD
Ancient writers found plenty to say about Pompey’s triumph, lingering
on the details of its display. The vast quantity of cash trundled through
the streets was part of the appeal: “75,100,000 drachmae of silver coin,”
according to the historian Appian, which was considerably more than
the annual tax revenue of the whole Roman world at the time—or, to
put it another way, enough money to keep two million people alive for a
year.6 But the range of precious artifacts that Pompey had brought back
from the royal court of Mithradates also captured the imagination.
Appian again notes “the throne of Mithradates himself, along with his
scepter, and his statue eight cubits tall, made of solid gold.”7 Pliny, al-
ways with a keen eye for luxury and innovation, harps on “the vessels of
gold and gems, enough to fill nine display cabinets, three gold statues of
Minerva, Mars and Apollo, thirty three crowns of pearl” and “the first
vessels of agate ever brought to Rome.” He seems particularly intrigued
by an out-sized gaming board, “three feet broad by four feet long,” made
out of two different types of precious stone—and on the board a golden
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 0
moon weighing thirty pounds. But here he has a moral for his own age
and a critical reflection on the consequences of luxury: “The fact that no
gems even approaching that size exist today is as clear a proof as anyone
could want that the world’s resources have been depleted.”8
In some cases the sheer mimetic extravagance of the treasures on dis-
play makes—and no doubt made—their interpretation tricky. One of
the most puzzling objects in the roster of the procession was, in Pliny’s
words, “a mountain like a pyramid and made of gold, with deers and
lions and fruit of all kinds, and a golden vine entwined all around”; fol-
lowed by a “musaeum” (a “shrine of the Muses” or perhaps a “grotto”)
“made of pearls and topped by a sun-dial.” Hard as it is to picture these
creations, we might guess that they evoked the exotic landscape of the
East, while at the same time instantiating the excesses of oriental luxury.9
Other notable spectacles came complete with interpretative labels. The
historian Dio refers to one “trophy” carried in the triumph as “huge and
expensively decorated, with an inscription attached to say ‘this is a tro-
phy of the whole world.’”10 This was a celebration, in other words, of
Pompey the Great as world conqueror, and of Roman power as world
empire.
Almost all of these treasures have long since been lost or destroyed:
the agate broken, gems recycled into new works of art (or monstrosi-
ties, depending on your taste), precious metals melted down and re-
fashioned. But a single large bronze vessel (a krater) displayed in the
Capitoline Museum at Rome might possibly have been one of the many
on view in the procession of 61 bce—or if not, then a close look-alike
(Fig. 2). This particular specimen is some 70 centimeters tall, in plain
bronze, except for a pattern of lotus leaves chased around its neck and
inlaid with silver; the slightly rococo handles and foot are modern resto-
rations. It was found in the mid-eighteenth century in the Italian town
of Anzio, ancient Antium, and given to the Capitoline Museum—where
it currently holds pride of place as the center of the “Hall of Hannibal”
(so-called after its sixteenth-century frescoes depicting a magnificently
foreign Hannibal perched on an elephant but showing also, appropri-
ately enough, a triumphal procession of an allegorical figure of “Roma”
over a captive “Sicilia”).11
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
11
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 2:
Bronze vessel, late second–early first century bce. Originally a gift from King
Mithradates to a group of his own subjects (as an inscription around the neck records), it may have reached Italy as part of the spoils of Pompey—a solitary survivor of the treasures on display in his triumphal procession in 61?
The connection with Mithradates is proclaimed by an inscription
pricked out in Greek around the rim: “King Mithradates Eupator [gave
this] to the Eupatoristae of the gymnasium.” In other words, this was
a present from Mithradates to an association named after him
“Eupatoristae” (which could be anything from a drinking club to a
group involved in the religious cult of the king). It must originally have
come from some part of the Eastern Mediterranean where Mithradates
had power and influence, and it could have found its way to Antium by
any number of routes; but there is certainly a chance that it was one tiny
part of Pompey’s collection of booty. It offers a glimpse of what might
have been paraded before the gawping spectators in September 61.12
A triumph, however, was about more than costly treasure. Pliny, for
example, stresses the natural curiosities of the East on display. “Ever
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 2
since the time of Pompey the Great,” he writes, “we have paraded even
trees in triumphal processions.” And he notes elsewhere that ebony—by
which he may well mean the tree, rather than just the wood—was one of
the exhibits in the Mithradatic triumph. Perhaps on display too was the
royal library, with its specialist collection of medical treatises; Pompey
was said to have been so impressed with this part of his booty that he
had one of his ex-slaves take on the task of translating it all into Latin.13
Many other items had symbolic rather than monetary value. Appian
writes of “countless wagonloads of weapons, and beaks of ships”; these
were the spoils taken directly from the field of conflict, all that now re-
mained of the pirate terror and Mithradates’ arsenal.14
Further proof of Pompey’s success was there for all to contemplate on
the placards carried in the procession (see Figs. 9 and 28). According to
Plutarch, they blazoned the names of all the nations over which he tri-
umphed (fourteen in all, plus the pirates), the number of fortresses, cit-
ies, and ships he had captured, the new cities he had founded, and the
amount of money his conquests had brought to Rome. Appian claims to
quote the text of one of these boasts; it ran, “Ships with bronze beaks
captured: 800. Cities founded: in Cappadocia 8; in Cilicia and Coele-
Syria 20; in Palestine, the city which is now Seleucis. Kings conquered:
Tigranes of Armenia, Artoces of Iberia, Oroezes of Albania, Darius of
Media, Aretas of Nabatea, Antiochus of Commagene.”15
No less an impact can have been made by the human participants in
the show: a “host of captives and pirates, not in chains but dressed up in
their native costume” and “the officers, children, and generals of the
kings he had fought.” Appian numbers these highest ranking prisoners
at 324 and lists some of the more famous and evocative names: “Tigranes
the son of Tigranes, the five sons of Mithradates, that is, Artaphernes,
Cyrus, Oxathres, Darius, and Xerxes, and his daughters, Orsabaris and
Eupatra.” For an ancient audience, this roll-call must have brought to
mind their yet more famous namesakes and any number of earlier con-
flicts with Persia and the East: the name of young Xerxes must have
evoked the fifth-century Persian king, best known for his (unsuccessful)
invasion of Greece; Artaphernes, a commander of the Persian forces at
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
13
the battle of Marathon. The names alone serve to insert Pompey into
the whole history of Western victory over Oriental “barbarity.”16
An impressive array of captives made for a splendid triumph. By some
clever talking, Pompey is said to have managed to get his hands on a
couple of notorious pirate chiefs who had actually been captured by one
of his Roman rivals, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus, who had been
hoping to show them off in his own triumphal parade. At a stroke,
Pompey had robbed Metellus’ triumph of two of its stars, while en-
hancing the line-up in his own.17 Even so, some of the defeated were
unavoidably absent. Tigranes père of Armenia, Mithradates’ partner in
crime, had had a lucky escape. Thanks to a well-timed surrender, he
was restored by Pompey as a puppet ruler on his old throne and did not
accompany his son to the triumph. (In the treacherous world of Ar-
menian politics, young Tigranes had actually sided with the Romans,
before disastrously quarreling with Pompey and ending up a prisoner.)
Mithradates himself was already dead. He was said to have forestalled
the humiliation of display in the triumph by his timely suicide; or rather
he had a soldier kill him, his long-term precautionary consumption of
antidotes having rendered poison useless.18
In place of Tigranes and Mithradates themselves, “images”— eikones
in Appian’s Greek—were put on display. Almost certainly paintings
(though three-dimensional models are known in other triumphs), these
were said to capture the crucial moments in the conflict between
Romans and their absent victims: the kings were shown “fighting, beaten
and running away . . . and finally there was a picture of how Mithradates
died and of the daughters who chose to die with him.” For Appian,
these images reached the very limits of realistic representation, depicting
not only the cut and thrust of battle and scenes of suicide but even, as he
notes at one point, “the silence” itself of the night on which Mithradates
fled. Thanks to triumphal painting of this type, art historians have often
imagined the triumph as one of the driving forces behind the “realism”
that is characteristic of many aspects of Roman art.19
Pompey himself loomed above the scene, riding high in a chariot
“studded with gems.” Parading his identification with Alexander the
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 4
Great, he was said to have been wearing a cloak that had once belonged
to Alexander himself. We are not told how he combined this with the
traditional costume of the triumphing general, which included an or-
nate purple toga and tunic that modern studies have traced back vari-
ously to the costume of the early kings of Rome or to the cult image of
the god Jupiter himself. In any case, Appian on this occasion chooses to
be skeptical (“if anyone can believe that,” he writes), although he does
go on to offer an implausibly plausible account of just how Pompey
might have got his hands on this heirloom of a king who had died some
250 years earlier: “He apparently found it among the possessions of
Mithradates—the people of Cos having got it from Cleopatra.” This
Cleopatra, like her more famous later name-sake, was a queen of the
Ptolemaic royal house of Egypt and a direct descendant of Alexander’s
general Ptolemy. The treasure she had left on the Greek island of Cos
had come into Mithradates’ possession in 88 bce; it is just possible
(though not very likely) that this included some genuine memorabilia of
Alexander, for Ptolemy was not only a close associate of the king but had
also taken charge of his corpse and burial.20
Dressed as Alexander or not, Pompey chose to display his power by
a show of clemency rather than cruelty. “He put none of the prisoners
to death as he arrived at the Capitol . . . instead he sent them back
home at public expense—except those of royal blood. Of these, only
Aristoboulus [of Judaea] was put to death at once, and Tigranes [junior]
later.” Pompey’s blaze of restraint served, of course, to hint just how
deathly a ceremony a triumph might be. Other victorious generals were
reputed to have taken the crueler course. The idea was that for the
most powerful, news-worthy, or dangerous of the captives the proces-
sion might culminate in execution, rather than in feasting.21
TRIPLE TRIUMPH
The ceremony of 61 bce was not Pompey’s first triumph. After a trium-
phal celebration for victories in North Africa in probably 81 or 80, and
another for victories in Spain in 71, he now belonged to that select group
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
15
of Roman generals—including Romulus himself and a clutch of less
mythical republican heroes—who had triumphed three times. It was an
achievement that quickly became his crowning glory, his identifying
device, almost his nickname: he was the man who, in the words of the
poet Lucan, “thrice had mounted the Capitol in his chariot”—“three-
triumph-Pompey,” as we might put it.22 In fact, his own signet ring
made exactly that point: according to Dio, Pompey sealed his letters
with a design that blazoned three trophies of victory, presumably in the
traditional form of a suit of enemy armor pinned to a tree trunk or stake
(see Fig. 4).23
True, other Romans celebrated even more triumphs than Pompey:
Julius Caesar, for example, was to notch up five; and Camillus, who
saved Rome from the Gauls, is supposed to have had no fewer than four
in the early fourth century bce. But Pompey, in a sense, could outbid
even these. As Plutarch put it, “The greatest factor in his glory, and
something that had never happened to any Roman before, was that he
celebrated his third triumph over the third continent. For others before
him had triumphed three times. But he held his first triumph over Af-
rica, his second over Europe, and this final one over Asia, and so in a
way he seemed to have brought the whole world under his power in his
three triumphs.” Pompey’s three triumphs marked out the planet as his,
and as Rome’s, domain.24
Glory, however, courts controversy; the proudest and richest of cere-
monies are also those most liable to backfire. Pompey’s first triumph, in
particular, became renowned as much for its own-goals as for its glorious
celebration of victory. Pompey was at that time still in his twenties, his
career launched and accelerated in the blood-thirsty campaigns of Ro-
man civil war between the rival factions of Marius and Sulla. Too young
ever to have held an elected office, he was already a terrifyingly success-
ful and ruthless general in Sulla’s camp and was instrumental in Sulla’s
rise to “dictatorship” in the city. “Murderous teenager” was the famous
taunt thrown at him in a courtroom altercation by an elderly adversary.
(This ageist banter had, in fact, been started by Pompey, who asked his
opponent whether he had been sent back from the underworld to make
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his charge.)25 In North Africa, he managed to destroy the remaining
Marian forces who did not immediately desert to his side, and to oust
their African ally, King Iarbas of Numidia, from his throne—before, ac-
cording to Plutarch, going on a hunting expedition to round up some
exotic African animals, against whom, as much as against the human in-
habitants, he apparently wanted to display the overwhelming strength of
Rome.26
Returning home, he was greeted warmly by Sulla who, according to
one version, hailed him for the first time as “Magnus,” “the Great.”
Pompey also asked to celebrate a triumph. It would have been unprece-
dented, in Roman memory at least, for a man so young who had as yet
held no magistracy to be granted such an honor, and, whether for this or
other reasons, the dictator at first refused. The story goes that his change
of heart was brought about by a bold and prescient quip of Pompey.
“You should bear in mind,” he is reported to have said, “that more
people worship the rising than the setting sun.” As Plutarch explains,
the implication that Pompey’s power was on the rise, while his own was
on the wane, was not lost on Sulla: “Let him triumph,” he finally con-
ceded.27
The exact date of the celebration is not known. Pompey’s age on the
occasion is given variously as “in his twenty-fourth year,” twenty-four,
twenty-five, and twenty-six. But if they differ on the precise chronology,
ancient writers agree in identifying Pompey’s extreme youth and lack of
formal status—he was not yet a member of the senate—as the triumph’s
most memorable feature. As Plutarch put it, vividly if inaccurately, “He
got a triumph before he grew a beard.” To some, this seemed a dazzling
honor, proof of Pompey’s precocious military genius, and a blow for
youth and talent against the conservative closed-shop of senatorial tradi-
tion; and it is said to have increased his popularity among the common
people. To others, such flouting of precedent and traditional hierarchy
represented another step in the dissolution of republican politics. “It
goes absolutely against our custom that a mere youth, far too young for
senatorial rank, should be given a military command . . . It is quite un-
heard of that a Roman equestrian should hold a triumph,” as Cicero had
caricatured the huffing and puffing of Pompey’s opponents.28
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
17
The controversies of this triumph did not stop there. One picturesque
detail concerns a team of African elephants. Pompey had brought these
back to Rome, caught perhaps on his own hunting expedition. His plan
was to hitch his triumphal chariot not to the customary horses but to
four of these lumbering beasts. It was a dramatic gesture which would
serve to emphasize Pompey’s far-flung conquests of exotic foreign terri-
tory, and at the same time cast a divine light over the conqueror himself.
For, in Greco-Roman myth, the victorious return of the god Bacchus
from his conquest of India was often staged in a wagon drawn by ele-
phants.29
How Pompey’s aides succeeded in training these animals and yoking
them to the chariot is a matter of guesswork. But the project came to a
premature end at one of the gates through which he was to pass on his
way up to the Capitol. The elephants were too big to go through.
Pompey apparently tried a second time, again unsuccessfully, and then
replaced them with horses. This too-tight squeeze may possibly have
been stage-managed to emphasize the idea that Pompey had literally
grown too big for the constraints of the city. More likely, it was an em-
barrassing impasse, followed by an awkward hiatus while the outsized
animals were removed and the replacements yoked in their place, to the
horror (and glee) of the more conservative senators. As the story was
later told, at any rate, the moral was not far below the surface: even the
most successful of triumphing generals should take care not to get above
themselves.30
Some of Pompey’s own troops might also have taken pleasure in his
discomfiture. For in the run-up to the celebration, relations between the
soldiers and their general had become, at the very least, strained. The
enthusiastic participation of the troops in a triumph could usually be
guaranteed by a generous hand-out from the spoils. On this occasion,
Pompey’s golden touch failed him, and the men complained about the
meanness of what they received: the story was that they not only threat-
ened to mutiny but to give in to the obvious temptation and loot the
cash on display in the procession itself. Pompey’s reaction was to stand
firm and—in what was to become another famous slogan—to say that
he would rather have no triumph at all, indeed he would rather die, than
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1 8
give in to his soldiers’ insubordination. This went down predictably well
in some quarters. According to Plutarch, one of the leading opponents
of his triumph changed his mind after this display of old-fashioned dis-
cipline; and the anecdote is recounted elsewhere as an example of proper
determination on the part of a general.31 It can hardly, however, have en-
deared him to the rank and file.
He did not make the same mistake after the Mithradatic war, when
the size of the donative distributed before the triumph (in fact, while
the troops were still out in the East) reached legendary proportions.
One hundred million sesterces are said to have been shared out between
his “legates and quaestors,” Pompey’s immediate subordinates, probably
about twenty in all. These men must have been wealthy already, but an
extra 5 million sesterces each would have been the equivalent of a sub-
stantial inheritance, and on its own a sizeable aristocratic fortune. For
Pompey, it was a good investment in political loyalty.
The lowest ranking soldiers received 6,000 sesterces each—a tiny pro-
portion of what was given to the commanders, but at roughly six times a
soldier’s annual pay it must, even so, have seemed a major windfall.32
Certainly this triumph was remembered centuries later, long after the
end of antiquity, for its lavish generosity—as an early sixteenth-century
document from the archives of Florence vividly brings home. This was
written by an adviser to the Medici, suggesting a detailed programme
for celebrating the feast of John the Baptist. To fill one afternoon,
this anonymous apparatchik proposed the recreation of four particular
ancient triumphs, giving in each case the reasons for his choice. One
of them is the (third) triumph of Pompey; the reason is Pompey’s liberal-
ity and his generosity to friends and enemies alike. A good model for
the Medici.33
THE ART OF MEMORY
Public spectacles are usually ephemeral events. At the end of the day,
when the participants have gone home, when the props, the rubbish,
the barricades, and the extra seating have all been cleared away, the
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
19
show lives on only in memory. It is, of course, in the interests of the
sponsors to ensure that the memory lasts, to give the fleeting spectacle
a more permanent form, to spread the experience beyond the lucky
few who were present on the day itself. That is one function, in modern
ceremonial, of souvenir programmes, commemorative mugs, postage
stamps, and tea towels. In the case of Pompey’s triumphs, the written
accounts of the events offered by ancient historians, antiquarians, and
poets are crucial in the whole process of its memorialization; and we
shall return to these later in this chapter. But art and architecture also
played an important part in fixing the occasions in public consciousness
and memory.34
Coins, for example, replicated Pompey’s great day in miniature and
distributed it into the pockets of those who could never have witnessed
the ceremony. A striking gold coin or aureus (Fig. 3) depicts the head of
Africa (wearing a tell-tale elephant’s skin) with a border in the form of
a laurel wreath, one of the distinctive accessories of the general and his
soldiers at a triumph; the clear link with Pompey is made by the title
MAGNUS running behind Africa’s head, and more allusively by the jug
and lituus (a curved staff ) which were the symbols of the augurate, the
priesthood he held. It can only be Pompey then in the triumphal chariot
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 3:
Gold coin ( aureus) minted to celebrate one of Pompey’s triumphs, c. 80, 71, or 61 bce. On the reverse (right), a miniature scene of triumph. On the obverse (left), a laurel wreath encircles the name “Magnus,” a head of Africa, and the symbols of Pompey’s priesthood.
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
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[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 4:
Reverse designs of two silver denarii commemorating Pompey’s victories, minted 56 bce. The three trophies (left) call to mind Pompey’s three triumphs. The globe surrounded by wreaths (right) hints at worldwide conquest—and at the globe carried in the triumphal procession of 61.
on the reverse of the coin, being crowned by a flying figure of Victory.
The rider of the nearest horse in the team is presumably Pompey’s son,
for the children of the triumphant general regularly seem to have shared
his chariot or to have ridden next to him on trace-horses. PRO·COS, for
pro consule, written beneath, is the formal title of Pompey’s military
command. Whether it is linked to his first, second, or third triumphs
(it has been variously dated to c. 80, 71, and 61 bce) or even seen as a
later issue celebrating all three, the image acted as a visual reminder of
Pompey’s triumphal career.35 Alongside their obvious economic func-
tions, these coins would have been a prompt to reimagining the specta-
cle maybe years after, or miles distant from, its original performance.
Another set of coins, silver denarii issued in 56 bce by Pompey’s son-
in-law, Faustus Sulla (the dictator’s son), recall Pompey’s triumphs us-
ing different visual clues.36 These fall into two main types (Fig. 4). The
first depicts on its reverse three trophies of victory, plus the symbols
of Pompey’s priesthood. The other features a globe surrounded by three
small wreaths, with a larger wreath above; below are an ear of corn
and what is usually—and over-confidently, I suspect—identified as the
stern-post of a ship (together perhaps a reference to Pompey’s naval
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
21
command against the pirates and his control of Rome’s corn supply in
57). The three trophies must call to mind Dio’s description of Pompey’s
signet ring. The globe evokes not only his world-wide conquests but
also, more specifically, that “huge and expensively decorated . . . trophy
of the whole world” carried in the procession of 61, while the laurel
wreaths signal the triumphal context.37
The appeal of these designs lies partly in their sheer bravura in reduc-
ing the vastness of the ceremony and the victories lying behind it to a
space no larger than a postage stamp. But, predictably enough, triumphs
had their colossal memorials too. Part of the profits of Roman warfare in
the Republic regularly went into the construction of public buildings,
for the most part temples. (The tradition of “triumphal arches,” as we
call them, became fully established only later, and even then were not
exclusively connected with triumphs.) These temples simultaneously
commemorated the power of Rome, the prowess of the general, and the
support of the gods for Roman victory, as well as acting as memorials of
the triumphal celebrations themselves. For they were not only funded
out of the very riches that were paraded in procession through the
streets, but they also provided permanent showcases for some of the
prize spoils that would have been merely glimpsed on the day of the tri-
umphal spectacle.38
Pompey’s name is associated with a Temple of Minerva, which—as
Pliny’s quotation of its dedicatory inscription makes clear—he founded
out of the spoils of his eastern campaigns: “Dedicated to Minerva, in
proper fulfillment of his vow, by Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus, imperator,
at the completion of the thirty years’ war, following the rout, ruin,
slaughter, or surrender of 12,183,000 men, the sinking or capture of 846
vessels, the submission of 1538 towns and fortresses, and the subjec-
tion of lands from the Sea of Azov to the Red Sea.”39 He was also linked
with a Temple of Hercules, which Vitruvius in his manual of archi-
tecture refers to as “Hercules Pompeianus.” To judge from Vitruvius’
description of its decidedly old-fashioned architectural style, Pompey
probably financed a restoration rather than the original foundation, but
a sufficiently lavish restoration for his name to become attached to the
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2 2
building. There is a fair chance that its statue of Hercules—by Myron,
so Pliny has it, the famous fifth-century bce Greek sculptor (best known
now for his Discus Thrower but in antiquity more renowned for his
extremely life-like Cow)—was part of the spoils of victory of one of
Pompey’s campaigns. Certainly, such a connection is implied by another
of the triumphal coins of Faustus Sulla, which features a head of Hercu-
les, in characteristic lion’s skin.40
It is, however, another design in the same series of coins—Venus
crowned with a laurel wreath—that signals Pompey’s most extravagant
attempt to set his triumph in stone.41 For they were minted the year
before the spectacular inauguration of the theater and porticoes that
were built out of the profits of Pompey’s eastern campaigns and destined
to display many of his triumph’s choicest spoils. The term “theater
and porticoes” hardly does justice to this vast building complex, which
stretched from the present day Piazza Campo dei Fiori to the Largo Ar-
gentina, covering an area of some 45,000 square meters (Fig. 5). A dar-
ing—and, for Rome, unprecedented—combination of temple, pleasure
park, theater, and museum, it wrote Pompey’s name permanently into
the Roman cityscape. Even now, though no trace remains visible on the
ground, its buried foundations (and particularly the distinctive curve of
the theater) determine the street plan and housing patterns of the city
above; it remains a ghostly template which accounts for the surprising
twists and turns of today’s back-streets, alleyways, and mansions.42
Add to this the lucky survival of exactly the right part of the third-
century ce inscribed plan of the city of Rome (the so-called “Marble
Plan” or “Forma Urbis”), combined with a series of references in ancient
authors and some modern excavation, and we are able to reconstruct the
main lines of its design and use—even if intense controversy surrounds
the details.43 At one end of the multi-storey complex perched a Temple
of Venus “Victrix.” This was the goddess who as “giver of victory” could
be seen as the divine guide of Pompey’s military success; one ancient
writer made the understandable mistake of calling it simply a Temple of
Victoria.44 But Venus “victorious” (both translations are correct) must
also have evoked the success of the goddess herself in the mythical con-
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
23
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 5:
Pompey’s theater and porticoes. There have been many attempts to recapture the
daring design and lavish scale of the whole complex. This three-dimensional reconstruction, based on nineteenth-century drawings, shows the Temple of Venus Victrix (bottom left) overlooking the auditorium; beyond the porticoes, gardens and a sculpture gallery.
test with Juno and Diana for the apple of Paris, and so too the whole
history of the Trojan War—and Rome’s descent from Venus’ son, the
Trojan Aeneas—which that contest sparked.
On this upper level stood other smaller shrines to a clutch of notably
military virtues (including Virtus itself, the personification of manly
courage, and Felicitas, the kind of divinely inspired good fortune that
was essential to successful generalship). More eye-catching, though, was
the dramatic feat of engineering that adapted and expanded the steps
of the Temple of Venus into the seating of a vast theater, cascading
down to a performance area and extensive gardens beyond. According to
Pliny’s no doubt exaggerated figures, it could hold 40,000 spectators.45
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2 4
Whether this scheme was inspired by the so-called “theater-temples” of
Italy (where temple steps doubled with theater seating) or was a piece of
new-fangled Hellenism copied, as Plutarch claimed, from the architec-
ture of the Greek city of Mytilene is hard to say. What is certain is that
this was the first permanent stone theater built in the city of Rome, and
as such it caused some muttering about luxury and immorality among
the old guard.46 No less of an innovation were the gardens, walkways,
and porticoes that stretched for almost two hundred meters (this was ef-
fectively Rome’s first public park) toward a new senate house that stood
at the far end of the complex. This was the spot “even at the base of
Pompey’s statue” where Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 bce.47
The whole development was littered with sculpture and painting, in
part the booty from the east, in part (as Pliny remarks about statues of a
pair of heroines, one of whom was famous for giving birth to an ele-
phant) specially commissioned. There are a number of references to
prize items from this gallery in surviving ancient literature. Pliny notes,
for example, in addition to Alcippe the elephant’s mother, a painting
of Cadmus and Europa by the fourth-century artist Antiphilos and
another by the fifth-century painter Polygnotos, originally hanging in
Pompey’s senate house and showing “a shield bearer” (a talking point,
it seems: was he shown mounting or dismounting from his horse?).48
Traces of this gallery in surviving marble or bronze, still less in paint,
have been much harder to pin down. The survivals include a group of
five outsized Muses, plus a matching Apollo (now split between galleries
in Rome, Naples, and Paris), a similarly colossal seated female figure,
and a number of inscribed statue bases, all discovered in this area of
Rome.49
Beyond this general outline, our detailed understanding of the deco-
rative programme of the building is much more limited than most of
the reconstructive fantasies of modern archaeologists would suggest.
These have often rested on the ingenious but doubtful speculation that
a list of risqué pagan statues denounced for their immorality by Tatian,
a second-century Christian polemicist, in fact represents (though Tatian
himself does not say so) a partial roster of the statues from Pompey’s
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
25
temple, theater, and porticoes.50 This has launched a variety of theories:
that the sculptural decoration was themed around Greek poetesses,
courtesans (hetairai), and extraordinary mothers (fitting neatly with
Pliny’s Alcippe, of course); that it offered a “quintessentially Roman
formulation” of the equation of “libido with tyranny,” within an artistic
programme that put on show a particularly loaded version of the union
of Greek and Roman culture; or, taking a more cerebral turn, that it
recreated in stone the theological theories of that most influential first-
century polymath Varro, under perhaps the directly guiding hand of
Varro himself.51 Whether these scholarly fantasies are just that or whether
they reflect in part the fertile imagination of the Romans themselves is a
moot point. But, either way, it should not cloud the fact that this was, or
was also, a monument of Pompey’s triumph.
With its array of treasures from the conquests, any walk through
Pompey’s porticoes must also have entailed a re-viewing of the spoils
first seen on September 28 and 29, 61—the procession being re-enacted
in the movement of each and every visitor, as they passed the objects on
display.52 But more than that, some individual works of art explicitly
evoked Pompey’s triumphal moment. Pliny refers to a portrait of Alex-
ander the Great by the painter Nikias (prompting recollections of the
cloak said to have been worn by Pompey in the procession), as well as to
a group of statues of “fourteen nationes” or “peoples” that stood “around
Pompey” or (depending on the exact reading of a possibly corrupt text)
“around the porticoes/theater of Pompey.”53 These were presumably new
commissions, personifications of the peoples conquered in his cam-
paigns; significantly or not, the number fourteen coincides with the to-
tal number of nations whose names, according to Plutarch, were carried
at the front of the triumphal parade itself (or, alternatively, with the list
of conquests that Pliny quotes from the “announcement” of the tri-
umph). The statues certainly continued to make an impression well into
the Empire: Suetonius claims that, after he had murdered his mother,
the emperor Nero dreamed that was he was being menaced by them; it
was a nightmare that foreboded provincial uprising from the peoples
whom Pompey had once conquered.54
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2 6
One surviving statue may even represent Pompey in his role as trium-
phant conqueror: a colossal statue of a nude male, some three meters
tall, which since soon after its discovery in the sixteenth century has
stood in the Roman mansion now known as the Palazzo Spada (Fig. 6).
In the mid-seventeenth century it was identified as the very statue be-
neath which Caesar was assassinated. The arguments were based on its
findspot in the right area of the city, the presumed likeness of its head to
other portraits, and (for those with vivid imaginations) the red stains in
the marble of his left leg—traces of Caesar’s blood. This identification
appeared to crumble when the head was shown to be entirely modern, a
sixteenth-century restoration.
Nonetheless, leaving the blood aside, the findspot does make some
connection with Pompey’s theater complex plausible, as does the scale of
the piece and some of its attributes: the figure is supported by a palm
trunk (a plant strongly connected with victory and triumph), while in
his hand he holds a globe, the symbol of world conquest. True, these are
also well-known attributes of Roman emperors, and a detailed case has
been made for seeing here a figure of the emperor Domitian. But it is no
less likely that the seventeenth-century scholars had it right (albeit for
the wrong reasons): that this is what is left of the triumphant Pompey
from his senate house.55
The triumphal aspects of this whole building complex were empha-
sized even more starkly in the celebrations that marked its inauguration
in 55 bce—a characteristic Roman combination of tragic theater, music,
and athletics, horse racing and wild beast hunts (the hunts alone lasted
for five days). The date chosen for the festivities is itself significant. Al-
though not explicitly recorded in any surviving ancient evidence, it was
almost certainly the closing days of September (shortly after Cicero de-
livered his speech In Pisonem [Against Piso], as that speech makes clear).56
In other words, the inauguration of the buildings took place over the
anniversary of the third triumph—making in the process another stu-
pendous birthday celebration for Pompey.
The plays chosen for the occasion, too, could be seen as an imag-
inative re-performance of the triumph. According to Cicero, two re-
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 6:
Colossal statue of Pompey, now in the Palazzo Spada, Rome. The head was
shown to be modern, when the statue was moved in 1798 to provide a backdrop in a performance of Voltaire’s Death of Caesar; but the rest may be what is left of the general that once stood in the senate house that was part of his theater-and-portico complex.
Th e
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2 8
vivals featured prominently in the theatrical programme: Accius’
Clytemnestra and the Equus Troianus (Trojan Horse) of either Naevius or Livius Andronicus. We can do no more than guess at the details of their
plots, but Clytemnestra certainly focused on the return of Agamemnon
to Greece after his victory at Troy, the Equus Troianus on the devious
Greek scheme to bring that victory about. Cicero, in a letter written
shortly after the event, strongly suggests that the spoils of war played a
starring role in both productions: he writes of the “six-hundred mules”
that tramped across the stage in the Clytemnestra (no doubt carrying Ag-
amemnon’s returning army, its baggage, and its treasure) and the “three-
thousand kraters” in the Equus Troianus (presumably a parade of booty
the Greeks stripped from the Trojans). It may be fanciful to imagine
that Pompey’s Mithradatic booty came back on stage to act the part of
Agamemnon’s spoils. But where else did those “three-thousand kraters”
come from?57
As with the triumph itself, however, despite its lavishness (or perhaps,
rather, because of it), Pompey’s inaugural celebration prompted cyni-
cism and disapproval as well as admiration. This was, no doubt, partly
because Pompey’s political pre-eminence had been eroded in the six
years since his third triumph. The kind of razzmatazz that accompanied
the triumphal procession of the Roman Alexander risked appearing
faintly ridiculous when it was revived to celebrate the triumphal monu-
ment of a man who had been forced to protect his own position through
an uneasy alliance with Julius Caesar, who had been the butt of abuse—
and worse—from all sides, and whose third consulship in the very year
of 55 bce had only been achieved by even more obvious corruption and
violence than usual.58
Cicero’s “memorably dyspeptic letter” describing the events threw
some predictable cold water on quite how successful the spectacles had
been. An elderly star actor brought out of retirement specially for the oc-
casion had apparently dried up at a key moment, the general extrava-
gance of the proceedings had been more off-putting than admirable,
and the wild beast hunts gave “no pleasure at all” to gentlemen of taste.
“What pleasure can there be for a man of refinement when some feeble
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
29
human being is being torn to pieces by a mighty beast, or a noble beast
run through with a hunting spear?” he asked, in that tone of carefully
contrived superiority sometimes adopted by the Roman elite in discuss-
ing the bloodier aspects of the games. But in fact, the elite were not
alone in feeling some disquiet at the fate of the animals. Pompey’s bad
luck with elephants came back to haunt him: a group of twenty that had
been assembled for the show attempted a mass break out from the arena,
causing (as Pliny rather calmly puts it) “trouble in the crowd,” and
finally—thwarted in the escape attempt—trumpeted pitifully to the
spectators as if making a plea for release. Just as the noble prisoners in
the triumphal procession itself were (as we shall see) always liable to up-
stage the victorious general himself in the play for the audience’s atten-
tion, so here it was animal victims who stole the show.59
But more than that, some of the chosen spectacles raised particularly
uncomfortable questions. It was one thing for the theatrical programme
to showcase the return of Agamemnon and so inevitably to cast Pompey’s
eastern victories in the light of the mythical Greek victory over Troy. But
how could the rest of Agamemnon’s story be kept out of the frame, no-
tably his murder immediately after that triumphant arrival home at the
hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus? It may be that
the image of Agamemnon as the great western conqueror of the East was
powerful enough, for most of the people, most of the time, to keep the
other associations at bay. But Suetonius, in his biography of Caesar, re-
ports the story that Pompey divorced his wife on his return from the
East “because of Caesar” and that he used to call Caesar “Aegisthus.”
This is as clear a hint as you could wish that the subversive potential of
the mythical stories on display was not lost on all Romans.60
Other attempts to memorialize the triumph, or to extend its display
beyond the day of the procession itself, had a more personal focus—and,
in some cases, were no less double-edged. Triumphal spoils were not
only displayed in major building projects; they also adorned the private
houses of victorious generals. Pliny stressed the permanence of the tri-
umphal message entailed by such displays. He explained that, as the
spoils were not removed with a change of owner, the “houses themselves
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went on triumphing for ever, even when they changed hands” and that
for new owners the spoils acted as an incentive to glory (“Every day the
walls of the house reproach an owner who has no taste for war for in-
truding on someone else’s triumph”).61
Pliny may have had in mind here a famous passage in one of Cicero’s
attacks on Mark Antony, who occupied Pompey’s house after his death
(having bought it for, no doubt, a knock-down price during the civil
wars). The rams of ships captured by Pompey, probably in his campaign
against the pirates, still stood in its entranceway; and these spoils could
hardly believe, as Cicero imagines it, that the drunken and dissolute An-
tony was really their new owner. In this case the captured weapons re-
mained—maybe for centuries—as the carriers (and protectors) of the
glory of the triumphing general, and as an incentive to follow his exam-
ple. Even in late antiquity, Pompey’s house (or a house that was believed
to be Pompey’s) went under the name of the “House of the Rams”
(domus rostrata). 62
The special costume worn by the triumphing general offered the pos-
sibility of a different type of permanent honor. Traditionally this had
been worn on the day of the triumph alone. But Pompey in 63 bce, be-
tween his second and third triumphs, was granted the almost unprece-
dented right to wear various elements of the dress on particular public
occasions—including, according to the historian Velleius Paterculus, the
right to “the golden crown and full triumphal costume at all circus
games.” This grant probably accounts for the presence of the mysterious
fourth wreath, or crown, on the coin of Faustus Sulla, and its implica-
tions are clear to us: the temporary glory of the triumphal procession
was being turned into a permanent mark of status and prestige. The im-
plications were also clear to (and resisted by) some Romans, including, if
we are to believe Velleius, Pompey himself: “He did not have the nerve
to use this honor more than once; and that was once too often.”63
Even so, in January 60 bce, in a letter to his friend Atticus, Cicero
could pillory Pompey’s obsession with the baubles of triumphal glory.
While the senatorial heavyweights were preparing to gang up to defeat a
bill that would have distributed land to his veteran soldiers, Pompey
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
31
himself was keeping his head down; or, as Cicero put it, “He’s safeguard-
ing that dinky little triumphal toga of his by keeping quiet.”64 What
does this exactly mean? That Pompey was unwilling to do anything to
jeopardize his rights to triumphal dress, voted in 63 bce? Or, more
loosely, that he wanted above all to hang on to the fleeting renown of his
third triumph, celebrated only a few months earlier? Either way, the at-
tributes of triumphal glory are here cast as an unworthy obsession, the
trinkets of honor rather than the real thing.
THE HEART OF THE TRIUMPH
This story of Pompey exposes many of the issues that lie at the heart of
Roman triumphal culture. Some of these need very little exposing. It
would be hard to overlook the role of the ceremony, and its memorials,
in the celebration of Roman military prowess and imperial expansion,
and in the glorification of the victorious general himself; this is why,
after all, kings, dynasts, and autocrats have chosen to imitate it ever
since, parading their power and their conquests in recognizably Roman
style. In fact, the triumphal entry of the French king, Henri II, into the
city of Rouen in 1550 was explicitly likened in contemporary records to
Pompey’s ceremony: “No less pleasing and delectable than the third tri-
umph of Pompey . . . seen by the Romans as magnificent in riches and
abounding in the spoils of foreign nations” (Fig. 7).65
The triumph was about display and success—the success of display
no less than the display of success. As the Greek historian Polybius put it
in his analysis of Roman institutions in the second century bce, it was “a
spectacle in which generals bring right before the eyes of the Roman
people a vivid impression of their achievements.” The general was, in
other words, the impresario of the show and almost (as Polybius’ lan-
guage strongly hints) a consummate artist, restaging his own achieve-
ments in front of the home crowd.66 So it certainly must have seemed in
61. Some of Pompey’s conquests were, quite literally, brought to Rome
(the booty and treasure, the beaks of wrecked pirate ships, the exotic
trees, the captives all paraded through the streets). But also on show was
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 2
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 7:
Soldiers in the triumphal entry of Henri II into Rouen in 1550. As in some Ro-
man triumphs, they carry models of forts captured by the victorious army. Enthusiastic accounts of the procession held these models to be so accurate that the places were “easily recognizable” to the participants in the various battles.
a notable range of different representations of both the processes and the
profits of victory (the placards detailing the money gained and the peo-
ples conquered, the paintings capturing details of Mithradates’ defeat,
the trophy of the whole world). The triumph, in other words, re-pre-
sented and re-enacted the victory. It brought the margins of the Empire
to its center, and in so doing celebrated the new geopolitics that victory
had brought about.
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
33
This is what Pompey himself suggested in a famous quip he is sup-
posed to have uttered before his triumph, at an assembly at which he
detailed his successes to the Roman people: “The very pinnacle of his
glory, as he himself said, was to have found Asia a frontier province and
to have left it at the very center of the state (mediam patriae). ” This was more than showy rhetorical exaggeration. It was a clever play on words;
for as a proper noun, Media means the “country of the Medes,” and so a
part of Asia (“he turned Asia into Media . . . ”). It was also, surely, a
knowing allusion to the nature of Roman victory itself and to its repre-
sentation in the triumph; for Asia did indeed come to the very heart of
Rome.67
Almost equally clear is the fact that the glory of the triumph was
bound up in the rivalry and competition of Roman republican politics.
Each individual ceremony was a celebration in its own right, of course;
it reflected the particularities of an individual campaign and an individ-
ual moment of politics. But, long before the first century bce, it was also
part of the history of the triumph, to be judged against, to upstage or be
upstaged by, the triumphs of predecessors and rivals. True, the hot-
house competitiveness of Roman political life may have been over-em-
phasized by modern scholars; among the hundreds of triumphs cele-
brated through the Republic, many must have been modest occasions
where the victorious general was entirely content with a few cart-loads
of spoils and the regulation plaudits. All the same, this ceremony—as al-
most every other Roman institution—could hardly have escaped being
implicated in the struggles for supremacy between the great dynasts of
the first century. It was certainly written up in these terms by ancient
commentators. Hence the repeated rhetoric of innovation and inflation,
the stress on triumphs which were bigger and better than those that had
gone before or which launched new forms of display. In Pompey’s case
we have already noted the emphasis on the unprecedented size of the
profits and the vast quantity of booty, as well as on the elephants (who
for the first time, albeit unsuccessfully, pulled the triumphal chariot)
and on the novelty of treating exotic trees as spoils of war.
The sense of direct triumphal rivalry is most vividly captured by the
story of his relations with Metellus Creticus, who was also scoring victo-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 4
ries over the pirates that threatened to upstage Pompey’s own. In telling
how Pompey stole two of Metellus’ prize captives to adorn his own tri-
umph, Dio prompts us to reflect on how triumphal glory is achieved
and calibrated, and on the fact that in the celebration of victory even
the successful general can be a loser as well as a winner. Plutarch goes
further, claiming that Pompey sent his own men to fight on the pi-
rates’ side against Metellus. Resorting to an extravagant comparison
with the traditional stories of Greek myth, Plutarch suggested that this
was an even more flagrant piece of glory-hunting than that of Achilles in
Homer’s Iliad, who prevented his comrades from attacking his enemy,
Hector, so that no one else should have the honor of the first blow.
Pompey “actually fought on behalf of enemies of the state and saved
their lives, in order to rob of a triumph a general who had worked hard
to achieve it.”68
Losers in the race for triumphal glory, however, were not only those
who were upstaged by their rivals in the lavishness of the spectacle they
could provide. One of the most important lessons of Pompey’s tri-
umphs (and one to which I shall return several times) is the risk and
the danger attached even—or especially—to the most spectacular of cel-
ebrations. Not far under the surface of that image of self-confident
success usually associated with the triumphing general in most modern
writing (“his greatest moment of glory ever”) is the specter of failure and
humiliation.69
It was not just a question of things going wrong, although that must
have been a frequent enough event in even the best-planned ceremo-
nial. Pompey’s discomfiture with the elephants was more than matched
by Caesar’s, when the axle of his chariot broke during the first of his se-
ries of triumphs in 46 bce, ironically enough in front of a Temple of
Felicitas (Good Fortune). Caesar was almost toppled out and had to
wait for a replacement.70 Nor was it primarily a matter of the predictable
sneers of rivals and friends. Sneers and strident satire have always been
an occupational hazard of the successful, and are a fairly reliable marker
of celebrity renown. A much more significant concern in ancient writing
on the triumph is the underlying problem of glory and its representa-
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
35
tions. Did the panoply of triumphal display on the scale launched by
Pompey necessarily risk overplaying its hand? Was true glory to be mea-
sured in terms of luxury or of restraint? Did the pomp and circumstance
invite retribution as well as admiration? In the fullness of time, would
the triumph be remembered as the general’s finest hour or the presage of
his fall?
For Pliny, one notorious object carried in the procession of 61 pro-
voked reflections of this type: the portrait head of Pompey himself made
out of pearls. “That portrait, that portrait was, I repeat, made out of
pearls,” he carped, in full tirade. “This was the defeat of austerity and
the triumph, let’s face it, of luxury. Never, believe me, would he have
been able to keep his title ‘Magnus’ (‘The Great’) among the heroes of
that earlier generation if he had celebrated a triumph like this after his
first victory. To think, Magnus, that it was out of pearls that your fea-
tures were fashioned—things you would never have been allowed to
wear, such an extravagant material, and meant for women. Was that
how you made yourself seem valuable?”
But this portrait was not for Pliny simply a symbol of Pompey’s ex-
travagant effeminization. There was a yet nastier implication, which he
goes on (gleefully, one feels) to insinuate. “It was, believe me, a gross and
offensive disgrace, except that the head on display without the rest of his
body, in all its eastern splendor, ought really to have been taken as a
cruel omen of divine anger; its meaning could easily have been worked
out.” Or, at least, it could have been with hindsight. For Pliny is refer-
ring to Pompey’s murder on the shores of Egypt, where he had fled after
his defeat by Caesar’s forces at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 bce. Decap-
itated by a treacherous welcoming party, his head “without the rest of his
body” was eventually presented to Caesar, who reputedly wept (croco-
dile tears?) at the sight. The head of pearls in his greatest triumphal pro-
cession already presaged Pompey’s humiliating end.71
Other ancient writers also drew an unsettling connection between
Pompey’s death and his moments of triumphal glory. Lucan’s mag-
nificently subversive epic on the civil war between Pompey and Caesar,
the Pharsalia, written a hundred years later during the reign of Nero
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 6
(and with a cynical eye on the imperial autocracy that stemmed from
Pompey’s defeat), repeatedly plays on ideas of triumph. Its opening
verses herald the subject of the poem as “wars that will win no tri-
umphs,” an oxymoron pointing to the illegitimacy of the civil conflict
that is Lucan’s theme.72 Throughout, Pompey himself is both defined
and dogged by his triumphal career. The “Fortune” who brought him
victory over the pirates has abandoned him, because she is “exhausted by
his triumphs.”73 And after his humiliating death, what is burnt on the
funeral pyre by his widow is not his body at all but his weapons and
clothes, in particular his “triumphal togas” and “the robes thrice seen by
Jupiter supreme.”
Lucan seems to be hinting not only at the close identification of
Pompey with his triumphs (to cremate Pompey is also to cremate his tri-
umphs), but also—as Cicero once saw it—at his solipsistic obsession
with the superficial trappings of triumphal glory (to cremate Pompey is
only to cremate this fancy dress).74 The most pointed scene, however, oc-
curs in his camp on the night before the disastrous battle of Pharsalus it-
self, when Pompey dreams that he has returned to Rome: he is sitting in
his own theater—his triumphal monument—and is being applauded to
the skies by the Roman people; this, in turn, takes him back to the cele-
bration of his first triumph and to the applause of the senate and people
on that occasion. Once again the triumph (or its memory) accompanies
and directly presages defeat.75
There is a final uncanny twist. As Dio emphasizes, Pompey was mur-
dered “on the very same day as he had once celebrated his triumph over
Mithradates and the pirates”; or, in Velleius’ formulation, “in his fifty-
eighth year, on the eve of his birthday.” In Roman cultural memory
Pompey’s whole life—his death no less than his birth—was tied to his
moment of triumph.76
THE TRIUMPH OF WRITING
Pompey’s triumph of 61 was one of the most memorable—or, at least,
the most remembered and, for us, the best documented—in the whole
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
37
history of Rome. For all the undoubted importance of the memorials in
marble, bronze, and gold, it was writing, more than anything else, that
inscribed the occasion in Roman memory; it was recalled, rethought,
and resignified through the tales in Pompey’s biographers, the poetic
imagination of Lucan, the sometimes grinding narratives of ancient
historians, the encyclopedic curiosity (and moralizing fervor) of the
elder Pliny, and more.77 These are the accounts that underlie the story
of Pompey’s triumph told in this chapter. Yet even the least suspicious
of readers must by now have felt a few reservations about just how
plausible some of the descriptions are. Did the procession really feature
such extravagant quantities of precious metals as we read? A statue of
Mithradates eight cubits high (that is some three and a half meters) in
solid gold? Do the figures for cash acquired, captives on parade, or en-
emy defeated (more than 12 million, according to the dedication to Mi-
nerva that Pliny quotes) make any sense? Has not a good deal of exag-
geration, or wishful thinking, crept into these ancient accounts, and so
too into our own story of the triumph? After all, Appian himself was
skeptical enough to sound a warning note about that unlikely story of
Alexander’s cloak.
There are obvious reasons for being suspicious. For a start—with the
exception of Cicero’s sarcasm on the inauguration of Pompey’s theater—
not one of the surviving ancient accounts is from the pen of an eyewit-
ness to the ceremonies; and the fullest descriptions of the triumph it-
self were written at least a century (and in Dio’s case almost three centu-
ries) later. They are almost bound to be, in part at least, the product
of years of anecdote, hyperbole, and popular myth-making, of later
reformulations of Pompey’s image and importance, and of their authors’
experience of triumphal ceremonies in their own day, projected back—
even if indirectly—onto the parade of 61 bce. Of course, some good
“primary” evidence, even archival records, may lie behind some of these
accounts, but that is harder to pin down than we might imagine.
We can be fairly certain that Plutarch’s bibliography included the
(now lost) account of the Mithradatic wars by Pompey’s own tame his-
torian, Theophanes of Mytilene, and that Appian made use of the his-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 8
tories of Pompey’s contemporary Asinius Pollio. But we do not know
whether either of these men were present at the triumph of 61 or
whether they included a description of it in their books; and even if they
did, we could not be sure that the triumphal details in Plutarch and
Appian were drawn directly from them.78 Besides, there is also the ques-
tion of the intellectual and ideological agenda of the ancient writers.
Pliny, for example, was not setting out to offer a historical description of
Pompey’s triumph. His various references to the ceremony all serve quite
different aims, whether to exemplify the consequences of excess, the
characteristics of extraordinary human beings, or the history and use of
ebony. This will inevitably have affected the selection and adaptation of
the material at his disposal.
Scratch the surface of the surviving ancient accounts and all kinds of
particular difficulties emerge. Sometimes we find awkward inconsisten-
cies between writers. It was reassuring to note that Pliny and Plutarch
both offer a list of fourteen peoples conquered by Pompey. It was reas-
suring, too, to be able to match this figure to the number of statues of
the nationes who formed that notable group of sculpture in Pompey’s
theater. Far less reassuring is the fact that the names of the countries
cited are significantly different in each case, that they do not exactly
match any other list we have of Pompey’s conquests, fourteen or not,
and that we have no reliable way now of establishing which peoples were
officially the object of Pompey’s triumph.79
Sometimes it is a matter of detecting clear hints of literary embel-
lishment and invention. So, for example, when Appian reports that
Mithradates’ reason for suicide was his desire not to appear in Pompey’s
triumphal procession, we can be almost certain that he is not relying on
any evidence for the king’s motives but exploiting what was by then a
well-known cliché of the triumph (seen most famously in the story of
the suicide of Cleopatra) that foreign rulers would do anything rather
than suffer the humiliation of a Roman triumph. Even the quotations
of, or from, various official documents are not necessarily quite what
they seem. We do not know whether the ancient writers saw and tran-
scribed the documents themselves, or took them from earlier literary ac-
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
39
counts, reliable or not. And we cannot always work out what the origi-
nal document was.
For example, a copy of one inscription, listing Pompey’s conquests in
detail and noting his generous offering to “the goddess,” was included in
a (now lost) book of the Bibliotheca Historia (Library of History) by the
Greek historian Diodorus—and is known to us only because of its curi-
ous preservation in a tenth-century Byzantine anthology. Some scholars
take it to be a Greek translation of the original dedicatory inscription of
Pompey’s Temple of Venus Victrix (or of Minerva). Others argue that it
is not from Rome at all but the original Greek record of some dedication
by Pompey in the East, perhaps at the famous Temple of Artemis at
Ephesus. Others imagine that it is not a single text, but a composite of a
number of documents translated by Diodorus then sewn together prob-
ably by his Byzantine anthologizer. Which of these solutions is correct is
an entirely open question.80
The numbers given for cash or captives, for spoils or ships taken, re-
main the most tendentious area of all. Ancient records of figures such as
these are almost always controversial: not only were they easily suscepti-
ble to exaggeration (more euphemistically, “rounding up”) in antiquity
itself, but in the process of transmission by later scribes, who most likely
had very little idea of the significance or plausibility of these numbers,
they were very easily corrupted. The question is which ones have been
corrupted, by how much, and on what principle they can be corrected.81
Various suggestions have been made for regularizing some of the figures
cited for Pompey’s triumphs. For example, Pliny’s impossible 12,183,000
for the number of enemy prisoners and casualties has been ingeniously
reduced to 121,083 and in the process brought into line with the sum to-
tal of enemy troops said to have been killed, imprisoned, or put to flight
at different stages of the campaign in Plutarch’s account: an aggregate
(though Plutarch does not do the calculation himself ) of 121,000.82
In general, however, modern historians have been more inclined than
we might expect to give some credence to the raw numbers cited for the
profits of the campaigns and the cash distributed to the soldiers. This is
partly because, for all their problems, these figures have proved too
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
4 0
tempting a historical source to discard: it is only from the total amount
said to be distributed to the soldiers, combined with the level of individ-
ual donatives, that any estimate has been possible of the number of
troops under Pompey’s command; and it is from Plutarch’s claims about
the annual tax revenue of the Roman Empire and Pompey’s additions to
it that many an ambitious theory on Roman economic history has been
launched.83 This has meant turning a relatively blind eye to inconve-
nient contradictions between different figures in different ancient writ-
ers. Pliny, for example, claims that from his booty Pompey paid 50 mil-
lion denarii into the treasury, while Plutarch gives a figure more than
twice as much: 120 million denarii.84 It has also meant not giving weight
to other, conflicting indications. It seems implausible—even if not im-
possible—that Pompey should have made distributions to his troops on
the scale reported without some noticeable impact on the quantity of
Roman coins minted. But in so far as we can reconstruct the pattern of
Roman minting and coin circulation through this period, Pompey’s
donatives and the influx of booty into Rome and subsequent public ex-
penditure seem to have made (suspiciously) no impact at all.85
So where does this leave our understanding of Pompey’s triumph? We
are confronted with what is a common dilemma in studying the ancient
world. Some of the information transmitted to us must be inaccurate,
even flagrantly so; some of it may well be broadly reliable. But we have
few clear criteria (beyond hunch and frankly a priori notions of plausi-
bility, compatibility, and coherence) that enable us to distinguish what is
“accurate” from what is not. How, for example, do we evaluate the ob-
jects said to have been displayed in the procession? Reject the eight-cu-
bit solid gold statue because it is simply too big to be true? Accept the
wagonloads of precious vessels because we have a specimen that seems
to match up, and the pearl head because Pliny is so insistent about it?
Suspect some exaggeration (but not perhaps outright invention) when
it comes to the golden mountain with the vine or that extraordinary
sundial?
Yet to think about this triumph principally in terms of the “accuracy”
of our sources—and so how best we might reconstruct the events as they
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
41
happened on the day—is in many important ways to miss the point. It
is, of course, right and proper to recognize that the surviving written ac-
counts do not offer a direct window onto the ceremonies; not even eye-
witness narratives do that (as we know from our own experience, as well
as from the study of numerous Renaissance and early modern rituals,
where an abundance of primary documentation in fact proliferates the
problems of reading and reconstructing).86 But the point is that “the
events as they happened on the day” are only one part of the story of
this, or any, triumph.
The triumph of Pompey is not simply, or even primarily, about what
happened on September 28 and 29, 61 bce. It is also about the ways
in which it was subsequently remembered, embellished, argued over,
decried, and incorporated into the wider mythology of the Roman tri-
umph as a historical institution and cultural category. Like all cere-
monies—from coronations to funerals, graduation to mardi gras—its
meaning must lie as much in the recollection and re-presentation of the
proceedings as in the transient proceedings themselves. Its story is al-
ways in the telling. The exaggerations, the distortions, the selective am-
nesia are all part of the plot—as this book will show.
c h a p t e r
II
The Impact of the Triumph
ROMAN TRIUMPHAL CULTURE
The triumph left a vivid mark on Roman life, history, and culture.
At some periods the ceremony was more or less an annual event in the
city. In the ten years between 260 and 251 bce, for example, twelve tri-
umphs are recorded, thanks to successful Roman campaigns against the
Carthaginians. Pompey’s triumph in 71 was the last in a bumper year
that had already seen three triumphal processions. Many of these occa-
sions were memorialized by Roman writers who recounted—and, no
doubt, embroidered—the controversies and disputes that sometimes
preceded them, as well as the character of the processions themselves,
with their placards and paintings, captives, precious booty, and occa-
sionally unexpected stunts. Some were more unexpected than others. In
117–118 ce a triumph celebrated the emperor Trajan’s victory over the
Parthians. But Trajan himself was, in fact, already dead; his place in the
triumphal chariot was taken by a dummy.1
Triumphs offered a suitable climax to poems celebrating Roman
achievement. Silius Italicus, writing in the first century ce, made the
triumph of Scipio Africanus the culmination of his verse account of
the war against Hannibal. He probably had in mind the precedent of
Ennius, the “Father of Roman Poetry.” Although only a few hundred
The Impact of the Triumph
43
lines survive of Ennius’ great epic on Roman history, the Annales, its
final book very likely featured the triumph of his patron, Marcus Fulvius
Nobilior, in 187 bce.2 Completely imaginary celebrations added to the
picture, as writers retrojected the triumph back into the world of Greek
history and myth, to honor the likes of Alexander the Great and the god
Bacchus. In a particularly striking piece of Romanization, at the end of
his epic on the legends of the Greek city of Thebes (the Thebaid), Statius
invents a Roman-style triumph for the Athenian king Theseus after his
victory over that classic symbol of female barbarity, the Amazons. The
king rides through the streets, to the cheers of the crowd, in a chariot
decked with laurel and pulled by four white horses; in front stream the
captives, the spoils, and the weapons taken from enemy, carried shoul-
der-high. But there is a twist. In this story, the enemy leader is under no
threat of execution as the procession reaches its end; Hippolyte, the Am-
azon queen, is Theseus’, her conqueror’s, bride.3
Monuments depicting or commemorating triumphs came to domi-
nate the cityscape of Rome; some of them still do. The Arch of Titus,
erected in the early 80s ce, is a highlight of the modern tourist trail, be-
ing one of the few monuments in the Roman Forum to remain standing
to its full height (albeit with the help of a radical rebuild in the early
nineteenth century). In its passageway are two sculptured panels with
the most evocative images of the triumph to have survived from antiq-
uity. On one side, Titus in his chariot celebrates his triumph over the
Jews, held jointly with his father Vespasian, after the sack of Jerusalem in
70 (Fig. 8). On the other side, the booty from the Temple, including
the distinctive menorah, is carried shoulder-high in procession through
Rome (Fig. 9).4 The triumphal imagery of other buildings we may re-
construct from fainter traces, combined with ancient descriptions.
The Forum of Augustus, for example—the showpiece monument of
Rome’s first emperor and a match for Pompey’s theater-complex in gran-
deur, if not in size—seems to have been packed with allusions to tri-
umph. It too was built from the profits of successful campaigns (ex
manubiis). In the center of its great piazza stood a four-horse triumphal
chariot or quadriga, possibly carrying a statue of Augustus himself along
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
4 4
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 8:
The triumphal procession in 71 ce of the future emperor Titus, from the pas-
sageway of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. A typically Roman combination of
documentary realism and idealizing fantasy: Titus stands in his chariot, crowned by a winged Victory; in front, another female figure (perhaps the goddess Roma, or “Virtue”) leads the horses. The fasces, Roman rods of office, fill the background.
with a figure of Victoria, the personification of victory (or so an elegant
bronze female foot found on the site has been taken to suggest). Statues
of heroes of the Republic lined the colonnades, each one (according to
Suetonius) “in triumphal guise.” And, in a classic instance of a Greek
subject being reinterpreted in Roman triumphal terms, two famous old
masters by the fourth-century bce painter Apelles showing “War as a
captive”—or, according to another writer, “Madness”—“hands bound
behind his back, and Alexander triumphing on a chariot.” As if to drive
the point home, the emperor Claudius later had the face of Alexander
cut out and Augustus’ substituted.5
Outside Rome too there were plenty of visual reminders of triumphs.
One of the most spectacular must have been the vast monument over-
The Impact of the Triumph
45
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 9:
The procession of triumphal spoils from the passageway of the Arch of Titus
(facing Fig. 8). The sacred treasures of the Jews, taken by the Romans at the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, are paraded through the streets: in the center the menorah, to the right the Table of Shewbread. The placards identify the objects or record the details of the victory.
looking the site of the battle of Actium, on the northwest coast of
Greece, which commemorated the defeat there in 31 bce of Antony and
Cleopatra and the founding moment of Augustus’ domination of the
Roman world. Here, recent excavations have brought to light thousands
of fragments of marble sculpture, which make up an elaborately detailed
sculptural narrative of the triumph that followed in 29. If one of the
functions of the triumphal procession was, as Polybius had it, to bring
the successes of battle before the eyes of the people in Rome, at Actium
that process was reversed: the triumph was replayed in marble on the site
of the battle.6
A more familiar sight on the Roman landscape were the so-called “tri-
umphal arches” which by the first century ce had become a characteris-
tic marker of Roman presence and power across the Empire, from Brit-
ain to Syria. Most of these had a less direct connection with triumphal
celebrations than their modern title implies (the term arcus triumphalis
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
4 6
is not known in Latin until the third century ce). They were built to
commemorate particular events, to honor individual members of the
imperial family, or, earlier, to vaunt the prestige of republican aristocrats.
We know, for example, of a series of three arches decreed in honor of the
imperial prince Germanicus after his death in 19 ce. The important fact
is not that such arches regularly commemorated triumphs (though some
did), but—in a sense, the other way round—that they used the imagery
of triumphal celebrations as part of their own rhetoric of power.
Triumphal chariots once perched on the tops of many arches, while
the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (modern Benevento) in south Italy,
built in 114 ce to mark the construction of the road between Brindisi
and Rome, incorporates a miniature frieze showing a triumphal proces-
sion that winds its way around all four sides of the monument (Fig. 10).7
But the triumph was commemorated not only in these great piles of
masonry; the ceremony invaded domestic space too. We know of one
anonymous grandee, the proprietor of a villa outside Pompeii that was
destroyed in the eruption of 79 ce, who must regularly have faced up
to the triumph at his dinner table. For the design of one of the exquisite
silver cups from the famous dinner service discovered at Boscoreale
features a triumphing general—almost certainly the future emperor
Tiberius—with his retinue, standing proud in his triumphal chariot
(Fig. 11).8
The impact of the triumph was not confined to the realm of imperial-
ist geopolitics or military history; it extended far beyond the general, his
friends and rivals among the Roman elite, the victorious soldiers and the
noble, or pathetic, captives dragged along in the procession. To be sure,
these figures enjoy the spotlight in most ancient accounts of the cere-
mony. But, as with all such public ceremonials at any period of history,
there must have been a wide range of different experiences of the tri-
umph and all kinds of different personal narratives prompted by it.
What, for example, of those who flogged refreshments to the crowds,
who put up the seating or cleared up the mess at the end of the day?
What of the spectators who found the sun too hot or the rain too wet,
who could hardly see the wonderful extravaganza that others applauded,
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 10:
The Arch of Trajan at Beneventum, 114–118 ce. Its sculpture commemorates
the achievements of the emperor in both peace and war; the small triumphal procession (Fig. 21) runs around the whole monument, just below the attic storey. Further sculpture would originally have stood on top, above the attic.
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
4 8
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 11:
Triumph of Tiberius, on a silver cup from Boscoreale. The future emperor
stands in the chariot, holding a scepter and laurel branch; behind, a slave holds a wreath or crown over his head. The exact date of the piece depends on which of Tiberius’ two triumphs is depicted: 7 bce or 12 ce.
or who found themselves mixed up in the outbreaks of violence that
could be prompted by the spectacle? The historian Dio reports “blood-
shed” at a controversial triumph in 54 bce.9 What kind of experience
was that for the by-standers?
These experiences are not entirely lost to us, even if we know much
less about them than most historians would now wish. Ovid, for exam-
ple, in his Ars Amatoria (Art of Love), turns his, and our, attention to the fun and games in the audience and to “conquests” of a different sort. He
presents the triumphal procession as a good place for a pick-up and ex-
plains to his learner-lover how to impress the girl in his sights with
pseudo-erudition:
The Impact of the Triumph
49
. . . Cheering youths will look on, and girls beside them,
A day to make every heart run wild for joy;
And when some girl inquires the names of the monarchs,
Or the towns, rivers, hills portrayed
On the floats, answer all her questions (and don’t draw the line at
Questions only): pretend
You know even when you don’t.10
We even catch an occasional glimpse of the infra-structure beneath
the lavish ceremonial, a glimpse of the workers and suppliers who made
the whole show possible. A tombstone in Rome, for example, commem-
orates a gladiator from Alexandria who came to the capital specially “for
the triumph of Trajan” in 117–118 and lists his bouts in the games that
followed the triumph: a draw on the second day, a victory on the ninth
against a man who had already fought nine fights—and then the text
breaks off.11 From a different angle, Varro in his treatise on agriculture
could see the triumph, and particularly the banquets that regularly came
after the procession itself, as a money-spinner for farmers. The aviary on
his aunt’s farm, he insists, had provided 5,000 thrushes for the triumph
of Caecilius Metellus in 71 bce. At twelve sesterces a piece, auntie had
raked in a grand total of 60,000 sesterces. All pomp and glory aside, she
and her fellow farmers had their own good reasons for welcoming the
announcement of a triumph.12
Yet the grip of the triumph on Roman culture is evident not only in
the details of performance and preparation, or in the memory or antici-
pation of the great day itself. The triumph was embedded in the ways
that Romans wrote, talked, and thought about their world; it was, as
the old cliché aptly puts it, “good to think with.” Sometimes the associa-
tion with victory, in a literal sense, remained strong. Seneca, for exam-
ple, refers to a gladiator optimistically called “Triumphus.” A town in
the province of Spain went under the name “Triumphale.” Vegetius, in
his military handbook, cites the phrase “emperor’s triumph” as a typi-
cal army security password. And, appropriately enough, during Rome’s
war against Hannibal, two prodigious infants were supposed to have
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
5 0
uttered the words traditionally chanted in the triumphal procession:
“io triumpe.” The first infant was aged just six months; the second,
even more incredibly, made his voice heard from the womb. These did
not turn out to be good omens; the dreadful Roman defeat at Lake
Trasimene in 217 bce shortly followed the first utterance, and more than
a decade would pass after the second before Hannibal was finally de-
feated.13
Often, however, the forms, conventions, and hierarchies of the tri-
umph provided a vocabulary for discussing quite different aspects of Ro-
man life. Modern English too, of course, uses the word “triumph” and
its derivatives in a wide range of contexts, to mark out “triumphant”
theatrical performances or to brand motor cars and female underwear.
(“Triumph has a bra for the way you are,” as the advertising slogan ran.)
But our words evoke little more than a general sense of resounding suc-
cess. In ancient Rome, the ceremony itself remained a live presence in
almost every usage. Slaves in Roman comedy represented their clever
victories over their masters in parodies of technical triumphal vocabu-
lary. Seneca neatly encapsulated the virtue of clemency as a “triumph
over victory,” using exactly the same Latin formulation (“ex victoria
sua”) as for a triumph “over Spain” or wherever; and the triumph was re-
peatedly turned to in Roman philosophical debates on glory, morality,
and ethics. Early Christians reworked its conventions to express the “tri-
umph” of Jesus.14
Poets did more than celebrate triumphs of their patrons; they found
in the ceremony a model for activities as diverse as the pursuit of love
and the production of poetry itself. In a famous poem celebrating the
immortality of writing (“I have completed a monument more lasting
than bronze”) Horace deploys the technical vocabulary of the triumph
to vaunt his own achievements in bringing the traditions of Greek verse
into Latin. In appealing to the Muse to crown him with “Delphic lau-
rel,” he further blurs the boundary between poetry and triumph—laurel
being an emblem of both.15 Propertius exploits a similar theme, begin-
ning his third book of poems with a flamboyant image of himself and
his Muse in a triumph. On board his chariot (just like the young chil-
dren of a triumphant general) are his “little Loves” (parvi Amores)—Cu-
The Impact of the Triumph
51
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 12:
“The Triumph of Love.” Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) captures the
theme of Petrarch’s Trionfi, with a victorious Cupid riding on a triumphal chariot. Around him are his prisoners—famous victims of Love, including the Latin poets Ovid and
Tibullus, Hercules, King Solomon, and the tragic lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. As the Latin verse beneath explains, they are making their way not to the Temple of Jupiter (who, phi-landerer that he is, shares the chariot with Cupid) but to the Temple of Venus on the hill.
pids, or perhaps his “love poems” themselves; and, behind, like the
general’s soldiers, a “crowd of other writers,” his poetic imitators who
share in his victory.16 Even more subversively, in his series of Amores
(Love Poems), Ovid exploits the conventions of the triumph to explore
the predicament, or success, of the lover. This way of rethinking the cer-
emony was to have an enormously successful afterlife in Renaissance
allegories of the triumph, notably in Petrarch’s series of six moralizing
poetic Trionfi (Triumphs), the Triumph of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame,
Time, and Eternity (Fig. 12).17 But Petrarch looked back directly to
Ovid, and to one poem in particular where the love-sick poet pictures
himself as a wounded captive in the triumphal procession of a victorious
Cupid:
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5 2
With your train of prisoners behind you, besotted youths
and maidens,
Such pomp, such magnificence, your very own
Triumph: and I’ll be there too, fresh-wounded, your latest
Prisoner . . . 18
It is a joke that simultaneously pokes fun at the militaristic ethos of
the ceremony and re-appropriates its conventions to reflect on erotic
conflict.
Ovid’s clever playfulness hints at yet another role for the triumph in
Roman intellectual culture. It was not only “good to think with”; it was
also good to think about. Roman academics and antiquarians regularly
directed their energies to wrestling with the history and meaning of the
ceremony, and to explaining its (even to them) peculiar customs and
symbols. They puzzled, and disagreed, over its origins and the etymol-
ogy of the word triumphus itself. It was not merely the imagination of
poets and story-mongers that gave the triumph an Eastern pedigree. If
some scholars held the ceremony to be the invention of Rome’s founder
Romulus, for others it was the brainchild of the god Bacchus. In fact,
the Bacchic origin meshed conveniently with the derivation of the word
triumphus itself from one of Bacchus’ Greek epithets (thriambos). But that did not convince those who preferred to see it as a perfectly Roman
term. Suetonius apparently explained it as bona fide Latin: tri-umphus reflecting the three sections of Roman society—army, senate, and peo-
ple—involved in granting the honor.19
The significance of the triumphal laurel was also a particularly hot
topic of debate. Masurius Sabinus, a first-century ce antiquarian, saw it
as a fumigator or purifier (and so saw the origin of the triumph itself as a
ritual of purification after the bloodstains of war). Pliny preferred to
stress its links with the god Apollo and its symbolic connections with
peace (while also noting that it was a plant that was never struck by
lightning).20
Where they could not explain, they could at least try to bring sense
and order. Repeated attempts were made to reconstruct or establish the
The Impact of the Triumph
53
rules of the triumph. Who was allowed to celebrate one, after what kind
of victory, and against what kind of enemy? Was a triumph allowable,
for example, after the defeat of such “inferior” enemies as pirates or
slaves?21 Even the victims in the triumph became the targets of an aca-
demic obsession with classification. In one particularly far-fetched (or
fine-tuned) attempt at systematization, Porphyrio, an ancient commen-
tator on the poetry of Horace, claimed to be able to distinguish the dif-
ferent types of wagon assigned to transport different ranks of royal cap-
tives in the procession: esseda for “conquered kings”; pilenta for the
“conquered queens”; petorrita for the “king’s relations.”22 The triumph
brought out the best and the worst in Roman scholarship.
THE MODERN TRIUMPH
These Roman writers would, no doubt, be gratified to learn of the im-
pact of the triumph on later historians. From the scholarly world of Byz-
antium, through the rediscovery of classical antiquity in the Renaissance
and its reassessment in the Enlightenment, right up to the present day,
this distinctive piece of Roman ceremonial has stirred historical and an-
tiquarian curiosity, prompting a huge variety of reconstructions, anal-
ysis, and explanation. What Andrea Mantegna recaptured in his cycle of
paintings of the Triumphs of Caesar—originally for the Gonzaga family
of Mantua, now in Hampton Court Palace, London (see Figs. 27, 28,
and 29)—others discussed in essays, treatises, and poetry. Petrarch again,
for example, headlined the triumph in the ninth book of his Latin epic
Africa, linking the triumphal procession of Scipio Africanus to the po-
etic triumph of Ennius.23
Some early historical work is particularly notable, and still useful.
Italian humanists eagerly gathered together the widely scattered refer-
ences to the triumph in ancient writers. So efficient and accurate were
they that Onofrio Panvinio’s study of the triumph in his Fastorum Libri
V first published in the 1550s—an analytical list of Roman office holders
from Romulus to Charles V in the sixteenth century—remains even to-
day one of the most comprehensive collections of evidence for the cere-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
5 4
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 13:
A Renaissance view of the Roman triumph. Panvinio’s version of the ceremony
is here brought to life in a series of contemporary engravings, which pick out highlights of famous processions as he—following the main ancient accounts—described them. In this section: elephants, the chariots and regalia of the defeated kings, and the royal captives themselves.
mony (Fig. 13).24 Just over two hundred years later, Edward Gibbon’s es-
say “Sur les triomphes des Romains,” written in 1764 as a prelude to his
classic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is a strikingly intelligent account of the triumph, its few pages still one of the best introductions of all to the significance of the ceremony. In an unnervingly
modern vein, Gibbon reflects on—among other things—Roman con-
structions of glory and military virtue, and the relationship between the
audience and the spectacular display.25
Inevitably, very different interests have attracted scholars to the tri-
umph over the centuries. In the Renaissance, triumphal ceremonies that
claimed links with ancient Rome lay at the heart of politics and civic
spectacle. “Invented tradition” or not, this gave a particular edge and ur-
gency to the humanists’ studies of the triumph. Flavio Biondo, for ex-
ample, in his Roma Triumphans of 1459, saw the Christian church as the
direct inheritor of the Roman triumphal tradition, albeit with the ex-
plicitly pagan elements redefined. Just as the city of Rome had hosted
the long series of ancient triumphs, now it was the center of the trium-
phant Church, with all its Christian ceremonial and its military con-
The Impact of the Triumph
55
quests over the religious enemy in the shape of the Turks. For Biondo, it
was almost too good to be true (and, in fact, we now know it was not
true) that the site of St. Peter’s could be identified with that very tract of
land where the ancient Romans had assembled to start their triumphal
processions.
Panvinio, by contrast, traced the line of succession from ancient Ro-
man traditions through to the Holy Roman Empire, its rulers and its rit-
uals—as the paraded continuity in office-holding from Romulus to Em-
peror Charles V in his Fastorum Libri V underlines. It was a continuity
acted out in the streets of Rome during Panvinio’s lifetime, notably
in 1536 when Charles V made a triumphal entrance into the city after
his African victories, in a spectacle choreographed by Pope Paul III. For
this event, Paul attempted to reconstruct the exact route of the an-
cient triumph, demolishing so much of the city in the process that it
had Rabelais, famously, leaving town in disgust. Charles himself ap-
peared as a Christian triumphant over the infidel and as a second Scipio
Africanus—a Romulus and St. Peter combined.26
Humanists turned also to investigate many of the questions put on
the agenda by their ancient counterparts: the rules governing the cere-
mony, its origins, etymologies, and so on. Recent work has focused on
these issues, too, though driven by different scholarly priorities. The
legal basis of the triumph and the constitutional position of the gen-
eral himself proved a particular fascination for historians in the nine-
teenth century and beyond, whose aim was to reconstruct (or, as skep-
tics might now see it, devise) the “constitution” of ancient Rome. A
lawyer’s version of the triumph was inevitably the result, as they at-
tempted to see through the mass of often conflicting evidence to the
fundamental legal principles and sources of authority that underpinned
the ceremony.27
The preoccupations of the twentieth century with the operation of
politics in the Roman Republic shifted the focus slightly, but still tended
to keep the spotlight on the rules and regulations of triumphal celebra-
tions. On what grounds were some successful generals refused a celebra-
tion? Whose right was it to grant or refuse a triumph anyway? How did
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5 6
the rules change over time, particularly as the expansion of Roman over-
seas territory changed the nature of military engagement and the struc-
ture of military command?28
The origins and early history of the ceremony have also remained
firmly on the agenda of modern scholarship on the triumph. The crucial
questions here have been concerned not only with where exactly the cer-
emony originated (though many recent analysts, as we shall see in Chap-
ter 9, have advocated a foreign, or at least Etruscan, origin with even
more enthusiasm than ancient writers). No less central has been the idea
that the details of the ceremony as they have come down to us offer a
rare window onto the religion and culture of the earliest phases of
Rome’s history. The triumph was, after all, an institution stretching back
into the remote past, and Roman ritual practice was notoriously conser-
vative. The chances are that many triumphal conventions, customs, and
characteristic symbols—some of which puzzled later Roman writers—
preserve their archaic form, and that they are explained by (and also help
to explain) the shape and meaning of the triumph in distant prehistory.
This series of inferences is, in fact, a shaky one. In particular, the un-
changing conservatism of Roman ritual is at best a half-truth that has in-
creasingly been challenged, and will be further challenged in the course
of this book.29 Nonetheless, these notions underlie some of the most
powerful modern readings of the triumph. J. G. Frazer, for example, in
his founding text of comparative anthropology, The Golden Bough, saw
in the general—whose costume he believed combined distinctively regal
aspects with features drawn from the god Jupiter himself—a direct de-
scendant of the original “divine kings” of Rome (and so a marvelous
confirmation of his whole theory of primitive divine kingship). H. S.
Versnel, in Triumphus, a book that has become the standard modern ref-
erence point on the ceremony, thinks in terms of a primitive New Year
festival, harking back ultimately to the ancient Near East via Etruria. It
is indicative of the general direction of modern interests that Triumphus,
though subtitled “an inquiry into the origin, development and meaning
of the Roman triumph,” shows little concern with the ceremony as it
was practiced after the fourth century bce.30
The Impact of the Triumph
57
In the increasingly wide range of classical scholarship over the last
fifty years or so, very few triumphal stones have been left entirely un-
turned. Studies have appeared on the role of women at the triumph, on
the development of triumphal ceremonial into Christian antiquity, on
the similarities (and differences) between triumphal processions and fu-
neral processions, on the iconography of triumphal monuments, on tri-
umphal themes in Roman poetry, on the social semiotics of the proces-
sion, on the triumph as a means of controlling Roman elite rivalry or of
“conflict resolution,” as well as on a number of individual ceremonies—
real or imagined.31 And that is to cite only a few.
All the same, given the richness of triumphal culture at Rome and in
surviving Roman literature, it is surprising that so much attention over-
all has been devoted to the origins and earliest phases of the ceremony in
that misty period of Roman prehistory before we have any contempo-
rary literary evidence at all, and only the most controversial of archaeo-
logical traces; and that so little attention, by comparison, has been de-
voted to the triumph in periods of which we know much more and
where we can hope to see, if not “how it actually happened,” then at
least how it was recorded, remembered, imagined, debated, and dis-
cussed. As others have pointed out, there is no reliable modern guide
to the triumph during the Roman Principate, over the three centuries
between the reign of Augustus and the beginning of the Christian em-
pire—and one should probably include the last three centuries bce
as well.32
This book aims to fill some of that enormous gap, opening up and
exploring the triumphal culture of Rome in the late Republic and
Principate. It will bring together material—visual and archaeological as
well as literary—from that period and will bring back to center-stage
texts that have often been marginalized because they do not play to
dominant modern interests: poetic evocations of entirely imaginary tri-
umphs, for example, or unbelievably extravagant and inevitably inaccu-
rate accounts of processions such as Pompey’s. At the same time, it will
take a fresh look at texts that have often been interrogated, narrowly, for
the information they might provide on the prehistory of the ceremony.
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
5 8
I shall suggest, for example, that the ingenious speculations of Plu-
tarch or Aulus Gellius may tell us less about the proto-triumphs of the
eighth century bce than about the triumphal scholarship and culture of
the second century ce, a millennium later; that even Livy’s detailed ac-
counts of the triumphal controversies of the middle Republic are as
much about the configurations of the triumph in the late first century
bce as they are about the rules, regulations, and contests of the late
third. In short, I shall be looking carefully at the surviving ancient writing on the triumph, rather than merely through it to some more distant
world (or lost system or even lost reality) beyond.
The book is also prompted by a series of reflections—my own puzzle-
ment, if you like—about Roman ritual and public spectacle. I am not
so much concerned with definitions of ritual as a symbolic, social,
semiotic, or religious activity. Nor am I concerned with the tricky
boundary disputes that can still provoke intense academic debate. Is
there a difference (and, if so, what) between “ritual” and “ceremonial”?
Is ritual always focused on the sacred? Is there such a thing as “secular”
ritual? In fact, one singular advantage of some of the most recent theo-
retical studies of ritual in a cross-cultural perspective is that they tran-
scend such narrow definitional problems. I am thinking particularly of
work by Catherine Bell and by Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw.
All of these stress the idea of “ritualization” rather than “ritual.” On
this model, ritual actions are not seen as intrinsically different from
nonritual actions. What is crucial in distinguishing ritual from nonritual
behavior is the fact that participants themselves think of what they are
doing in ritual terms and mark it out as separate from their everyday,
nonritual practice.33
But if an approach of this kind makes it easier to take the triumph as
“ritualized activity” without becoming embroiled in the dead-end argu-
ments that have sometimes dogged its study (Is it a “religious” cere-
mony? If not, can it count as “ritual”?), all sorts of other questions still
remain. How can the history of an ancient ceremony best be studied?
How should we understand the relationship between written ritual (“rit-
uals in ink,” as they have been termed) and ritual practice?34 What were
The Impact of the Triumph
59
large-scale public ceremonies and processions for? Can we get beyond
the easy, even if sometimes correct, conclusion that such rituals, in clas-
sical antiquity no less than in any other historical period, acted to reaf-
firm society’s core values? Or beyond the more subtle variant that sees
them rather as the focus of reflection and debate on those values, and as
such always liable to disruption, subversion, and attack no less than to
enthusiastic participation, patronage, and support?35 In pondering these
questions, and in setting up an interplay between such theoretical re-
flections and the rich texture of the primary evidence (rather than at-
tempting to reach for neat solutions and definitions), I have found the
Roman triumph a uniquely telling object lesson. This is for a combina-
tion of reasons.
First, the triumph is the only public ceremony at Rome—with the ex-
ception of the infrequent Secular Games, the semi-private festival of
Dea Dia recorded by the priesthood of the Arval Brethren, and some el-
ements of the funerary tradition—for which we can reconstruct a histor-
ical series of individual, identifiable performances. True, the Roman cal-
endar included a whole variety of annual festivals whose celebration
likewise was supposed to extend back into the earliest periods of Rome’s
history and lasted as long as the pagan city itself, or longer: the Parilia,
the Vinalia, the Consualia, and so on. But each of these is usually repre-
sented to us as an undifferentiated cycle of more or less identical tradi-
tional ceremonies. Although ancient writers may dwell on the colorful
myths of these festivals’ origins, only rarely are later innovations or
changes in the ritual explicitly recorded.36
Even more rarely do we catch a glimpse of any individual occasion,
and then usually for reasons of political controversy: the memorable cel-
ebration of the Lupercalia on February 15, 44 bce, for example, when
Mark Antony took advantage of his lead role in the proceedings to offer
a royal crown to Julius Caesar; or the procession of the Hilaria (in honor
of the goddess Cybele, the “Great Mother”) on March 25, 187 ce, which,
with its elaborate fancy dress, provided the cover for an (unsuccessful)
assassination attempt on the emperor Commodus.37 Because the tri-
umph, though frequent, was not regular in this sense, because a fresh de-
Th e
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6 0
cision to celebrate a triumph was required on each occasion, and be-
cause it was by definition tied to outside events, the circumstances and
honorand different each time, it has a history unlike any other ritual at
Rome.
Second, ancient writers offer a wealth of detail on the performance
and spectacle of the triumph, and of individual triumphs, as for no
other Roman ceremony. Pompey’s triumph in 61 bce is one of the most
richly, if not the most richly, documented. But the lavish accounts, fan-
ciful or not, of many other triumphs also go far beyond descriptions of
anything else in the repertoire of ritual at Rome. This is due in large part
to the triumph’s centrality in Roman political and cultural life and to the
undoubted impact of its celebration. Writers lingered on their triumphal
descriptions because the ceremony seemed important to them.
But more strictly literary factors are also relevant. It would be wrong
to imagine that the details of the triumph were necessarily more compel-
ling than those of other rituals, certainly not for everyone all the time. It
would have been possible to write up ceremonies such as the Lupercalia
or Hilaria in a way that focused on the individual performance, the vari-
ations in their picturesque procedures, and the tensions and conflicts
that lay behind the yearly celebrations. Conversely, there were, as we
know, numerous triumphs in the course of Roman history—the pinna-
cle of glory for the general concerned, maybe—which figure in surviving
literature as briefly and routinely as any minor annual festival: “Marcius
returned to the city, celebrating a triumph over the Hernici,” “a triumph
was held over the Privernates.”38 Yet the competitive individualism of
the triumph, its association with many of the most prominent names in
Roman public life, as well as its links to the powerful narrative of impe-
rialism and Roman military success gave it a rhetorical charge which
those other ceremonies could not often match.
Third, the triumph attracted the interest and energies of Roman
scholars themselves more than any other ritual or festival. The combina-
tion of, on the one hand, the researches of ancient anthropologists and
antiquarians in their interrogation of the various features of the cere-
mony and its organization and, on the other, the work of literary com-
The Impact of the Triumph
61
mentators, puzzling over the more obscure vocabulary and difficult pas-
sages in the written versions of the triumph, offers us an unusually
nuanced view of ancient attempts to explain and make sense of a ritual.
It presents Roman intellectuals in action, themselves trying to under-
stand the traditions of their own culture; and it gives us a memorable
opportunity to work with them. In this respect, again, no ritual can
touch it.
“FASTI TRIUMPHALES”
The single most impressive monument—in both the literal and meta-
phoric sense—of this ancient scholarly interest in the triumph is the
register of triumphant generals, that once stood inscribed on marble, in
the Roman Forum. Part of an ensemble erected during the reign of Au-
gustus, the names of the generals were listed, side by side with those of
the consuls and other chief magistrates of the city, stretching right back
to the beginning of Rome’s history. Though the monument does not
survive intact, a large cache of fragments was excavated near the Temple
of Antoninus and Faustina (see Plan) in the mid-sixteenth century—a
discovery that partly inspired the researches of Panvinio and his con-
temporaries, who saw in them the chronological key to Roman history.
The fragments were reconstructed, reputedly by Michelangelo (such was
their importance), in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline,
first in its courtyard, then moved to an upstairs room shared with the
famous Roman bronze wolf, where they still remain; hence their mod-
ern title Fasti Capitolini, “The Capitoline Chronology” or “Calendar.”
Pieces unearthed since the Renaissance have been incorporated in the re-
construction, or are displayed alongside (Fig. 14).39
Despite numerous gaps in the surviving text, it is absolutely clear
that the register of generals ( Fasti Triumphales, as it is sometimes now
known) originally offered a complete tally—or so it was presented—of
those who had celebrated triumphs, from Romulus in the year of the
city’s founding (traditionally 753 bce) to Lucius Cornelius Balbus in 19
bce (see Fig. 36). The Fasti still preserves the full or partial record of Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
6 2
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 14:
The modern display of the Fasti Capitolini in the Capitoline Museums, Rome.
The combination of the iconic wolf with the list of magistrates and generals makes a particularly powerful symbol of ancient Roman culture—as those who devised this layout no doubt intended.
more than two hundred triumphs, making it the most extensive ancient
chronology of the ceremony that we have. Each entry is given in a stan-
dard format, with the full name of the general, the formal title of the of-
fice he held, the name of the peoples or places over which he triumphed,
and the date of the ceremony—the day, month, and year from the
founding of Rome: “Quintus Lutatius Cerco, son of Gaius, grandson of
Gaius, consul, over the Falisci, first of March, year 512.”40
The list adopts a generous definition of the “triumph” and notably
includes the record of two forms of celebration that ancient writers often
took care to distinguish from the triumph “proper”: the ovation (ovatio)
and the triumph on the Alban Mount (triumphus in Monte Albano). 41
The ovation differed from the triumph mainly in that the general pro-
The Impact of the Triumph
63
cessed to the Capitoline either on foot or horseback, not in the trium-
phal chariot, and he was crowned with myrtle, not laurel. Ancient schol-
ars dreamed up a variety of unconvincing theories to explain this
ceremony: Aulus Gellius, for example, claimed it was used when the
war had not been properly declared, or when it had been against “un-
suitable” enemies, such as slaves and pirates—though these conditions
match very few of the thirty ovationes known to us. In practice it seems
to have been often seen, and used, as a consolation prize for generals
who, for whatever reason, were refused a full ceremony; and it was
sometimes known as the “lesser triumph.”42
The triumph on the Alban Mount was a more drastic response to re-
fusal. A few generals between the late third century and the early second,
who had been turned down for a triumph in Rome, chose instead to cel-
ebrate one on the hill, now known as Monte Cavo, about 27 kilometers
outside the city—presumably, though we have no details of the ritual,
processing up to the shrine on the summit by the ruggedly paved road
that still survives.43 Both these ceremonies are given their place in the in-
scribed list (distinguished only by the addition of “ovans” in one case,
and “in Monte Albano” in the other), suggesting that for some purposes
they too could count as bona fide triumphs. Also noted are other variants
to the triumphal ceremony and occasionally special honors. “Naval tri-
umphs”—that is, those for naval victories—are consistently indicated
(the first being for Caius Duilius in 260 bce), even though we know of
no specific difference in their procedures. And the dedication in 222 of
the so-called spolia opima appears on the list too, a ceremony supposed
to have taken place only when the general himself killed the enemy
commander in single combat and then dedicated the captured armor to
the god Jupiter Feretrius.
Although the content and overall layout of the text is clear enough,
the Fasti Capitolini are puzzling in several ways. The question of where
exactly in the Forum they were originally displayed has been an issue of
intense dispute for centuries. Panvinio himself imagined that they origi-
nally stood near the Temple of Vesta. But this idea was based on an
emendation of a passage in Suetonius’ treatise De Grammaticis (On
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
6 4
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 15:
Nineteenth-century reconstruction of the Regia in the Roman Forum, with the
inscribed lists of generals and consuls. The triumphs fill the tall pilasters, the magistracies the broader panels—and both are eagerly scanned by Roman passers-by. A nice idea, but we now think that the Regia was the wrong shape and too small for any such arrangement.
Grammarians) referring to fasti at “Praenestae,” which he erroneously read as pro aede Vestae (“in front of the Temple of Vesta”).44 By the nineteenth century, the location favored by most archaeologists was the
Regia (see Plan and Fig. 15), which served as the headquarters of the
priestly college of pontifices, who were themselves traditionally associated with the calendar and historical record-keeping. But excavations of this
building have suggested that it was hardly large enough to accommo-
date the whole of the text, encouraging most recent studies to opt in-
stead for one of the commemorative arches erected in the Forum by Au-
gustus; though, frankly, which arch is anyone’s guess (Fig. 16).45 Nor
is it certain at what precise date the texts were inscribed, whether the
consular and triumphal lists were planned together, or what process
of decision-making lay behind the later emendations and additions
(the consuls were continued down to the end of Augustus’ reign and
The Impact of the Triumph
65
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 16:
Reconstruction of an arch erected in the Roman Forum to commemorate
Octavian’s victory at the battle of Actium in 31 bce. This is one of many attempts to pin the inscribed list of generals and consuls to one of the Augustan arches in the Forum—
though the history of these, their date, location, and appearance, remain controversial.
a note of the performance of the Secular Games was added as late
as 88 ce).46
Even more crucially, we do not know who compiled the lists, by what
methods, or drawing on what sources of information. Texts inscribed on
stone rarely blazon their authors, and we can easily fall into the trap of
assuming them to be neutral documentary records, free from the in-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
6 6
terests, prejudice, or priorities of any particular writer. In fact, some
individual or group must have been responsible for the choice of words
carved into the marble—whether that responsibility entailed merely
selecting an existing document to copy or adapt, or a much more active
process of research and composition, delving into archives, family rec-
ords, and earlier historical accounts to reconstruct a complete chro-
nology of the ceremony. There have been some imaginative theories.
Panvinio, following his misreading of Suetonius, deduced that the main
hand behind the compilation was the Augustan antiquarian Verrius
Flaccus (in fact, Flaccus had been responsible for the calendar, or fasti,
at Praenestae). Others have detected the influence of Cicero’s friend
Atticus, who is known to have compiled a chronology of Rome and its
magistrates. But this is little more than a guess, for there is no firm evi-
dence on the processes of composition.47
We shall return to some of the problems of the Fasti Capitolini in the
next chapter—not only how they were compiled but also the nagging
question of how accurate they are. For the moment the most important
point to stress is that the Romans themselves saw—and were confident
that they could reconstruct—a historical sequence of triumphal ceremo-
nies stretching back into the earliest phases of their city. This point is
confirmed by some, admittedly scanty, surviving fragments of two other
inscribed lists of triumphs.
First are a couple of scraps listing some late second-century bce tri-
umphs, rather grandly known as the Fasti Urbisalvienses, after the town
(modern Urbisaglia in north Italy) where the larger piece turned up;
these are so close to the Fasti Capitolini as to make it almost certain that they were a direct copy, intended to replicate the metropolitan text in
an Italian municipality. The second group is made up of five more
substantial fragments found somewhere in Rome during the Renais-
sance, listing triumphs between 43 and 21 bce and known as the Fasti
Barberiniani after the family who once owned them (see Fig. 37). These
not only fill in some of the gaps of the Fasti Capitolini, but their use of a distinctively different formula (“Appius Claudius Pulcher over Spain,
first of January, triumphed [and] dedicated his palm”) suggests an inde-
pendent tradition.48
The Impact of the Triumph
67
Nonetheless, the clear impression given by these documents is that,
by the end of the first century bce, a broad orthodoxy had become es-
tablished on the overall shape of triumphal history, even if, as we shall
see, particular details and individual triumphs could be matters of dis-
pute and disagreement.
THE LESSONS OF HISTORY
That historical sequence of individual celebrations was more than a mat-
ter of simple chronology. For it provided the basis on which Roman
writers theorized and sometimes puzzled over the development of the
triumph in a more general sense. In many ways the triumph came to be
seen as a marker of wider developments in Roman politics and society.
So, for example, the increasingly far-flung peoples and places over which
triumphs were celebrated represented a map of Roman imperial expan-
sion and of the changing geopolitical shape of the Roman world. This
aspect certainly struck Florus, when he reflected on Rome’s victory in
wars of the fifth century bce over two settlements that by his day had
long been as Roman as Rome itself (one not much more than a suburb
of the city): “Over Verulae and Bovillae, I am ashamed to say it—but we
triumphed.” It made the point, even if at the cost of some creative in-
vention; there is no other reference to a triumph over either of these
towns.49
Even more powerfully, though, triumphal history was conscripted
into moralizing accounts of the pernicious growth of luxury and corrup-
tion. The decline of the sturdy peasant virtues of early Rome could be
traced in the increased ostentation of the triumph. If Caius Atilius
Regulus (who triumphed in 257 bce) was supposed to have held the
reins of his triumphal chariot in calloused hands that only recently
“guided a pair of plough oxen” or if the Manius Curius could be said (in
Apuleius’ memorable phrase) to have “had more triumphs than slaves,”
the same was not true later.50 Dionysius of Halicarnassus concluded his
account of Romulus’ founding triumph in 753 bce with some uncom-
fortable thoughts on the changed character of the ceremony in his own
day: “In our life-time it has become extravagant and pretentious, mak-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
6 8
ing a histrionic show more for the display of wealth than for the reputa-
tion of virtue; it has departed in every respect from the ancient tradition
of frugality.”51 Dio too seems to have echoed these sentiments, though
(so far as we can gauge from the Byzantine historian who is our main ac-
cess to the lost sections of his early books) he pinpointed the cause of de-
cline in the influence of “cliques and political factions” in the city.52
This moralizing was given a particular edge by the fact that triumphal
processions themselves were one of the main conduits through which
wealth and luxury were introduced to Rome. Triumphs did not simply
reflect the rise of extravagance. As they celebrated richer and richer con-
quests and displayed the costly booty through the streets, they were
partly responsible for it. So Livy emphasizes in his discussion of the vic-
tory of Cnaeus Manlius Vulso against the Galatians (in modern Turkey),
and of the subsequent triumph in 187. It was then, he writes, that Ro-
man banquets began to feature “lute-girls and harpists, and other seduc-
tive dinner-party amusements”; “it was then that the cook began to be a
valuable commodity, though for men of old he had been the most insig-
nificant of slaves, both in cash-value and the work he did, and then that
what had been servile labor began to be considered an art.” With no less
disapproval, both Livy and Pliny (who quotes a writer of late second
century bce as his authority) add “sideboards and one legged tables” to
the roster of deleterious novelties introduced by this triumph.53
The chronology of the triumph was, in other words, more than a
scholarly game for Roman antiquarians. The sequence of triumphal
celebrations from Romulus onward provided a framework onto which
other developments in Roman politics and society could be mapped.
THE AUGUSTAN NEW DEAL
The Fasti Capitolini themselves signal one of the most striking links be-
tween triumphal chronology and Roman history more generally. For
their layout of the complete sequence of triumphs on four pilasters,
starting with the victory celebration of Romulus, comes to an end with
that of Lucius Cornelius Balbus in 19 bce. Balbus’ triumph for victories
The Impact of the Triumph
69
in Africa (over a perhaps misleadingly impressive roster of towns and
tribes listed by Pliny) occupies the final centimeters at the bottom of the
fourth pilaster, leaving no space for any further celebrations to be re-
corded.54 This was not a matter of chance. It must have taken careful cal-
culation on the part of the designers and carvers to ensure this perfect
fit. Nor was Balbus’ merely the most recent celebration to have taken
place when the decision was made to inscribe the whole triumphal chro-
nology. As the design shows, this triumph was intended to represent the
end of the series, or at least a rupture in the pattern of celebrations that
had held good for centuries.
So far I have referred to the sequence of triumphs as an unbroken se-
ries, from the mythical foundation under Romulus to whatever celebra-
tion is deemed to count as the last (the triumph of Diocletian and
Maximian in 303 ce is one favorite modern candidate, but there are
plenty of rivals stretching into Byzantium—as we will see in Chapter 9).
And so, in a sense, it is. At the same time, a notable change occurred un-
der the emperor Augustus, both in the generals to whom the honor was
awarded and in the frequency at which it was celebrated. After Balbus in
19 bce, no one triumphed in ancient Rome apart from the emperor
himself or, occasionally, members of his closest family. The only partial
exception is the ovation, or “lesser triumph,” awarded in 47 ce to Aulus
Plautius, the general responsible for the initial conquest of Britain—as
much a parade, no doubt, of the traditionalism of the ruling emperor
Claudius as of Plautius’ success.55
This restriction partly explains why the number of triumphs decreases
dramatically at this point. In the course of his gloating over the triumph
of the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus over the Jews in 71 ce (“a
most glorious victory over those who had offended God the Father and
Christ the Son”), the Christian historian Orosius, writing in the fifth
century ce, calculated that it was the three hundred and twentieth tri-
umphal celebration in eight centuries of Roman history. Of those 320,
only 13 took place in the hundred years after 29 bce; and of those, only
5 were staged in the ninety years following Balbus’ triumph. And during
some periods of the Empire no triumph is known for decades: in the
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
7 0
twenty-six years between the triumph of Claudius over Britain in 44
and the Jewish triumph, for example, or in the more than forty years
that separated the posthumous triumph of Trajan in 117–118 from that
of Marcus Aurelius over the Parthians in 166. It is not, however, quite
so rare as some modern miscalculations claim: only thirteen between
31 bce and 235 ce, as one particularly glaring piece of faulty arithme-
tic has it.56
For successful generals outside and sometimes inside the imperial
family, triumphal ornamenta or insignia replaced the celebration of a triumph proper and were awarded until the second century ce. It is clear
enough what these “ornaments” did not include: namely, the traditional
public procession to the Capitol, accompanied by the spoils, captives,
and victorious troops. Much less clear is what exactly they did include.
We assume, rather vaguely, that they amounted to the “paraphernalia of
a triumph,” in the sense of the distinctive triumphal toga and tunic, plus
the crown or wreath and scepter. But in fact the only direct piece of evi-
dence (a confusing description of Claudius’ triumph over Britain) may
well indicate that men granted this honor wore only the usual toga
praetexta of a magistrate.57 It is also a matter of guesswork how, and with what ceremony, they were bestowed—though they seem to have been
accompanied by the grant of a statue of the honorand in that most tri-
umphal of monuments, the Forum of Augustus.58 Second best or not,
this series of honors must have served to keep the triumph on the politi-
cal and cultural agenda, while at the same time perhaps investing the full
ceremony itself with rarity value and yet more celebrity status.
The reasons for the restriction of the triumph to the innermost impe-
rial circle are, in broad terms, obvious enough: it was not in the interests
of the new autocracy to share with the rest of the elite the fame and
prominence that a full triumphal ceremony might bring, particularly
military prominence. Modern historians have laid great emphasis on
this, writing of the “elimination” of “a major element in senatorial pub-
lic display” and of the projection of the emperor “as the sole source of
Roman military success,” while building up the triumph of Cornelius
Balbus as the swansong of the traditional ceremony.59
The Impact of the Triumph
71
In fact, the picture is more complicated. To be sure, the Fasti Capitolini
chime in with this modern orthodoxy, by ending so decisively with the
triumph of Balbus at the bottom of the final pilaster. As we shall see in
Chapter 9, ancient observers are far less emphatic or univocal than their
modern counterparts. Suetonius, for example, offers a dramatically di-
vergent view, painting the reign of Augustus as a bumper period for the
triumph.60 Several other writers do point to a change in triumphal prac-
tice around this date, but they focus on different pivotal moments and
theorize the change in a variety of different ways.61
However we resolve these details, the change in triumphal practice
has significant implications for how we read ancient descriptions of the
ceremony and ancient investigations of the rules, origins, and meaning
of the ritual. For the majority of these—including such rich accounts as
Plutarch’s description of Pompey’s triumph or Valerius Maximus’ discus-
sion of various aspects of “triumphal law”—were written not only much
later than the events which are their subject but in a period when the full
triumph in the traditional republican sense was no longer a regular sight
in the Roman streets but an element in the ceremonial of imperial mon-
archy. Some of the authors who wrote in such detail about triumphs
may never have witnessed one; almost none could have participated in
the kind of controversies that surrounded some triumphal celebrations
in the Republic.62
This disjunction between the flourishing of the “culture of the tri-
umph” (the ritual in ink) and the relative rarity of the ceremony in prac-
tice is one of the creative paradoxes that drives this book.
c h a p t e r
III
Constructions and Reconstructions
AN ACCURATE RECORD
The study of ancient history is necessarily stereoscopic. We have one eye
on how the ancients themselves understood their own culture and their
past. But at the same time, with the other eye, we are constructing our
own story; we are subjecting theirs to critical scrutiny and enjoying the
privilege of those who come later to “know better” about the past than
our predecessors. In Chapter 2 I stressed the importance of taking seri-
ously Romans’ own accounts of triumphs and their own attempts to
make sense of the history and meaning of the institution. Yet taking the
Roman view seriously is not the same as suspending all critical judg-
ment; it is not the same as imagining it to be “correct.”
The way that the ceremony was described, debated, and theorized by
the ancients themselves is an important subject of study in its own right.
But that approach must always be in dialogue with shrewd historical
skepticism and a cool suspicion about just how much the Roman writers
themselves knew about the ceremony and its history. The inscribed Fasti
Triumphales were an extraordinary achievement of Roman historical re-
construction and the backbone of many modern studies of the cere-
mony’s history, to be sure. But how accurate a document is it? To what
extent is a (more than symbolic) chronology of Roman triumphal cele-
Constructions and Reconstructions
73
brations within our grasp—whether we rely on this inscribed text or on
the records transmitted by historians such as Livy?
Suppose we were faced with an inscribed list—from Westminster Ab-
bey, maybe—of English monarchs from King Arthur to Elizabeth II,
each reign precisely dated and its major achievements summarized. At
either end of such a roster we would have little difficulty in assessing the
historicity of the kings and queens concerned. The status of Queen Vic-
toria (1837–1901) or even Edward VIII (whose brief “reign” in 1936
would have posed its own problems to the compilers of the list) is of an
entirely different order from that of King Arthur. Whatever shadowy
historical character or characters may, or may not, lie behind the story of
the Lord of the Round Table, there is no doubt that he is exactly that—a
story, an ideological fiction, a mythical ancestor of English kings and
kingship.
So too with the roster of triumphing generals inscribed in the Roman
Forum. It would be perverse to be too skeptical about the general ac-
curacy of the triumphal record of the last two centuries bce, which
amounts to well over a hundred ceremonies in all. Even if the details of
these occasions were embellished, invented, or disputed by historians in
antiquity, we usually have no good cause to doubt the occurrence of the
recorded triumphs, some of which—such as Pompey’s in 61—are docu-
mented in a wide variety of different sources and media. Nor is it likely
in this period that any celebration has fallen out of the record (though
later, after 19 bce, where we rely almost entirely on now-patchy literary
accounts, some ceremonies have almost certainly been lost to us, even if
for a time they retained a place in Roman memory).
Conversely, it would be just as perverse not to be skeptical about the
historicity of the earliest triumphs recorded, in the mythical period of
the foundation of the city and its more or less legendary early kings. The
triumph of Romulus that opens the Fasti Triumphales certainly played
an important role in the symbolic history of the ceremony, much as the
reign of King Arthur does in the symbolic history of British kingship.
But no one would now imagine that it could be pinned down to a par-
ticular historical occasion or real-life honorand. Besides, the differences
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
7 4
between ancient writers in their reconstructions of the early history of
the triumph reinforce the sense of a fluidity in the tradition. Livy’s
Romulus does not triumph, for example (though he does dedicate the
spolia opima after killing the enemy commander, Acro); Dionysius of
Halicarnassus’ Romulus does—not just once but, as in the inscribed
Fasti, three times.1 Indeed, by and large Dionysius’ chronology in his
Antiquitates Romanae (Roman Antiquities) is much closer to the Fasti
than Livy, but even he, significantly or not, omits any mention of the
two triumphs of the last king, Tarquin the Proud, that have a place on
the inscription.2
The more difficult problem lies not in identifying the clearly mythi-
cal, and the equally obviously historical, examples but in how to draw a
line between them. In the English case, this would be the “King Alfred
dilemma,” a monarch caught in that difficult territory between “myth”
and “history” (a bona fide ruler of the late ninth century, maybe, but
hardly the founder of the British navy or absent-minded dreamer who
burnt the peasant’s cakes in anything but legend). So where in the list of
triumphs does myth stop and history start? How far back in time can
we imagine that the compilers of the inscribed Fasti, or other histori-
ans working in the late Republic and early Empire, had access to accu-
rate information on exactly who triumphed, when and over whom?
And if they had access to it, did they use it? To what extent were they
engaged in fictionalizing reconstruction, if not outright invention? This
is the kind of dilemma that hovers over most of our attempts to write
about early (and not so early) Rome. Why believe what writers of the
first century bce or later tell us? Or, to push the argument back a step, how
trustworthy were the historical accounts composed in the third or second
centuries bce, now largely lost to us, on which the later writers relied?
Modern critics have generally divided into two opposing camps on
these questions, or hesitated awkwardly between them. On the one
hand stand the optimists, who argue that the traditions of archival and
other forms of record-keeping were well enough, and early enough, es-
tablished at Rome for reasonably reliable data to be available for even a
period as remote as the last phases of the monarchy in the sixth century
Constructions and Reconstructions
75
bce; and that some of this information, whether transmitted through
priestly records (the notorious Annales Maximi, for example), family his-
tories, or traditional ballads, was incorporated into the historical narra-
tive that survives.
On the other hand are the skeptics who not only doubt the existence,
or (if it existed) the usefulness, of the supposed archival tradition but
also question the process by which any early “information” was trans-
mitted to the later historical narrative. It was not a matter of wholesale
one-off invention. But over time, so this argument runs, the repeated at-
tempts of Roman historians to systematize such fragmentary evidence as
they had and to massage it into a well-ordered series of events and mag-
istracies, combined with the powerful incentive to elevate the achieve-
ments of the ancestors of families prominent in later periods, drastically
compromised the accuracy of the Romans’ view of their early history.3
As Cicero summed it up, the “invented triumphs and too many consul-
ships” with which leading families glamorized their own past distorted
the Roman historical tradition.4
INVENTED TRIUMPHS?
It is no easier to resolve this historiographical dilemma in the case of the
triumph than in the case of any Roman institution. Leaving aside what-
ever information may have been recorded in Roman archives, we cer-
tainly have evidence of a range of public documents specifically associ-
ated with triumphal celebrations. On an optimistic reading, these might
underpin the accuracy of the triumphal chronology. A scholar of the
first century ce, for example, discussing a particular form of archaic
Latin verse, refers to “the ancient tablets which generals who were going
to celebrate a triumph used to put up on the Capitoline”; and he quotes
lines (in the so-called “Saturnian” meter which is his subject) from two
of them, vaunting the military success of generals who triumphed in 190
and 189 bce.5 Likewise, Cicero implies that scrupulous generals submit-
ted accounts that were filed away in the state treasury (and, in principle
at least, retrievable from it)—accounts that noted not only the quantity
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
7 6
of triumphal booty but also systematically inventoried the size, shape,
and attitude of each sculpture.6
Pompey’s triumphs were, as we have seen, trumpeted on inscriptions
in the temples that his victories funded, and Livy quotes the text at-
tached to a dedication to Jupiter in the Temple of Mater Matuta, which
details the achievements of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in Sardinia
and his subsequent triumph in 175. (The dedication was a tablet or
painting in the shape of the island, decorated with representations of the
battles concerned.)7 In fact, some aspects of triumphal chronology seem
to have been so well established in the Roman world that Varro could
treat a notable triumph in 150 bce as a fixed date against which to cali-
brate prices of wheat and other staples.8
Yet how far back in Roman history such documentation goes remains
quite unclear. None of the examples just quoted is earlier than the sec-
ond century bce, nor do we have any indication that material of this
kind was regularly used by historians and scholars in antiquity in deter-
mining or checking the history of the triumph. Moreover, the details of
triumphal history as it has been transmitted to us present all kinds of
difficulties and discrepancies. Livy, in fact, echoes Cicero when he com-
plains of the conflicting evidence for the campaigns, victories, and com-
manders of the year 322 bce and laments the lack of any contemporary
history of that period, the misleading influence of family histories, and
the outright “falsehoods” found in the eulogistic inscriptions attached to
the portrait statues of the republican elite.9 The compilers of the Fasti
Capitolini must have got their data from somewhere, but for us to imag-
ine hard-nosed archival research on their part, still less an accurate
source, would be an act of faith.
In fact, to follow the skeptics, there can be no doubt whatsoever that
some of the information on republican triumphs recorded in the in-
scribed Fasti as well as in literary accounts has been, at the very least,
“touched up” at some stage. Even supposing that we were prepared to
suspend disbelief and accept that the exact date of all triumphs, as well
as the full name of the general (including father’s and grandfather’s
name), could have been transmitted accurately from the fifth century
bce, a number of specific cases must arouse suspicion.
Constructions and Reconstructions
77
The very first triumph of the newly founded Republic in 509 bce,
supposedly celebrated by Publius Valerius Publicola, offers a usefully
glaring example. Dated to the first of March (the opening, appropri-
ately enough, of the month of Mars, the god of war), it falls on the anni-
versary of that first triumph of Romulus which launched the whole
series. It is, in theory, possible that we are dealing here with a lucky
coincidence, or with some canny politicians in the late sixth century
who already “knew” the date of the (mythical) first triumph and chose
to replicate it. Much more likely is that, in the retrospective construc-
tion of republican triumphal history, the first triumph of the Repub-
lic (mythical or not) was mapped onto the very first triumph of all,
as a second founding moment of the city and of its most distinctive
ritual.10
Similar issues arise with the six other celebrations assigned to the first
of March, making it, to judge from the Fasti, the single most popular
date for the ceremony through the Republic.11 Generals may well have
found this an attractive and symbolically resonant date to choose for
their own big day. But no less likely is it that, in the course of the long
scholarly process of fine-tuning and filling the gaps in the triumphal re-
cord, the first of March would have seemed a particularly appropriate
date to assign to dateless triumphs.
Besides, despite the generally consistent overall picture of triumphal
history given by the inscribed documents and different ancient writers,
there are very many individual discrepancies long after the obviously
mythical period of the early kings. We are not dealing, in other words,
with a single orthodox triumphal chronology publicly memorialized in
the Fasti Capitolini, but a number of chronologies, similar in outline,
while divergent—even conflicting—in detail. Several triumphs, for ex-
ample, are recorded in the Fasti but nowhere else, even at periods when
Livy’s detailed year-by-year historical narrative survives. We know noth-
ing at all, apart from what is inscribed on the stone, of the triumph of
Publius Sulpicius Saverrius over the Samnites on October 29, 304 bce.
Likewise, no mention is made in any surviving literary account of the
triumphs of Gaius Plautius Proculus in 358, Gaius Sulpicius Longus in
314, or Marcus Fulvius Paetinus in 299, though in each case Livy does re-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
7 8
fer to an appropriate victory or campaign (one is tempted to ask whether
a triumph has been extrapolated from a victory, or even vice versa).12
It is not simply, however, that the Fasti are fuller, more gullible, or
more systematic in their records. For in other instances, even bearing in
mind the fragmentary nature of the surviving text, the inscription omits
triumphs that are claimed in some literary accounts: a group at the start
of the Republic (in 504, 502, and 495), but a couple later too—including
a celebration in 264 for the victory of Appius Claudius Caudex in Af-
rica, which is featured in Silius Italicus’ Punica, his epic on the Punic
Wars, as the subject of a painting that roused Hannibal’s indignation.13
What accounts for these discrepancies? Sometimes presumably the
partisan or self-serving inventions that Cicero and Livy imply. But—al-
though one modern critic has not unreasonably concluded that “tri-
umphs are more likely to be invented than ignored”—a variety of fac-
tors, not the least of which was sheer carelessness, could lead to the
exclusion of a ceremony from a particular record. So, for example, the
omission of Octavian’s triumph for his victory at Actium in 29 bce from
the Fasti Barberiniani may be the fault of an inattentive stone carver
(even though other more sinister explanations are possible, as we shall
see).14 In other cases it seems clear enough that, in constructing their his-
torical narratives, Roman writers failed to mention individual triumphs
because they had other historical priorities in mind. This may explain
the fact that two celebrations which took place during the Civil Wars of
the 30s bce (the triumph of Lucius Marcius Censorinus in 39 and Gaius
Norbanus Flaccus in 34) are recorded only in the inscribed Fasti. 15
Yet on other occasions a deeper level of uncertainty or more radi-
cally different versions of the details of triumphal history were at stake.
Polybius, for example, writes of the “very splendid” triumph of Scipio
for victories in Spain in 206 bce; Livy, by contrast, claims not only that
Scipio did not celebrate a triumph, but that he requested one only half-
heartedly, as it would have breached precedent. For up to that point, no
one who, like Scipio, had held command without being at the same
time a magistrate had triumphed.16 On the other hand, Livy makes
much of the triumph of Cnaeus Manlius Vulso in 187, as we have al-
Constructions and Reconstructions
79
ready seen, noting the fifty-two enemy leaders led before the general’s
chariot, the wagonloads of coin, weapons, and precious metals, and the
songs chanted by the victorious troops, as well as lingering on its moral
consequences; yet the historian Florus explicitly states this triumph was
requested by Vulso but refused.17
An instructive case is the disputed triumphal career of Lucius
Aemilius Paullus, whose three-day triumph in 167 over King Perseus of
Macedonia was later written up almost as extravagantly as Pompey’s of
61. But how many triumphs did Paullus celebrate? We can identify this
one and an earlier celebration in 181 bce, for victory over the Ligurians
of north Italy. Both of these, and these only, were recorded on the in-
scription beneath the statue of Paullus that stood among the republican
worthies in the Forum of Augustus.18
Yet we find a different story in the inscription accompanying another
statue of Paullus put up by one of his descendants in the mid-50s bce to
embellish the so-called Fornix Fabianus in the Forum—an arch origi-
nally erected in 121 bce to commemorate the victories of Paullus’ grand-
son, Quintus Fabius Maximus Allobrogicus. Here, Paullus is clearly
stated to have “triumphed three times.”19 This second tradition is fol-
lowed by Velleius Paterculus, in his history of Rome written during the
reign of the emperor Tiberius. Before his great triumph over Perseus,
Paullus had, Velleius states, “triumphed both as praetor and as consul.”20
Paullus was praetor in 191, when he campaigned in Spain; but there is
certainly no space for such a triumph in the Fasti, which indeed explic-
itly marks the triumph of 167 as his second.
This is very likely an example of an “invented triumph.” We cannot
be absolutely certain that a triumphal celebration in 191 has not fallen
out of the mainstream of the historical record. But more likely, within
the traditions of family loyalty, exaggeration, and hype (as represented
on what is effectively a dynastic monument of Paullus’ family), two tri-
umphs were massaged into three; at some point, too, an appropriate
campaign, in Spain, was found to fit the fictive triumph. And as Cicero
and Livy feared, the invention got a foothold, even if a precarious one,
in the historical narrative of Paullus’ career. If so, this is a rare instance
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
8 0
where we not only suspect invention but can see its process in action,
largely because of its relatively late date; earlier inventions presumably
became so established in the triumphal record that they are no longer
easily identifiable as such.21
That late date is in itself striking, for the second century bce is well
within the period when the historicity of recorded triumphs in general
seems hardly to be in doubt. It serves as a powerful reminder that the in-
centives to embellish triumphal careers did not stop even at a time when
the historical narrative was more carefully policed. It is also a warning
that no firm chronological line can be drawn between a period of “myth-
ical” and one of “historical” triumphs. Although the record of the late
Republic reflects the historical sequence of triumphs celebrated much
more closely than that of the early Republic, there was never a period
when distortion of all kinds—from wishful thinking to subtle readjust-
ments—was entirely off the agenda.
We cannot now reconstruct the processes of compilation, reading, or
research that lay behind the finished inscribed text of the Fasti Capitolini.
We can only guess at its relationship with the literary records of trium-
phal history embedded in the writing of Livy, Dionysius, and their lost
predecessors. We can often do little to explain or resolve the discrepan-
cies between the various sources of evidence. It is clear nevertheless that
underneath the self-confident parade of triumphs from Romulus to
Balbus lurked more controversy, dispute, and uncertainty than immedi-
ately meets the eye. Of course, part of the point of the inscription was
precisely to create such a public orthodoxy, to mask the conflicts and to
exclude the variants. In that sense it tried to monopolize the history of
the triumph and is about the most spectacular example of triumphal
ideology to survive. One of the tasks of a modern historian must be to
question the version of history offered by the Fasti, and expose the self-
serving myths, the uncertainties, and half-truths within.
RECONSTRUCTING A RITUAL
Nostalgia, anachronism, exaggeration, creative invention, scrupulous ac-
curacy—all these, in different combinations, determined how individual
Constructions and Reconstructions
81
triumphs were written up by ancient authors. Yet the particular appeal
of this ceremony for scholars since the Renaissance has, nevertheless,
been the sense that the richness of the ancient evidence does allow us for
once to reconstruct the programme of a major Roman ritual in its en-
tirety. Ask the question: “What happened at the Lupercalia, or the
Parilia?” and the answer will come down to the one or two picturesque
details: the dash round the city at the Lupercalia; the bonfire-leaping at
the Parilia. We could not hope to give any kind of coherent narrative of
the festivals. Even the inscribed records of the Arval Brethren mostly
give a relatively spare account of the annual ritual of Dea Dia.22
In the case of the triumph, by contrast, thanks to a host of ancient
references to location and context, participants and procedures, it has
been possible to sketch out a richly detailed “order of ceremonies,” from
beginning to end. In fact, at the center of most modern discussions of
the triumph, for all their differences in interpretation and their different
theories on triumphal origins and meaning, lies a generally agreed pic-
ture of “what happened” in the ceremony, at least in its developed form.
It looks something like this:23
The triumphal party assembled early in the morning on the Campus
Martius (outside the sacred boundary of the city, the pomerium), from
where the procession set off on a prescribed route that was to lead through
the so-called “Triumphal Gate”, on past the cheering crowds in the Cir-
cus Maximus, through the Forum to culminate on the Capitoline hill.
The procession was divided into three parts. The first included the
spoils carried on wagons or shoulder-high on portable stretchers (fercula);
the paintings and models of conquered territory and battles fought; the
golden crowns sent by allies or conquered peoples to the victorious gen-
eral; the animals that were to be sacrificed, trumpeters and dancers; plus
the captives in chains, the most important of them directly in front of the
general’s chariot.
The second part was the group around the general himself. He stood in
a special horse-drawn chariot, sometimes expensively decorated with gold
and ivory, with a phallos hanging beneath it (to avert the evil eye); his
face painted red, he was dressed in an elaborate costume, a laurel crown,
an embroidered tunic (tunica palmata) and a luxurious toga (originally of
purple, toga purpurea, later decorated with golden stars, toga picta); and in one hand he held an ivory scepter, in the other a branch of laurel. Behind
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
8 2
him in the chariot stood a slave, holding a golden crown over his head,
and whispering to him throughout the procession, “Look behind you.
Remember you are a man”. His children went with him, either in the
chariot itself if they were small, or on horseback alongside. Behind the
chariot came his leading officers and Roman citizens he had freed from
slavery, wearing “caps of liberty”.
The final part was made up of the victorious soldiers, wearing laurel
wreaths and chanting the ritual triumphal cry of “io triumpe”, inter-
spersed with those ribald songs about the general himself.
When they reached the foot of the Capitoline, some of the leading cap-
tives might have been taken off for execution; the rest of the procession
made its way up to the Temple of Jupiter. There the animals were sacri-
ficed to the god and other offerings were made by the general, before
feasts were laid on for the senate on the Capitol, and elsewhere in the city
for soldiers and people. At the end of the day, the (presumably exhausted)
general was given a musical escort back home.
Many of the elements of this reconstruction will already be recogniz-
able from the ancient discussions of Pompey’s triumph. Indeed, every
single part of it is attested in Roman literature or the visual arts—in
some cases many times over. It captures an image of the triumph that is
embedded in all modern literature on the subject, this book no less than
others. And it is an image that would no doubt strike a chord with
Romans themselves (unsurprisingly perhaps, as it is directly drawn from
ancient material). In comparison with the usual games of hypothesis,
guesswork, hunch, and “filling the gaps” that lie behind most ancient
historical reconstruction, this must count as uniquely well documented.
At the same time, it is grossly misleading. In a sense, all such general-
izations always are. Any attempt to sum up a thousand years of ritual
practice must involve drastic processes of selection, and the smoothing
out of inconsistencies; it must consistently ungarble the garbled evi-
dence and systematize the messy improvisations and the day-to-day
changes that inevitably characterize ritual as practiced, even in the most
conservative and tightly regulated society.24 It takes only a few moments’
reflection to realize that dozens and dozens of triumphal ceremonies
must have matched up to this standard template in only some respects.
The lavish displays of booty, for example, can only have become an op-
Constructions and Reconstructions
83
tion at a relatively late stage, when Rome was involved in lucrative for-
eign wars. And however much the literary tradition may have magnified
even modest ceremonies, small-scale triumphs with little on show, only
a few accompanying soldiers hardly raising a ribald song, and an unim-
pressive handful of captives no doubt easily outnumbered the block-
buster occasions celebrating the conquests of Pompey, Aemilius Paullus,
or Titus and Vespasian. Lucius Postumius Megellus, for example, who
celebrated a triumph in 294 bce, the very next day after he had put his
case to the senate, would hardly have had time to get a lavish show on
the road (unless it had all been prepared in advance).25
But simplification is precisely what generalizations are for. The price
we pay for highlighting the structure is the loss of difference and the rich
particularity of each occasion. This is no better or worse than modern
generalizations about the procedures at, for example, funerals or church
weddings. The claim that “the bride wears white” remains true at a cer-
tain level, no matter how many women choose to take themselves down
the aisle in pastel peach or flaming red.
The problems, however, run deeper than that. The very familiarity of
this reconstruction of the Roman triumph (from Mantegna’s Triumphs
of Caesar to the film Quo Vadis) and its confident repetition by historians over the last half millennium have tended to disguise the fragil-
ity, or occasionally the implausibility, of some of its most distinctive ele-
ments. What kind of balancing act, for example, would be required of a
general simply to stay upright in a horse-drawn chariot traveling over
the bumpy Roman streets, both hands full with a scepter and laurel
branch, sharing the ride with a couple of children and the obligatory
slave? Scratch the surface of some of the most central “facts” about the
triumph and an uncomfortable surprise may be in store.
The notorious phallos, for example, hanging under the triumphal
chariot (or “slung beneath” it, as more than one distinguished historian
has recently put it, obviously envisaging a sizeable object) turns out to
be much harder to track down than is usually implied. It is not a major
element in any of the ancient discussions of the triumph, and it is never
depicted in any of the numerous visual representations of the triumphal
chariot we have. In fact, in the whole of surviving ancient literature it
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
8 4
is mentioned precisely once: in Pliny’s encyclopedic Naturalis Historia
(Natural History). 26 It could be, of course, that Pliny has done us the
greatest good turn in preserving this crucial piece of evidence, over
which our other sources of information have drawn a polite veil. Plenty
of respectable theories about Roman culture are based on a single pass-
ing reference in Pliny, after all; and many modern historians would take
pride in their ability to rescue and deploy such apparently curious pieces
of information. Nevertheless, Pliny’s isolated remark remains a long way
from the confident assertion that “a phallos hung beneath the triumphal
chariot.” You would need a very strong commitment to the idea that
Roman ritual never changed and that a single instance was by definition
typical (once a phallos, always a phallos) to bridge that gap.
The same is true for several other elements in the reconstruction: the
golden stars on the triumphal toga (known only from Appian’s descrip-
tion of the triumph of Scipio); the historical development from toga
purpurea to toga picta (no more than a learned deduction noted by
Festus in the second century ce); the red-painted face (more widely at-
tested; but Pliny, who is again our main source of evidence, actually re-
fers to something more disturbingly exotic—a red painted body).27
Conversely, a blind eye is consistently turned to some of the less con-
venient records of triumphal custom. Although we are happy to rely,
when it suits our purposes, on the Byzantine historians who preserved
the gist of the lost sections of Dio, we steer very clear when it does
not. John Tzetzes’ claim, for example, that the triumphing general ran
around the “place” (presumably the Capitoline temple) three times be-
fore dedicating his garland has not entered our tradition of the tri-
umph.28 The “bell and whip” which—according to several Byzantine
historians, almost certainly drawing on Dio—hung on the triumphal
chariot usually lose out to the much more intriguing and satisfyingly
primitive, even if no better attested, phallos, though one modern com-
mentator has dreamed up the economical solution of using “bells and
whips” to decorate the phallos.29
In the final section of this chapter, I shall look in finer detail at just
two features of our standard image of the triumphal procession: the slave
Constructions and Reconstructions
85
who stood in the chariot behind the general, and the prescribed route
taken by the procession through the city to the Temple of Jupiter. My
questions are simple. How are these elements of the triumph reassem-
bled by modern historians? What gets lost in the process? What assump-
tions underlie it? The fact is that the same wealth of ancient evidence
which has encouraged the detailed reconstruction of the procession also
provides the material with which that standard reconstruction can be
challenged.
REMEMBER YOU ARE A MAN
The slave standing in the triumphal chariot behind the general, holding
a golden crown over his head and whispering “Look behind you. Re-
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