The Roman Triumph

role featured in the voice-over of the closing sequence of the 1970 movie

Patton—where his words, summing up the story’s moral lesson, were

more simply rendered as “All glory is fleeting.” But he has also been inte-

gral to one of the most influential modern theories of the ceremony:

that the triumphing general himself was seen as, in some way, divine (or,

more precisely, that he represented the god Jupiter). For what was the

point of warning someone that he was (only) a man, unless he was on

the verge at least of thinking of himself, or being seen, as a god?

The words of warning that I have quoted are drawn from the late-

second-century ce Christian writer Tertullian, whose reflections on the

custom are reassuringly compatible with modern explanations: “He is

reminded that he is a man even when he is triumphing, in that most ex-

alted chariot. For at his back he is given the warning: ‘Look behind you.

Remember you are a man.’ And so he rejoices all the more that he is in

such a blaze of glory that a reminder of his mortality is necessary.”

Tertullian, however, makes no mention of a slave. Nor does Jerome,

writing at the end of the fourth century ce: he repeats the phrase “Re-

member you are a man” (almost certainly borrowing it directly from this

passage of Tertullian), but he does at least refer to a “companion” of the

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general, who traveled behind him in the chariot and muttered the key

words each time the crowds roared their acclamation.30

A handful of other ancient writers offer a similar, but not identical,

account; some of them offer very different explanations of the words

spoken; and a few hint more allusively at the slave’s role. According

to Arrian, the hard-line philosopher Epictetus saw in the reminder of

mortality (delivered by whom he does not say) a lesson in the transience

of human possessions and affections. And this pointedly philosophical

angle is possibly shared by Philostratus, who writes of the emperor

Trajan parading his pet philosopher before the city of Rome in his tri-

umphal chariot. In what could be a parody of the practice of the tri-

umph and a humorous reversal of the warning, the emperor “turns

round to him and says ‘I do not know what you are saying but I love you

as I love myself.’”31

Dio seems to have referred explicitly to the “public slave” in the char-

iot and to his repeated “Look behind you.” No mention here, though,

of “Remember you are a man,” and Dio’s interpretation of the warn-

ing strikes a rather different note. For him, if his later excerptors and

summarizers have transmitted his sense correctly, it means “Look at

what comes next in your life and do not be carried away with your pres-

ent good fortune and puffed up with pride.” Juvenal, by contrast, ex-

ploited the scene for a satiric sideswipe at the Roman elite. In describing

the procession that opened the circus games (which overlapped closely

with the triumphal procession), he hints that the mere presence of the

sweaty slave in the same chariot was enough to take the bigwig down a

peg or two.

Pliny, meanwhile, in discussing the iron ring traditionally worn by

the triumphing general, alluded to the presence of a slave but assigned

him the job of holding “the golden Tuscan crown” over the general’s

head. Elsewhere, without reference to the exact words or to who might

have spoken them, he refers to the phrase, like the phallos, as a “defense

against envy”—or, in the primitive gloss that some modern translators

choose to put on it, “protection against the evil-eye.” His sense here is

hard to fathom, partly because the text itself is now corrupt and exactly

Constructions and Reconstructions

87

what Pliny originally wrote is difficult to reconstruct. But he seems to

have suggested, in extravagant terms, that the words were intended to

“win over Fortune, the executioner of glory” (Fortuna gloriae carnifex).

Confusing enough for us—and it certainly confused Isidore, Bishop of

Seville, who drew heavily on Pliny in the compilation of his own multi-

volume encyclopedia in the seventh century ce. In a memorable piece of

creative misunderstanding, Isidore has “an executioner” (carnifex) in-

stead of the slave in the chariot—a particularly gruesome warning of the

“humble mortal status” of the general.32

The implications of all this are clear enough. First, the standard claim

that “a slave stood behind the general in his chariot and repeated the

words ‘Look behind you. Remember you are a man’” is the result of

stitching together different strands of evidence. No ancient writer pre-

sents that whole picture. Jerome is perhaps the closest, with half the

full phrase and a “companion” in the chariot. Otherwise, Tertullian’s

quotation, broadly confirmed by Epictetus and, on a generous reading,

Philostratus and Pliny, must be combined with the testimony of Dio,

Juvenal, and Pliny again on the presence of the slave (even though Dio

offers a rather different form of the words spoken, and Juvenal says

nothing about them at all—and is, in any case, describing the circus

procession, not the triumph!).

Second, each of these different strands of evidence comes from a dif-

ferent date and context. None is earlier than the middle of the first cen-

tury ce. Only Dio (albeit writing in the third century ce and filtered

through much later Byzantine paraphrases) is offering a description of

triumphal practice. The rest are conscripting the symbols of triumph

into second-order theorizing or moralizing; even Pliny’s reference to the

use of an iron ring in the triumph is prompted by his lamentations over

the decadence and corruption of gold (“A terrible crime against human-

ity was committed by the man who first put gold on his fingers”).

Several are driven by a distinctive ideological agenda. For Juvenal, the

slave is invoked as a weapon against aristocratic pride; for Jerome, the

general’s “companion” provides an analogy for Christian reminders of

human frailty. But Tertullian provides the most glaringly partisan exam-

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8 8

ple. For he quotes the words in the context of a Christian attack on the

idea that the Roman emperor was a god. The triumphing general he

has in mind is the emperor; and, using that standard Christian tactic

of twisting pagan practice to convict itself, he trumpets the words “Re-

member you are a man” as a clinching argument for the emperor’s

mortality. Where Tertullian picked up this piece of triumphal custom

we do not know. There is no clear evidence that he ever went to Rome,

still less that he witnessed a triumph.33 But he would certainly have been

horrified to think that his comments were used to support any argument

that the general represented the pagan Jupiter.

The picture becomes even more puzzling if we include the visual evi-

dence for the triumphal procession. On the diminutive triumph that

decorates the silver cup from Boscoreale, we see a plausible figure of a

slave standing behind Tiberius in his chariot, holding a crown or wreath

over his head (see Fig. 11). He appears again on a fragment of a sub-

stantial relief sculpture from Praeneste (Palestrina), apparently show-

ing a triumph of the emperor Trajan (Fig. 17).34 But with the exception

of a solitary clay plaque and possibly a lost sarcophagus of the late Em-

pire (known from Renaissance drawings) that depicted the “triumphal”

opening of the circus games (see Fig. 35), there is no trace of the slave on

any other visual representation of the ceremony.35

It is not that he is simply omitted (though that is sometimes the case).

More often his place is taken by the entirely imaginary figure of a

winged Victory.36 It is she, for example, who stands in the chariot and

crowns Titus on his Arch (see Fig. 8), Trajan on the Beneventum frieze

(see Fig. 10), and Marcus Aurelius on the triumphal panel now in the

Capitoline Museum (see Fig. 31). Augustus had this treatment too, more

than once, to judge from that solitary female foot found in the Forum of

Augustus and a coin that depicts an arch topped by a triumphal chariot,

and Victory on board with (presumably) the emperor (Fig. 18).37 On

other coins she is shown swooping in from the skies to crown the gen-

eral (or zooming off again).38 But again there is no sign of the slave, nor

does he appear on what is often taken to be the very earliest coin repre-

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 17:

Part of a relief panel from Praeneste (Palestrina) showing the emperor Trajan

(98–117 ce) in triumph; the right-hand section is lost. The emperor—recognizable by his distinctive features and hairstyle—is accompanied in the chariot by a slave who holds a large, jeweled crown over his head.

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9 0

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 18:

Gold coin ( aureus) minted 17–16 bce to celebrate Augustus’ road repairs—commemorating, in particular, the arches erected in honor of his restoration of the Via Flaminia. On top of the arch is a statue of Augustus, riding in a chariot pulled by a pair of elephants and crowned by a winged figure of Victory.

sentation of a historical triumph, commemorating Marius’ triumph in

101 bce (Fig. 19).39

This is an extraordinary discrepancy between the texts and (most) im-

ages. We are not simply dealing with different conventions of represen-

tation in different media, textual and visual. That is no doubt part of it.

But the problem is that the “message” of the different representations of

the triumphal scene is so entirely contradictory. If the figure of the slave

and his words of warning acted in some sense to humble the general at

his triumph or to draw the sting of what might be seen as his excessive

glory, putting the figure of Victory in his place signaled precisely the re-

verse: it showed the crowning of the general by the divine agent of the

gods, a shameless display of power, honor, and prestige.

This contradiction has proved impossible to solve. The few modern

attempts to make sense of it are frankly unconvincing. The idea, for ex-

ample, that the replacement of the slave by a Victory reflects a historical

development of the ceremony, from a primitive religious ritual (where

such ideas as the “evil eye” were taken seriously) to a naked display of

power and success, flies directly in the face of the pattern of the evi-

dence. In strictly chronological terms, Victory is attested long before the

Constructions and Reconstructions

91

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 19:

Reverse design of a silver denarius minted in 101 bce, commemorating Marius’

triumph of that year. The general in his chariot is accompanied by a horse and rider, probably Marius’ son.

slave; but, in any case, the contrast is much more one of medium and

context than of date.40

Nor is it clear what lies behind those rare occasions when the slave is

depicted in visual images.41 In fact, a closer look at the relief from

Praeneste uncovers some absurd paradoxes. If, as has been argued, the

triumph in question on that sculpture is Trajan’s posthumous celebra-

tion of 117–118 ce, then (on a literal reading) we are being asked to imag-

ine the slave uttering his warnings of mortality to the dummy of an em-

peror who is already dead—and about to become, pace Tertullian, a

god.42 We do better, I suspect, to celebrate rather than explain (away) the

contradictions, and to see them rather as a reflection of different ancient

“ways of seeing” the triumph and different conceptions of the position

of the general and the nature of military glory.

These issues bring us face to face with the fragility of the “facts of the

triumph.” The slave, with his warning for the general, certainly has

some part in the history of the ritual. But there is nothing to prove that

he was the original, permanent, and unchanging fixture in the ceremony

as performed that he is often assumed to be. Besides, different versions

of his words were clearly current, and they were interpreted in different

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9 2

ways. Even supposing he were a constant presence in the procession, his

role could be emphasized, effaced, or substituted according to different

priorities of representation and interpretation. If the slave holds a warn-

ing for us, it is of the risks we run in attempting to turn all these various versions of the triumph in art and literature—the moralizing turns, the

Christian polemic, the glorifying images, the anthropological specula-

tion—back into ritual practice.

PLOTTING THE ROUTE

The triumphal route, from its starting point somewhere outside the

sacred boundary (pomerium) of the city to its culmination on the

Capitoline hill, offers a different but no less revealing angle on the pro-

cesses of historical reconstruction that underlie most modern accounts

of the ceremony. Over the centuries of triumphal scholarship this aspect

has generated considerably more controversy than the figure of the slave.

Admittedly, only a few historians have ever contested the basic princi-

ple that there was a prescribed route for the procession. There is a broad consensus too that a better understanding of the path it took might

well lead to a better understanding of the triumph as a whole. The

meaning of a procession, as several studies in the Greek world have

shown, regularly “feeds off ” the buildings and landscapes by which it

passes. The overall shape of the route too might offer an indication of

the procession’s original function. For example, a circular course right

around the city, reminiscent of various purificatory ceremonies of lus-

tration, might suggest a similar purificatory purpose for the early tri-

umph (and fit nicely with one strand of ancient scholarship, which sees

the prominence of laurel in the ceremony as connected with its role in

purification).43

But matching up the various passing allusions to the route in ancient

literature to the topography of the city on the ground has proved ex-

tremely difficult. Mapping the triumph is a much more tendentious

process than any of the more self-confident scholarly reconstructions

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care to hint. I shall not summarize here all the twists and turns of the ar-

guments for and against different routes, as they have been played, re-

played, and sometimes literally re-enacted over the last five hundred

years. I want instead, by looking closely at one or two controversial de-

tails, to reflect on why the apparently simple question “Where did the

triumph go?” has proved so difficult to answer.

This is, once again, a fascinating case study in historical method. It

also raises important issues of conservatism and innovation in the ritual

practice of the triumph, which have implications for Roman ritual cul-

ture more generally. How conservative a ritual was the triumph? How

rigid were the rules or conventions governing its performance? What

does “conservatism” mean in the case of a ceremony carried out over

more than a thousand years, through the streets of a city that was itself

transformed over that period from a rural village of wattle and daub to a

cosmopolitan capital—with all the display architecture, extravagant ur-

ban planning, and squalid slums that go with it?

Every attempt to reconstruct the triumphal route must start from the

account by the Jewish historian Josephus of the triumph of the emperor

Vespasian and Titus in 71 ce. Josephus himself had been a participant in

the Jewish war, had defected to the Roman side, and, if not an eyewit-

ness to the triumph, then was at least drawing on contemporary ac-

counts. His is the only description of a triumphal procession to provide

more than a series of snapshots of the performance and to offer a con-

nected narrative and something approaching a route map for at least the

start of the occasion.

All the soldiery marched out, while it was still night, in proper order and

rank under their commanders, and they were stationed on guard not

at the upper palace but near the Temple of Isis. For it was there that the

emperor and prince were resting that night. At break of day Vespasian

and Titus emerged, garlanded with laurel and dressed in the traditional

purple costume, and went over to the Portico of Octavia. For it was

here that the senate, the leading magistrates and those of equestrian

rank were awaiting their arrival. A platform had been erected in front of

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9 4

the colonnade, with thrones of ivory set on it. They went up to these

and took their seats. Straightaway the troops broke into applause, bearing

ample testimony one and all to their leaders’ valor. They were unarmed,

in silken costume, garlanded with laurels. Acknowledging their applause,

although the men wanted to continue, Vespasian gave the signal for

silence.

When it was completely quiet everywhere, he rose, covered most of his

head with his robe, and uttered the customary prayers. Titus prayed like-

wise. After the prayers, Vespasian briefly addressed the assembled com-

pany all together and then sent the soldiers off to the traditional breakfast

provided by the emperors. He himself meanwhile went back to the gate

which took its name from the fact that triumphs always pass through it.

Here he and Titus first had a bite to eat and then, putting on their trium-

phal dress and sacrificing to the gods whose statues are set up by the gate,

they sent off the triumphal procession, riding out through the theaters so

that the crowds had a better view.

At this point Josephus changes focus to enthuse about the displays of

spoils and special stunts in the procession. He does not pick up the route

again until Vespasian and Titus are on the Capitoline, waiting for the

shout that would indicate their celebrity prisoner had been put to death

in the prison (carcer) in the Forum, at the foot of the hill.44

The general area of the start of this procession is clear enough from

Josephus’ description. The Portico of Octavia is firmly located in the

south of the Campus Martius, between the surviving theater of Marcellus

and the theater and porticoes of Pompey; the Temple of the Egyptian

goddess Isis, from which a considerable quantity of Egyptian and

Egyptianizing statuary and bric-à-brac has been unearthed, was some

five hundred meters to the north, just east of the Pantheon. Vespasian

and Titus, in other words, were conducting the preliminaries in the

Campus Martius, outside the pomerium, while the procession proper

presumably moved on its way southward, past the western slopes of the

Capitoline and into the Forum Boarium (the so-called “Cattle Market”;

see Plan). Beyond that, despite all the apparently precise details of

Josephus’ narrative, the locations or movements of the procession are

very hard to pin down. It is to fill that gap, between text and map, that

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some of the most seductive but unreliable scholarly certainties have been

generated.45

Where, for example, did Vespasian and Titus spend the night, guarded

by the serried ranks of their troops? Josephus’ Greek (just like my trans-

lation) could mean that they lodged in the Temple of Isis. If so, it would

seem a significant choice: a careful allusion to the fact that in the civil

wars of just two years earlier, Titus’ younger brother Domitian was said

to have escaped his opponents thanks to an ingenious disguise as an at-

tendant of the Egyptian goddess.46 What better place for this new impe-

rial team to sleep over than the temple of the goddess whose protection

had saved the young hope of the dynasty?47 Yet the Greek can equally

well mean that Vespasian and Titus spent the night “near the Temple of

Isis.” At this point practical modern logic has often come into play. The

pair of generals, plus their army, would need a good deal of space, more

than the Temple of Isis could possibly provide. Somewhere close by (the

exact location is not absolutely certain) was the so-called villa publica: a building originally connected with the Roman census, used occasionally

to house ambassadors and with surrounding parkland large enough to

hold an army levy.

Neither Josephus nor any other ancient writer mentions the villa

publica in connection with the triumph. But this has not stopped mod-

ern scholars from confidently identifying the villa publica as the place

where the Flavian pair lodged on this occasion. More than that, it

has not stopped them from identifying it as the traditional place where

triumphing generals stayed on the eve of their celebration: the build-

ing “whose function it was,” as one recent authority has it, “to accom-

modate the generals and victorious armies before the triumph.” Another

even imagines the returning general plus army “wait[ing] in the Villa

Publica,” where he “would apply to the senate for the right to hold a tri-

umph.”48 If so, even with the capacious parkland, it must have been im-

possibly (and implausibly) overcrowded at some periods in the late Re-

public, when more than one general was simultaneously waiting for his

triumph, sometimes over a period of years. This process of conjecture,

wild extrapolation, and over-confidence is how many of the “facts” of

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the triumph are made. To repeat: no ancient evidence whatsoever links

the villa publica with the ritual, beyond the ambivalent and uncertain

implications of Josephus’ description.

RECONSTRUCTING THE “TRIUMPHAL GATE”

Even more confusion surrounds the “gate” where Vespasian and Titus

went after addressing the senate and others in the Portico of Octavia—a

monument that has been the subject of more pages of learned dispute

than any other part of the triumphal route. Josephus’ rather awkward

periphrasis (“the gate which took its name from the fact that triumphs

always pass through it”) has always been taken to be a gloss on the mon-

ument known in Latin as the porta triumphalis (“the triumphal gate”).

This is mentioned for certain on only four other occasions in ancient lit-

erature. It is referred to once by Cicero, in his attack on the ignominious

return to Rome in 55 bce of his adversary Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso: “It

doesn’t matter what gate you entered the city by,” he sneers at one point

in the proceedings, “so long as it wasn’t the triumphal one.” And it ap-

pears three times in connection with the funeral of the emperor Augus-

tus: Tacitus and Suetonius both record a proposal that Augustus’ body

should be carried to its pyre “through the triumphal gate.” Dio goes fur-

ther and states that this was exactly what did happen “by decree of the

senate” (all implying that the gate was not usually open or a free thor-

oughfare).49

None of these writers give any hint of its form; the term “porta” (in

Greek pulÃ) rather than “arcus” or “fornix” more easily suggests a gate in

a city wall than a free-standing arch (as is also implied by Cicero’s de-

scription of Piso “entering” the city), though many recent theories have

opted for a free-standing structure. None refer to its function in the tri-

umph. None, apart from Josephus, give any clue to where it stood;

though, if Augustus’ body was to be carried through it in his funeral

cortège without a vast detour, we should probably have in mind some

place between the Forum (where the eulogies were delivered) and the

northern Campus Martius (where the pyre and his mausoleum stood).

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Despite this vagueness, most modern scholars have been convinced

that this structure represented a significant point at the start of the pro-

cession. The idea of the ceremonial passage through an arch or gate

(whether as rite de passage, a purificatory ritual, or an entry ritual) has proved predictably seductive.50 And most scholars have also been convinced that, with the help of a variety of other evidence, the location of

the gate might be pinpointed. Only one independent mind of the early

twentieth century ventured to suggest that the porta triumphalis may not

have been a fixed structure at all but the name applied to whatever gate

or even temporary arch the general passed through as he began his pro-

cession. And she has been much ridiculed for it (rightly maybe; for the

idea certainly seems to conflict with Josephus’ account).51

Leaving to one side the various hypotheses of Renaissance scholars

(who regularly, and quite wrongly, conscripted the Vatican into the itin-

erary), enthusiastic arguments have been advanced over the last two

hundred years for placing the gate in the Circus Maximus, the Circus

Flaminius, the Campus Martius near the villa publica, as well as on the

road that led from the Forum to the Campus Martius around the east

side of the Capitoline hill.52 The most recently fashionable theory,

though floated as long ago as the 1820s, is that the triumphal gate was

identical with, or at least closely linked to, the Porta Carmentalis, a gate

in the old city wall at the foot of the Capitoline hill to the west, not far

from where the Theater of Marcellus still stands. Originally (part of ) the

city gate itself, the triumphal gate was later replaced—so the most influ-

ential version of the argument goes—by a free-standing arch. This is so

much the modern orthodoxy that it can now be treated as “fact.”53

It is, of course, not “fact” at all; and no ancient author states directly

or indirectly that the porta triumphalis was identical, or nearly identical, with the Porta Carmentalis. Yet a careful look at the arguments used to

support this case offers a marvelous object lesson in the methods of

modern historians of the triumph. We can trace the decidedly flimsy se-

ries of inferences and sleights of hand that claim to transform the myste-

rious and frankly opaque references in a few ancient texts into a physical

structure whose form we can reconstruct—and whose image survives.

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The idea takes off from what is almost certainly a Renaissance com-

mentary on Suetonius, explaining that “the porta triumphalis seems to

have been between the Porta Flumentana and the Porta Catularia.” We

do not know whether or not the Renaissance scholar was here drawing

on reliable ancient evidence. Nor do we know where in the old city wall

the Porta Catularia was situated (it is itself referred to in only one sur-

viving passage of ancient literature, without any precise location). But

assuming that our Renaissance informant is correct and assuming that

we can conveniently pinpoint the Catularia between the Capitoline and

the Campus Martius, then the implication would be that the porta

triumphalis belonged just where we believe the Porta Carmentalis to

have stood (though no agreed traces have been discovered).54

At this point, a story in Livy and Ovid helps out. When in 479 bce

the ill-fated posse of the Fabian clan marched out of Rome, to be de-

feated in their battle against the Veientines, Livy explains (according to

the usual translation) that they left by the wrong side of the Porta

Carmentalis, under the right-hand arch. Ovid chimes in with a refer-

ence to the curse of the right-hand arch (“Don’t go through it anyone,

there’s a curse on it”). This story is, of course, much later elaboration;

and even as told by Livy and Ovid, the exact significance of the “wrong”

arch is far from clear. Was there one side for entrances and the other

for exits, which the Fabii got wrong? Or was the right-hand side not

in regular use at all? It does seem to show, however, that the Porta

Carmentalis was a double gate, one side of which, or maybe both, was

governed by special customs or regulations. Notwithstanding all the dif-

ficulties (and, frankly, none of the proposed solutions make sense of all

the evidence), one of the arches of the Porta Carmentalis has become the

prime candidate for being the porta triumphalis, which was, the theory

goes, ritually opened on special occasions, such as triumphs.55

The rabbit out of the hat is a short poem by Martial celebrating a new

Temple of Fortuna Redux (“Fortune the Home-Bringer”) erected by his

patron the emperor Domitian after his return (hence “Home-Bringer”)

from wars in Germany, and a new arch to go with it nearby. The poem

opens with the temple built on what was “till now an open space”; and

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then Martial turns to the arch “standing exultant over subjugated na-

tions . . . with twin chariots numbering many an elephant”; it is, as the

poet insists, “a gate (porta) worthy of the emperor’s triumphs” and a

fitting “entrance way to the city of Mars.” Where exactly was this tem-

ple? The temptation to see it as a reconstruction of an old Temple of

Fortuna that stood near the Porta Carmentalis has proved almost irre-

sistible (despite the fact that Martial strongly suggests that his temple

was entirely new and built on open ground, not a reconstruction). Be-

cause if that were the case, the adjacent arch could be seen as a rebuild of

the porta triumphalis, this time as a free-standing structure.56

Why stretch the argument to such tenuous lengths? Because if the

theory is correct, the pay-off is rich. For the poem describes this arch in

some detail, as topped by a pair of chariots pulled by elephants, plus a

golden figure of the emperor. This can be matched up not only to an

image on a Domitianic coin but also to an elephant-topped arch in vari-

ous scenes in later Roman commemorative sculpture. In other words,

the porta triumphalis which risked being a hazy phenomenon, docu-

mented allusively by a couple of ancient writers and of entirely uncer-

tain form, has not merely been located but been given concrete form be-

fore our very eyes.57

We may judge these arguments and identifications a brilliant series of

deductions, a perilous house of cards, or a tissue of (at best) half truths

and (at worst) outright misrepresentations and misreadings. But im-

pressed or not, we will find it hard to reconcile this reconstruction of the

triumphal gate and its location with the single surviving piece of ancient

literary evidence that provides an explicit context for the gate in the to-

pography of the city. For, if we return to Josephus, we find that he gives

clear directions to it in the itinerary taken by Vespasian and Titus at the

start of their procession. After addressing the assembled company in

the Porticus of Octavia, Vespasian “went back to the gate which took

its name from the fact that triumphs always pass through it.” It is dif-

ficult to see how anyone could describe movement from the Porticus to

the Porta Carmentalis as “going back,” when the start of the journey had

been further north near the Temple of Isis.58 The text would seem to in-

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dicate that the gate was, as several earlier scholars suggested, “back”

toward the beginning of the route that Vespasian and Titus had taken

from the Isiac temple. Turning the Porta Carmentalis into the porta

triumphalis demands sidelining this particular detail of Josephus’

account.59

Whatever we decide about the gate, we must still face the question of

just how accurate a template in general the road map provided by

Josephus is. In particular, how correct is the common assumption that

Josephus’ route reflects the traditional pattern of behavior if not of all

triumphing generals (what happened before the definition of the early

city wall and its gates must be anyone’s guess) then at least of those from

the mid-Republic on? Filippo Coarelli takes a strong line in his own in-

fluential attempt to plot the route, claiming that Vespasian and Titus

were “preoccupied with following exactly the forms of the most ancient

ritual.”60 Josephus certainly, as Coarelli points out, glosses the porta

triumphalis as the gate through which triumphal processions “always”

pass; and he writes of Vespasian uttering the “customary” prayers.

Leaving aside the question of how on earth Josephus knew what was

customary (so far as we know the last triumph had been some twenty-

five years earlier and Josephus had been in Judaea anyway), it takes only

a moment’s reflection to see that this was not a traditional triumph, fol-

lowing the most ancient rules, at all.

Not only was the culminating location of the ceremony, the Temple

of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, still a pile of rubble after its complete de-

struction during the recent civil war (the final sacrifices must have been

carried out amidst the devastation).61 But also, unless we are to imagine

that both Vespasian and Titus had carefully avoided the center of the

city—the Palatine and Forum—since their arrival back in Rome from

the East (and all the evidence, Josephus included, is that they had not),

then, like other triumphing emperors, they had certainly flouted the re-

publican tradition that the general should remain outside the pomerium

until the ceremony.62 As anthropologists have long since shown, per-

forming a ritual “just as our ancestors have always done” is never exactly

that. It is always a mixture of scrupulous attention to precedent, conve-

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101

nient amnesia, and the “invention of tradition.” The triumph of 71

can have been no different; though it is now impossible for us, given

the evidence we have (and it may well have been just as tricky for

Josephus), to disentangle the various constituent strands of innovation

and conservatism.

SIGNIFICANT DEVIATIONS

Similar issues undermine most attempts to map the rest of the trium-

phal route (and indeed to reconstruct the ceremony as a whole). From

the point the procession goes through the triumphal gate and on through

“the theaters” (and which theaters, of course, depends on where you put

the gate), there is no narrative such as Josephus provides, and no clear

markers on the ground. Some commemorative arches were probably

planned with proximity to the procession in mind, some equally cer-

tainly were not (and it is not always easy to decide which falls into which

category). The title via triumphalis, which used to be attributed to the

modern Via S. Gregorio, running between the Colosseum and the great

fountain known as the Septizodium (see Plan), is an entirely modern

coinage. In antiquity itself via triumphalis was actually the name given

to a road outside the city, on the right bank of the Tiber, leading to

south Etruria (and its connection with the ceremony of triumph, if

any, is a matter of guesswork).63 Essentially, the method that has been

adopted in tracing the route is one of connecting the dots, that is, plot-

ting all the scattered topographical references to points on any trium-

phal procession, at any period and in any author, and then drawing a

line between them, on the assumption that the triumph took a single or-

thodox route throughout Roman history, notwithstanding the changing

face of the city’s monuments and other new buildings.

One dot goes in the Forum Boarium, where the statue of Hercules

stood; according to Pliny, it was dressed up in triumphal costume on the

days of the procession. Another dot pinpoints the Circus Maximus, for

Plutarch writes of the people watching the triumph of Aemilius Paullus

“in the horse-racing stadia, which Romans call ‘circuses.’” These are usu-

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ally taken to be the Circus Flaminius at the start of the procession,

though it is not mentioned by Josephus, and the Circus Maximus,

which is what Josephus may have meant by the “theaters” that gave the

crowds “a better view.”64 Add to these locations the references to trium-

phal processions on the Sacra Via (or “sacred way”), which led some-

how—its exact path and extent is disputed—between the lower slopes of

the Palatine into and perhaps through the Forum; the story of Julius

Caesar’s anger when one of the tribunes did not rise to his feet when his

procession passed the “tribunes’” benches (near the senate house); and

the need sometimes to drop off prisoners for execution at the carcer at

the foot of the Capitoline.65 Join all these points together and it is easy

enough to trace a route round the city and up to the Temple of Jupiter

on the Capitol, such as the one marked out on our Plan (see p. 335).

The result is by no means implausible as a ceremonial route, though

several scholars have felt that at something less than 4 kilometers it

would have been hardly long enough for the number of participants and

the quantity of booty that is sometimes reported. Ernst Künzl, for exam-

ple, compares it with the Rose-Monday procession in Mainz—where,

in the year in which he observed it, some six thousand participants,

one hundred tractors and other motor vehicles, and almost four hun-

dred horses occupied a good 7 kilometers. By contrast, just one day of

Aemilius Paullus’ extravaganza in 167 bce is said in one report to have

included 2,700 wagonloads of captured weapons alone, never mind the

soldiers and captives and booty on display.66 But beyond such practical

difficulties (which might always be taken as a further hint that the fig-

ures reported are wildly exaggerated), one final puzzling reference to the

triumphal route shines a terrifyingly clear light onto modern assump-

tions, and modern disputes, about the ceremony as a whole.

According to Suetonius, “As Caesar rode through the Velabrum on

the day of his Gallic triumph [46 bce], the axle of his chariot broke and

he was all but thrown out.” This story appears to be matched in the

account of Dio, who refers to the incident taking place “in front of the

Temple of Fortune [or Felicitas] built by Lucullus.”67 The location of

that temple is not otherwise known, and no archaeological traces have

Constructions and Reconstructions

103

been identified; but the combination of these references appears to lo-

cate it in “the Velabrum,” the valley between the Capitoline and the Pal-

atine that joins the Forum to the Forum Boarium. So far, so good. But

what was Caesar doing riding through the Velabrum? It is at first sight

a puzzling detour from the generally accepted route I have sketched

out. Two main solutions have been proposed. The first is that Caesar’s

triumph was taking a shorter route into the Forum. This involves imag-

ining that there were at least two possible triumphal itineraries: a long

version that went through the Circus Maximus then circled the Palatine

and made its way back to the Forum by the Sacra Via; and a much

shorter version that went directly down through the Velabrum into the

Forum. On this occasion, with a show of uncharacteristic modesty and

restraint, Caesar was taking the abbreviated path.68

The other argues precisely the reverse: namely, that all triumphs must

have gone this way. The standard route, instead of making its way di-

rectly from the Porta Carmentalis to the Circus Maximus through the

Forum Boarium, must have turned left down the street known as the

Vicus Iugarius as far as the Forum, then retraced its steps back up the

street on the other side of the Velabrum (the Vicus Tuscus) and then on

to the Circus Maximus. The presence of an Arch of Tiberius at the point

(probably) where the Vicus Iugarius meets the Forum is taken to sup-

port this version of the route.69

This second solution invests heavily in the idea of the conservatism of

Roman ritual. According to this line, it is inconceivable that any proces-

sional route in a religious system “as rigid and conservative as the Ro-

man state religion” could ever have varied: if Caesar took this path, then

so must have all triumphing generals from time immemorial.70 But more

than that, the very peculiarity of this detour down the Velabrum is itself

taken as proof of just how fossilized Roman ritual was. By the late Re-

public the Velabrum was a bustling commercial and residential zone,

but in the days of the early city it was believed to have been an un-

drained marsh. Any triumphing general wanting to complete a circuit of

the city before the sixth century bce (when the area was supposed to

have been drained) would have been prevented from proceeding straight

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across the marsh in this part of the city and would have been forced to

take a detour that clung to the sides of the valley. Caesar’s route then, so

the argument goes, shows us just how obsessively the topography of

early Rome was preserved in the ritual practice of later periods.71

The paradox of this apparently precious piece of evidence about Caesar’s

accident as he was riding through the Velabrum is that it is used to jus-

tify two completely contradictory claims about “the triumphal route”—

first, that the route could vary, with more than one possible itinerary

through the city, and second, that it was rigidly fixed, reflecting even in

the historical period the topographical constraints of the archaic city.

But this story has an even more surprising sting in the tail than that.

Never mind the problem that recent geological analysis suggests that the

Velabrum had not actually been a permanent bog since the neolithic pe-

riod.72 In our scholarly eagerness to follow Caesar down the Velabrum,

we have generally failed to ask if that is exactly where Suetonius claims

that he went. In fact, Suetonius’ Latin almost certainly means nothing of

the sort.

The phrase in question, Velabrum praetervehens, is usually translated

as “riding through” the Velabrum. This is not an impossible translation,

but all the same the verb praetervehor would be an odd choice to indicate

a route down through the Velabrum. The word is commonly used for

riding or sailing past something, even skirting or avoiding it.73 In this

case, a glance at the map would suggest that Caesar was not going

through or down the Velabrum at all but skirting or going past it—keeping it on his left, in other words—as he made straight (let’s suppose)

from the Campus Martius across the Forum Boarium to the Circus

Maximus. In which case, we are dealing neither with an alternative tri-

umphal route here nor with a curious detour fossilized in the itinerary

from the remote Roman past. Much more plausibly, the “Velabrum

loop” is the product of some loose reading of the Latin, over-enthusiasti-

cally interpreted.74

The fact is that we cannot map with certainty the route of any indi-

vidual triumphal procession; still less can we reconstruct “the” triumphal

route or even be certain that such a thing existed. No ancient author

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105

refers to any such fixed itinerary; the closest we come to that is Josephus’

remark about triumphs “always” passing through the (triumphal) gate.

That said, few students of Roman ritual would imagine that the tri-

umphal itinerary was invented completely new each time. After all,

what “ritualizes” ritual is the prescripted nature of its actions; and the

constraints of the topography of the city itself, combined with the fixed

endpoint on the Capitoline, the casual literary references, even the murky

tradition on the porta triumphalis, are enough to give us some idea of a

likely framework within which to plot the triumph’s layout.

The route sketched out on our map may not be too far from that

taken by some—maybe many—triumphs. But any more detailed recon-

struction than this must rest on all kinds of different imponderables,

and on different preconceptions. What degree of improvisation flour-

ished under the convenient alibi of ritual conservatism? How far did the

monumentalization of the city center shift (or, alternatively, fossilize)

the ritual route? What other factors prompted change or adaptation in

the itinerary? What role, for example, did the choices of individual gen-

erals play? Or the sheer amount of booty that had to be dragged through

the streets? For none of these crucial questions can we now do much

more than guess the answer or adduce more or less plausible parallels in

other cultures. Overall, as I have already noted, the main message from

the comparative evidence of more recent ritual traditions is that there is

likely to be much more innovation in the ceremony than any claims of

rigid ritual conservatism (whether vaunted by the Romans or their mod-

ern observers) would appear to allow. The triumph is likely to have been

much more conservative in theory than it was in practice.

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION

This close look at just two aspects of the procession has been intended

to show just how perilous is the process of reconstruction that lies be-

hind what we think we know about the triumph. It has been a lesson in

the limitations of our knowledge of the ceremony as it was actually per-

formed. But the issue is not simply one of the inadequacy of our histori-

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cal “sources,” as we like to term them (and in so doing, painting ancient

texts as the passive object of modern historical inquiry, rather than one

voluble and loaded side of a difficult dialogue). As I have repeatedly

stressed, the triumph is the most lavishly documented Roman ritual

there is. If this lavish documentation fails to answer convincingly the

questions we are setting before it, then the chances are that we are asking

the wrong questions. However seductive the question of “what hap-

pened on the day,” this is not necessarily the question that produces the

most telling answers from the range of texts and images that we now

have: texts, in particular, that are recreating triumphs of centuries earlier,

fantasizing about imaginary ceremonies, or deploying the ritual (as we

saw in the case of Tertullian and the slave) as a way of thinking about

other aspects of Roman culture and ideology.

In the next four chapters, I shall therefore change my focus back to

the triumph and its conventions as a major part of the Roman cultural

economy, the Roman imaginary. Looking first at the victims and spoils,

then at the triumphing general himself, I shall not be turning my back

entirely on the practice of the ceremony and the hard material evidence;

wherever possible, I shall attempt to throw light on “what happened.”

But for the most part I shall be dealing with a richer subject. What did

the triumph and its participant signify in Roman culture? What did

“Romans”—and inevitably that shorthand often comes down to “elite

Romans of the first century bce through the second century ce,” think

when they thought “triumph”?

c h a p t e r

IV

Captives on Parade

THUSNELDA STEALS THE SHOW

One of the highlights of the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873 was a vast

new canvas by the German painter Karl von Piloty entitled Thusnelda in

the Triumphal Procession of Germanicus (Fig. 20). Though this is to many

modern eyes an uncomfortably overblown nineteenth-century extrava-

ganza, measuring some five by seven meters, it was chosen as the work of

art to represent Germany by the international jury then in charge of se-

lecting “the outstanding creations of all nations” to adorn the show.

Plaudits soon followed. It was a masterpiece, as one critic enthused,

which showed the capacity of modern art “to work on our deepest feel-

ings”—outclassing, as a history painting, even Rubens and Veronese.1

The painting takes as its subject the triumph of the Julio-Claudian

prince Germanicus celebrated on May 26, 17 ce, after his military suc-

cesses against various German tribes. His campaigns had been launched

in retaliation for one of the most resounding “barbarian” victories over

the occupying power: the “Varian disaster” of 9 ce (as it is usually called,

from a Roman perspective), when three legions under Publius

Quinctilius Varus were more or less annihilated in the Teutoburg Forest.

Germanicus had certainly done something to restore Roman fortunes,

notching up a few victories against the insurgents, taking a handful of

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 20:

K. T. von Piloty, Thusnelda in the Triumphal Procession of Germanicus, 1873.

Spotlit in the center of the painting is the German heroine Thusnelda, wife of the rebel leader Arminius, under the disgruntled eye of the emperor Tiberius watching from his dais.

The triumphing general himself is only just coming into view in the background.

prominent captives (including Thusnelda, the wife of Arminius, the

German hero of the “Varian disaster”), and recovering two of the legion-

ary standards lost with Varus. Yet Arminius himself was still at large

and inflicting serious damage on the Roman forces. The triumph was

a potentially awkward celebration, since it was far from clear that

Germanicus had definitively won the war.2

Not that any such awkwardness necessarily impinged on the splen-

dor of the occasion or of its celebration in history. Velleius Paterculus,

always as eager to support the imperial dynasty as some other writers

were to undermine it, praised Tiberius for laying on a triumphal specta-

cle “which matched the importance of Germanicus’ achievements.” At

least one roughly contemporary calendar of festivals, inscribed on stone,

Captives on Parade

109

appears to have memorialized May 26 as the day on which “Germanicus

Caesar was borne into the city in triumph,” while coins issued under the

emperor Gaius (Germanicus’ son) depicted the young prince on his tri-

umphal chariot, and on the reverse blazoned the slogan “Standards Re-

covered. Germans Defeated.”3

The most detailed surviving eulogy of the ceremony is given by the

geographer Strabo, who refers to Germanicus’ “most brilliant triumph”

and then proceeds to list the famous captives on parade in the proces-

sion, including: Thusnelda and her three-year-old son, Thumelicus; her

brother Segimuntus, the chief of the Cherusci tribe; Libes, a notable

priest of another tribe, the Chatti; and an impressive roster of other Ger-

man leaders, their wives, and children. Only one German, Strabo ex-

plains, found a different place: Segestes, Thusnelda’s father and a Roman

collaborator, “was present at the triumph over his nearest and dearest, as

guest of honor.”4

Tacitus, however, strikes a discordant note, with a characteristically

cynical narrative of the triumph. It is a nice reminder that the very same

ceremony can for some observers be a glorious celebration, for others

a hypocritical sham. Tacitus opens his account of the year 15 with impli-

cations, already, of impropriety: “A triumph was decreed to Germanicus,

while the war was still going on. ”5 Precedents can be found for such a premature anticipation of victory.6 And, in any case, exactly what counted

as the definitive end of a war must often have been harder to deter-

mine at the time than it appears with the benefit of hindsight. In fact,

the declaration of a triumph might more than once have been a use-

ful device for drawing a final line under an uncertainly completed cam-

paign, asserting—rather than merely recognizing—its end. But Tacitus

presents the train of events and the culminating procession as yet an-

other example of the corruption of imperial rule, and in particular of

Tiberius’ jealousy of the dashing young prince and of his attempts to

rein in Germanicus’ success under the veil of empty honor.

“The procession,” he writes, “displayed spoils and captives, replicas

(simulacra) of mountains, of rivers and of battles.” But it was not only

the geographical features on show that were a pretense ( simulcra in the

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pejorative sense). So too the whole victory being celebrated: “Seeing

that he had been forbidden to finish off (conficere) the war, it was taken as finished (pro confecto). ” The very success of the sham spelled danger. “The impressive sight of the general, and his five children who

shared his chariot, riveted the attention of the spectators. But this

concealed an underlying anxiety, as they reflected that popularity had

not turned out well for his father, Drusus, that his uncle Marcellus

had died at an early age despite the passionate support of the plebs, and

that the enthusiasms of the Roman people were short-lived and ill-

omened.”7

Piloty’s painting combines the accounts of Tacitus and Strabo. The

scene on the imperial dais echoes all the Tacitean misgivings. A distinc-

tively clad German, who must be Segestes, can hardly bear to watch as

his family members walk by as captives. Tiberius himself, flanked by his

sinister right-hand man Sejanus, looks decidedly grumpy—if not half

asleep—at having to sit through the lavish celebration, sham or not. (It

is, of course, in the very nature of successful shams that they merge into

what they are pretending—but, at the same time, trying not—to be.)

Only the imperial ladies seem to be having a good time, gawping at the

exotic display.

But, unlike the image conjured by Tacitus, all eyes are not on the tri-

umphing prince. He is only just entering the scene, a small figure in the

background, half in shadow, crammed into the chariot with his five

youngsters. The foreground is dominated instead by the captives listed

by Strabo. The priest Libes is dragged along by a leering Roman soldier

who tugs at the old man’s beard. An assortment of German women look

alternately fearsomely wild or resigned to their fate. But unquestionably

the star of the show is the central, spotlit figure of Thusnelda, captive

wife of the rebel Arminius, with little Thumelicus at her side. She is

passing directly in front of the emperor and cuts a fine contrast with

Tiberius: for it is she who behaves as a proud monarch, tall and un-

bowed; the ruler of the Roman world is hunched up on his dais, with his

minders, merely a bit-part in the grand display. Here the triumphal vic-

tim has become the victor; all eyes are on her.

Captives on Parade

111

Piloty is playing with one of the commonest tropes of nineteenth-

century nationalism, taking the most prominent victims of Roman con-

quest and transforming them into heroes of the nation-states of Europe.

Boudicca, Vercingetorix, Thusnelda, and Arminius (“Herman the Ger-

man”) were all conscripted into the patriotic pantheon of their home

countries in northern Europe. But, knowingly or not, Piloty is also pick-

ing up key themes in Roman commentaries on the celebrations of tri-

umph: that the gaze of the audience was perilously hard to control; that

the general risked being up-staged by his exotic victims; that the noble

(or pitiful) captives might always steal the show. At the center of the pa-

rade lay a dynamic tension—a competition for the eyes of the specta-

tor—between victor and victim (see Frontispiece).

Most modern studies of the triumph have focused on the success-

ful general. This chapter offers a new perspective by concentrating on

the defeated. It aims to explore the victims’ role in the culture of the

triumph: from the (not so) simple facts of their number, identity, and

ultimate fate to the moral lessons they had to teach and their potential

rivalry in the economy of the spectacle with the general himself.

THE VICTIM’S POINT OF VIEW?

The second poem in Ovid’s collection of Amores (Love Poems) written in

the late 20s bce opens with the poet complaining of a sleepless night,

tossing and turning. The diagnosis is soon clear: our poet has become a

victim of the fire-power of Love (“Yes, Cupid’s slender arrows have

lodged in my heart”). Resistance is futile, and indeed will only make

matters worse. So he opts for unconditional surrender and (as we have

already glimpsed in Chapter 2) takes his due place as a captive in Cupid’s

triumphal procession.

So I’m coming clean, Cupid: here I am, your latest victim,

Hands raised in surrender. Do what you like with me.

No need for military action. I want terms, an armistice—

You wouldn’t look good defeating an unarmed foe.

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Put on a wreath of myrtle, yoke up your mother’s pigeons—

Your stepfather himself will lend you a fine

Chariot: mount it, drive in triumph through the cheering

Rabble, skillfully whipping your birds ahead,

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—displaying my captive mind—

With Conscience, hands bound behind her, and Modesty, and all

Love’s

Other enemies, whipped into line.

You’ll have them all scared cold, while the populace goes crazy,

Waves to its conquering hero, splits its lungs.

And what an escort—the Blandishment Corps, the Illusion

And Passion Brigade, your regular bodyguard:

These are the troops you employ to conquer men and immortals—

Without them, why, you’re nothing, a snail unshelled.

How proudly your mother will applaud your triumphal progress

From high Olympus, shower roses on your head;

Wings bright-bejewelled, jewels starring your hair, you’ll

Ride in a car of gold, all gold yourself.

What’s more, if I know you, even on this occasion

You’ll burn the crowd up, break hearts galore all round:

With the best will in the world, dear, you can’t keep your arrows

idle—

They’re so hot, they scorch the crowd as you go by.

Your procession will match that of Bacchus, after he’d won the

Ganges

Basin (though he was drawn by tigers, not birds).

So then, since I am doomed to be part of your— sacré triumph,

Why waste victorious troops on me now?

Take a hint from the campaign record of your cousin, Augustus

Caesar— his conquests became protectorates.8

Captives on Parade

113

This is a wonderfully evocative image of a triumph: the roaring crowds;

the victims chained and bound; the general’s mother looking on, proudly

applauding as she scatters rose petals over his head; the soldiers and

comrades on whom the success depended; and of course the victor him-

self in his splendid chariot and rich ceremonial dress. (Cupid here sports

not triumphal laurel but a wreath of myrtle, as worn in the “lesser” cere-

mony of ovatio—appropriately enough, as myrtle was the sacred plant of

Venus, and perhaps a hint that the erotic victory over Ovid had anyway

been too easy to deserve a full triumph.)

At the same time, the poem is, as many critics have pointed out,

dazzlingly subversive in a variety of ways. The most public celebration of

Roman military prowess is playfully (and pointedly) conscripted into

the celebration of private passion. The role of the lover, often presented

in Latin poetry as a soldier in Love’s army ( militat omnis amans, “every lover is a soldier,” as Ovid’s own slogan from later in this book has it) is

overturned, to make the lover the defeated victim, not the comrade, of

Cupid.9 And as the final couplet must prompt us to reflect, the relation-

ship of this imaginary triumph to the military celebrations of the em-

peror himself raises awkward questions: how far are we to see the figure

of the triumphant Augustus (“Caesar”) in this Cupid? Augustus and Cu-

pid were, after all, as Ovid insists, following the logic of the emperor’s

claimed descent from Venus herself— cognati, “cousins.”10

But the poem offers something rather more unexpected. Frustrating

as it is to admit it, this clever allegorizing, this manipulation of the con-

ventions of the ceremony to explore the idea of erotic capture, must

count as the closest we get to a surviving first-person account from a tri-

umphal victim. Of course, that is not very close at all. Ovid’s attempt

here to rethink the predicament of the poet-lover by imagining what it

might have felt like on the wrong side of the triumph was a quin-

tessentially Roman fantasy; it was one of the games only victors could

play. The same goes, and even more so, for the motivations and reac-

tions ascribed to bona fide historical captives by various Roman writers.

However tempting it might be to read these as if they gave us the vic-

tim’s own perspective on the triumph, they are inevitably Roman proj-

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ections of those motivations and reactions onto the mute victim. They

are more an exercise in ventriloquism than reportage—a different angle

on the ceremony, maybe, but still the victor’s story. Characters such as

Thusnelda and the rest did not find their own triumphal voice, in sur-

viving literature at least, until centuries after the Roman Empire had

collapsed.

THE CLEOPATRAN SOLUTION

The classic case of this ventriloquism is the reported reaction of that

most famous of all triumphal refuseniks, Cleopatra. Her suicide, after the death of Mark Antony, was the stuff of ancient, no less than modern,

legend. Plutarch’s account of the deadly asp(s) hidden in the basket of

figs has—despite Plutarch’s own doubts about the story and thanks,

in large part, to Shakespeare’s reworking of it in Antony and Cleopatra—

become canonical. And the motive for the suicide has become equally

enshrined in ancient and modern literary tradition. As Horace insisted

in his “Cleopatra Ode,” written soon after the event, the Egyptian

queen killed herself because she was not prepared to face the humiliation

of appearing in a Roman triumph; she preferred to cheat her enemy

Octavian (later Augustus) of the pleasure of parading her through the

streets of Rome.

Fiercer she was in the death she chose, as though

she did not wish to cease to be a queen, taken to Rome

on the galleys of savage Liburnians

to be a humble woman in a proud triumph.11

We read the same explanation in Plutarch, Florus, and Dio, and it pro-

vided Shakespeare with Cleopatra’s memorable line to the dying An-

tony: “Not th’imperious show / Of the full-fortuned Caesar ever shall /

Be brooch’d with me.” Livy too put similar defiant words in her mouth.

Though this portion of his history of Rome no longer survives in full, an

ancient commentator on Horace quotes from its account of the queen’s

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115

final days: “She used to repeat, again and again, ‘I shall not be led in tri-

umph.’”12 These are vivid vignettes and memorable slogans. And it is

tempting indeed to imagine, as many modern critics have, that they of-

fer us some direct insight into the psychopathology of a notable captive

and her reactions to the victory and its parade.

But it is not so simple as that. Partly, the bizarre details of the suicide

account are decidedly unlikely: Plutarch and Dio were not the only writ-

ers to have had their doubts about the asp—or the “Egyptian cobra,” in

modern zoological terminology—and to suggest alternative versions;

modern scholars too have queried the plausibility of many aspects of the

tale. “The Egyptian cobra is about two metres long and hard to conceal

in a basket (especially if there were two of them),” as one recent com-

mentator on Plutarch puzzles.13 Cleopatra may not, in any case, have

been as eager to take her own life as the standard story suggests. As many

military victors at all periods have found, some of the most prominent

captives are much more trouble than they are worth to keep alive, too

“hot,” glamorous, or disruptive to risk bringing back home. Octavian

may have publicly regretted the absence of the queen from his triumphal

parade; but many modern historians have suspected that, at the very

least, he gave her every opportunity to take her own life, even if he did

not actually arrange her murder.14

Even more to the point, however, is the fact that the tale of suicide

preempting the appearance in the triumphal procession is not restricted

to this one famous incident. It is one of the commonest tropes of Ro-

man triumphal narratives. When Mithradates decided to die rather than

face Pompey’s Roman triumph, he said to the officer chosen for the task,

so Appian reports: “Your strong arm has done me great service in strug-

gles against my enemies. It will do me the greatest service if you would

now make an end of me, in danger as I am of being led off to a trium-

phal procession after being for so many years the absolute monarch of so

great a realm.”15

Likewise runs the story of Vibius Virrius, rebel leader in the city

of Capua, which had rashly sided with Hannibal during Rome’s war

against Carthage. When defeat appeared inevitable, Virrius persuaded

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some twenty-seven of the Capuan senate to join him in drinking poison.

“I shall not be bound and dragged through the city of Rome as a specta-

cle in a triumph” are the words that Livy put in his mouth.16 There are

hints too that similar sentiments were sometimes ascribed to Zenobia,

the queen of Palmyra, whose territorial expansion in the East (at Rome’s

expense) was quashed by the emperor Aurelian in 272 ce. Various stories

were told of what happened to Zenobia after her defeat. According to

some writers she was paraded in Aurelian’s triumph; but the historian

Zosimus records the tradition that she died on the way back to Rome,

either from illness or self-imposed starvation. Again, we are meant to in-

fer, this might have been suicide to preempt the humiliation of the tri-

umphal procession.17

An obvious explanation for this series of look-alike incidents is that

they are all reappropriations of the original story of Cleopatra. Zenobia,

in the literary tradition at least, was often seen as a warrior queen closely

on the model of Cleopatra. One ancient biography alleges that she

claimed descent from the Egyptian queen herself, even using some of

the banqueting vessels that had once belonged to Cleopatra, while

dressed—as if to add another anti-Roman queen to her repertoire—

in the cloak of Dido.18 It is hardly surprising that some versions of the

story cast her death too in Cleopatran colors. Appian and Livy were also

writing after Cleopatra’s defeat, even if their subjects, Mithradates and

Virrius, predated her by decades or centuries. It would be a nice exam-

ple of the complexity of triumphal chronology, of the mismatch be-

tween the chronology of the celebrations themselves and that of their

literary representations, to imagine the ancient writers retrojecting a

(true) Cleopatran story back onto earlier captives facing the prospect of

a triumphal parade.

In fact, however, the story of Cleopatra is not the first to suggest

death as an option preferable to a parade through the streets of Rome.

We can trace the idea of defiant suicide back to the late Republic in an

anecdote about Aemilius Paullus and his triumph over the Macedonian

King Perseus in 167 bce. The king is said to have begged not to be pa-

raded in the triumphal procession; Paullus to have taunted him in reply

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117

with the “Cleopatran solution.” The matter had been, the victor ob-

served, in Perseus’ power; if he had wished to avoid that disgrace, he

could always have killed himself. We have no reason to suppose that this

is a more genuine exchange than any of the words ascribed to triumphal

victims. But that is not the point. For while this particular anecdote is

recounted twice by Plutarch in the early second century ce, it also used

by Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes (Tusculan Disputations) as an

example of how one might escape from suffering—almost fifteen years

before the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium.19

We are dealing then with something more significant in the long his-

tory of Roman triumphal culture than an elusive glimpse of a genuine

captive’s perspective on his or her own predicament. Whatever those

feelings were, the repeated stress on the suicide of the noble prisoner is

part of that ambivalent power struggle between victor and victim that

lies embedded at the center of the triumph and its representations. On

the one hand, so the narrative logic runs, Cleopatra—or Mithradates, or

whoever— did snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by the (reported)

act of suicide. Their death deprived their conqueror of the clearest proof

of his victory. As one recent account has it, “Cleopatra’s suicide . . . de-

nied to the triumph of 29 bc her physical presence as an assured token of

. . . submission”; the female prisoner thwarted the ambitions of the

general, trumped his military might, by removing her body from his

control.20

On the other hand, these stories also celebrated the inexorable power

of Roman conquest and triumph. As Paullus pointedly reminded Perseus,

there was no escape but death; this was a zero-sum game in which for

the victim the price of reclaiming victory was self-annihilation. This was

a logic that lurked also behind those triumphal processions in which the

living prisoners were on show. They offered not only proof of their own

submission; in the high stakes of triumphal competition they also dem-

onstrated the capacity of Roman power to serve up its victims to the

public gaze. The bottom line of the “Cleopatran solution” is that Ro-

man power correlated with its ability to parade those proudly defeated

monarchs in the center of Rome itself; their only escape, death.

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FACTS AND FIGURES

As the complexities of these apparently simple stories must hint, many

of the basic “facts” and practical details about triumphal prisoners are

hard, if not impossible, to pin down. Even for triumphs in relatively

well-documented periods, the question of how many captives were on

display on any occasion is difficult to answer with any confidence. An-

cient figures—especially, but not only, when they concern battle casual-

ties or other tokens of Roman military success—are notoriously unreli-

able.21 But very few of the ancient literary accounts hazard a number at

all, except (suspiciously) for a handful of early triumphs, where we read

of round numbers in the thousands.

The maximum is the 8,000 claimed by Eutropius (writing more than

half a millennium after the event) for the prisoners paraded in 356 bce in

a triumph over the Etruscans. This is followed by Dionysius’ total of

5,500 for a procession at the start of the fifth century bce and Livy’s re-

cord of 4,000 captives at the triumph of Marcus Valerius Corvus over

the town of Satricum in 346 bce, who were subsequently sold.22 Ac-

counts of later triumphs, if they quantify the prisoners at all, tend to re-

fer only to “lots of them” (as in Appian’s account of a “host” of captives

and pirates in Pompey’s parade in 61). Occasionally they note the com-

plete absence of captives on display. So it was in 167 bce, for example, at

the triumph of Cnaeus Octavius, who had scored a naval victory in the

war against King Perseus. “Minus captives, minus spoils,” as Livy re-

marks: Octavius had been upstaged by the triumph of Aemilius Paullus

which took place the day before, with its impressive complement of

booty and prisoners.23

The usual assumption—based, as so often, on common sense, backed

up by passing references in ancient authors where they happen to fit—is

that, by the time the Romans were fighting at any distance from home,

only a selection of those captured in war were normally brought back

to decorate a triumph. The majority would have been disposed of, most

commonly sold off as slaves, near the war zone and would have figured

in the triumph only in the form of the cash their sale raised.24 The

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119

general would have had to strike a balance between creating a powerful

impression on the day and the expense, inconvenience, and practical

difficulties of transporting, feeding, guarding, and managing a large

number of unwilling captives. In fact, we have no idea how any of those

arrangements were handled. Where, for example, were the mass of pris-

oners kept before the triumph? This must have been an especially press-

ing question when, as often in the late Republic, a period of months or

even years elapsed between the victory and the parade itself.

A strategic selection of some of the most impressive captives is cer-

tainly the model suggested by Josephus, writing of the aftermath of Ti-

tus’ suppression of the Jewish revolt. He refers to “the tallest and most

beautiful” of the young prisoners being reserved for the triumph, while

the others (after the hard core or the particularly villainous had been put

to death) were sent to the mines and amphitheaters or sold into slavery.

Scipio Aemilianus, too, according to Appian, picked out fifty of the sur-

vivors of the siege of Numantia for his triumph of 132 bce (though these

could hardly have been fine specimens, given the terrible conditions of

the siege); the rest were sold.25

Other ancient writers, however, refer to the large-scale transport of

prisoners to Rome: Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus’ captive Sardinians in

175 bce, who were so numerous (and therefore cheap) that, according to

one ancient theory, they gave rise to the puzzling Roman catchphrase

“Sardi venales!” “Sardinians for sale!” Or the full complement of prison-

ers who, Polybius implies, were sent to Rome in 225 bce for Lucius

Aemilius Papus’ triumph over the Gauls.26 All kinds of circumstances

might have encouraged a mass display of prisoners; Gracchus, for exam-

ple, may have used the human profits, in the shape of slave captives, to

make up for the absence of rich booty from Sardinia.27

KINGS AND FOREIGNERS

This vagueness over the number of captives put on show—however

frustrating for us—is not a mere lapse on the part of the ancient writers

on whom we depend for our information. They were concerned with

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significantly different issues, in particular with the rank, status, and ex-

otic character of the headline captives. On these topics they offer de-

tailed and specific accounts, even if not always consistent and compati-

ble. Livy, for example, underlined his disagreement with Polybius on the

parade of the Numidian prince Syphax in Scipio Africanus’ triumph of

201 bce. Polybius had claimed that he was exhibited in the procession,

Livy at one point claimed to know better—that Syphax had actually

died at Tibur before the triumph took place.28 Likewise, as we have al-

ready seen, different traditions were handed down of Zenobia’s role in

Aurelian’s triumph: did she die en route to Rome or was she the chief

captive on parade?

What seems to have counted for most, in the written versions of the

Roman triumph at least, was the display of defeated monarchs and their

royal families. Augustus pares this down to its essentials, boasting in his

own account of his Res Gestae (Achievements): “In my triumphs nine

monarchs or children of monarchs were led before my chariot.”29 But

this emphasis on celebrity captives has a long history throughout trium-

phal narratives. In contrast to the austere anonymity of Augustus’ de-

scription (perhaps he was well advised to disguise the fact that two of the

“children of monarchs,” Alexander and Cleopatra [junior], were also

children of a leading Roman senator, Mark Antony), writers often lov-

ingly recorded the resonant names of these high-status prisoners. We

have already seen that the triumph of Pompey in 61 bce was adorned

with a royal family whose names prompted memories of famous past

conflicts between West and East. Livy makes just this point about the

family of King Perseus on display in Aemilius Paullus’ parade in 167 bce.

The two young princes were called, with an eye on the glorious Macedo-

nian past, Philip and Alexander, “tanta nomina” (“such great names”).30

The roll call of these monarchs, princes, princesses, and “chieftains”

(the belittling title we like to give to the proud kings of “barbarian

tribes”) is an evocative one; it includes Gentius, king of Illyricum, plus

his wife, children, and brother, in the triumph of Lucius Anicius Gallus

in 167 bce (only a few months after Aemilius Paullus’ extravaganza with

King Perseus); Bituitus, king of the Gallic Arverni, in the triumph of

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121

Fabius Maximus in 120; Jugurtha, king of Numidia, and his two sons in

Marius’ triumph in 104; Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s elder sister, young prince

Juba of Mauretania, and the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix in Caesar’s

triumphs in 46.31 And this is not to mention all the vaguer references,

projected as far back as the early Republic, to “the noble captives” in the

procession, “the enemy generals” or “the purple-clad” walking before

the triumphal chariot. “The royal generals, prefects, and nobles, thirty-

two of them, were paraded before the victor’s chariot,” as Livy typically

notes of the celebration of Scipio Asiaticus’ defeat of King Antiochus

in 189 bce. It was even something of a cliché of Roman word play that

triumphs involved the enemy duces (“leaders”) themselves being ducti

(“led” as prisoners) in the victory parade.32

The triumph, as it came to be written up at least, was a key context in

which Rome dramatized the conflict between its own political system—

whether the Republic or the autocratic Principate that officially dis-

avowed the name “monarchy”—and the kings and kingship which char-

acterized so much of the outside world. Of course, many Roman tri-

umphs did not actually celebrate victories over kings; still less did they

have a king on display in the parade. Nevertheless, kings were seen as the

ideal adversaries of Roman military might. They dominated the imagi-

native reconstructions of historical triumphs; and the inscribed trium-

phal Fasti in the Forum specified carefully when the celebration had

boasted a royal victim, by adding the king’s name to the usual formula

of defeat—“de Aetolis et rege Antiocho,” “over the Aetolians and King

Antiochus. ”33 No other category of enemy was picked out in the inscrip-

tion in this way.

Kings also provided an image of triumphal victims that was repeat-

edly reworked in Roman fantasy, humor, and satire. When the younger

Pliny, in the published (and no doubt much embellished) version of the

speech he delivered on taking up his consulship in 100 ce, projects an

image of the emperor Trajan’s future triumph, it is a triumph over

Dacian kings that he calls to mind, with a stress once more on the royal

names. “I can almost see the magnificent names of the enemy leaders—

and the physique which is a match for those names.” He goes on to

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imagine single combat between Trajan and the enemy king, “if any of

those kings would dare to engage with you hand to hand.” (Not so hon-

orable, the behavior of the later emperor Lucius Verus, who is said to

have “brought actors from Syria as if he were bringing a group of kings

to his triumph.”)34 This same focus on triumphal royalty underlies the

quip of Florus about the celebration in 146 bce which followed Metellus

Macedonicus’ victory over Andriscus, an implausible adventurer who

had claimed to be the son and heir of King Perseus of Macedon. The

joke was that he did achieve royal status in the end, for in his defeat “the

Roman people triumphed over him as if over a real king.”35 Unsurpris-

ingly, this stereotype makes its mark on entirely mythic celebrations too.

The Christian writer Lactantius refers to some poem (now lost) on the

triumph of Cupid, on the model perhaps of Ovid’s treatment of that

theme—except that here it is Jupiter, the king of the gods, who is the

chief victim, led in chains in front of the triumphal chariot.36

If not royal, then the best triumphal prisoners were at least exotic and

recognizably foreign. Pompey’s captives in his procession of 61 bce—pi-

rates as well as the Eastern princes and generals—were said to be kitted

out in their native costume. Even better still, literary invention or not,

was the parade of the conquered in the triumph over Zenobia in 274 ce.

As often, the semi-fictional excesses of late Roman biography expose

some important truths at the heart of Roman culture. Here, in the biog-

rapher’s account of Aurelian’s procession, we read first of a marvelous

roster of foreign prisoners: “Blemmyes, Axiomitae, Arabs from Arabia

Felix, Indians, Bactrians, Hiberians, Saracens, Persians, all bearing gifts;

Goths, Alani, Roxolani, Sarmatians, Franks, Suebians, Vandals, Ger-

mans . . . the Palmyrenes, who had survived, the leading men of the city,

and Egyptians too, because of their rebellion.” But something even

better follows.

Statius’ epic fantasy of the mythical Theseus returning to his triumph

with an Amazon victim (and bride) in tow was said to have been played

out on the streets of Rome in the third century ce: “Ten women were

led in the procession, who had been captured fighting in male dress

among the Goths after many others had fallen—these, so a placard

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123

stated, belonged to the race of Amazons.”37 Hardly less exotic is the

glimpse of the victory celebrations after the battle of Actium, the culmi-

nation of the galaxy of Roman history imagined by Virgil on the famous

shield of Aeneas. How far this description draws directly upon the de-

tails of Octavian’s triumphal ceremony conducted in 29 bce, how far it

is a loaded or glamorous fiction, is a matter of dispute. But fiction or

not, it invests heavily in the wide-ranging and exotic origins of the cap-

tives on show, “as disparate in their style of dress and weaponry, as in

their native tongues.” The list includes “the tribe of Nomads and the Af-

ricans in their flowing robes, the Leleges and Carians and arrow-bearing

Gelonians . . . the Morini, most remote of human kind . . . and the wild

Dahae.”38

The obvious point is that the triumph and its captives amounted to a

physical realization of empire and imperialism. As well as the image of

Roman conflicts with monarchy, the procession (or the procession’s

written versions) instantiated the very idea of Roman territorial expan-

sion, its conquest of the globe. The prisoners’ exotic foreignness, at the

heart of the imperial capital, put on show to the people watching the

procession (or reading of it, or hearing tell of it, later) the most tangible

expression you could wish of Rome’s world power. It was a much better

display of Roman success, as Velleius Paterculus writes of the emperor

Tiberius’ triumph in which he took part in 12 ce, to have the enemy ex-

hibited in the procession than killed on the field of battle.39

But there is more to it than that. The emphasis on the foreignness of

the enemy prisoners goes hand in hand with the equally significant

point that Romans themselves belonged only on the winning side of this

ceremony. The logic was that the triumph was a celebration of victory

over external enemies only; that a triumph in civil war, with Roman citi-

zens dragged along where the exotic barbarian foe should be, was a con-

tradiction in terms. As Lucan has it, at the start of his epic poem on the

war between Caesar and Pompey, civil war could, in a sense, be defined

as “war that would have no triumphs.”40 Yet, Lucan’s text already hints

that this is precisely one of the fault lines of Roman triumphal culture:

for, as his readers would have known, victory in the civil war recounted

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in his poem was, in effect, celebrated in Caesar’s triumph in 46 bce—

even if disguised under the convenient rubric of “foreign” wars in Africa

and elsewhere.

While none of Caesar’s Roman adversaries were themselves on display

(the leading ones were dead anyway), paintings of several of them in

their last moments were put on parade. According to Appian, Caesar re-

frained only from exhibiting an image of Pompey, as he was “much

missed by all,” while for the rest he “took care not to inscribe the names

of any Romans,” on the grounds that such display of the names of fellow

citizens was “unseemly . . . shameful and ill-omened”—a telling detail,

given the stress we have already noted on the resonant names of promi-

nent captives.41

Cynics might have observed that the roll call of exotic captives in Vir-

gil’s version of Octavian’s triumph was a loaded cover-up for the fact

that there too civil war (against Antony) lay immediately behind the

celebrations—just as the hand-picked Jewish prisoners and the Jewish

spoils in the triumph of Vespasian and Titus were a useful disguise for

the defeat of the Roman enemies in the civil war that put the new

Flavian dynasty on the throne in 70 ce.42

BEFORE THE CHARIOT?

How exactly the prisoners were displayed in triumphal processions is

largely a matter of guesswork and presumably varied over time, accord-

ing to occasion and to different types of enemy. We find several refer-

ences to prisoners appearing in chains, while Appian thinks it worthy of

note that none of the host of captives in Pompey’s triumph in 61 were

bound.43 Some are said to have walked in the parade; others—including

some of the enemy generals in Vespasian and Titus’ triumph—were car-

ried on biers or floats; yet others, the most elite cadre of captives, rode in

wagons or chariots (of different types, finely calibrated to match the pre-

cise rank of captive, according to one Roman scholar). But by whatever

method the victims traveled, ancient writers are almost unanimous in

identifying their place in the procession: ante currum, “in front of the

Captives on Parade

125

general’s chariot.” Apart from a rogue line of Lucan that has the prison-

ers in Caesar’s triumph follow the chariot, this phrase, in fact, is repeated

so often that it seems almost the standard term in ancient triumphal jar-

gon—both in literary texts and inscriptions—for leading a victim “in a

triumphal procession.”44

It is tempting to conclude that the captives, or at least the most cele-

brated among them, were paraded—as Piloty shows his Thusnelda—di-

rectly in front of the triumphing general. And we shall certainly see that

ancient writers sometimes made a good deal of the interplay between

victor and victim that such proximity would imply. But in the only sur-

viving ancient sculpture to represent the overall choreography of a tri-

umphal procession, the layout appears more complex. In the small frieze

that winds its way around the attic storey of the Arch of Trajan at

Beneventum, apparently depicting a procession from the general’s char-

iot to the arrival of the first animals for sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter

(Fig. 21), several groups of prisoners have been identified. Some walk:

one woman carries a baby, another has a child at her side; in front a plac-

ard presumably proclaimed their identity. Others travel in carts and

chariots of different designs: one distinctive pair make their way in a

covered wagon, pulled by oxen; other couples sit chained in horse-

drawn chariots (Fig. 22). All are, in a general sense, “in front of the char-

iot” (everything in this procession is). But they are not clustered to-

gether almost at the victor’s feet, as is so often assumed. In fact, in that

position of greatest honor, or humiliation, we find here some rather un-

distinguished attendants carrying booty and what is thought to be one

of the golden crowns often presented to the general.45

This is another case of the complex interrelationship between visual

imagery, literary representations, and the procession as it took place on

the streets—just as we saw with the puzzling figure of the slave in the

general’s chariot. The temptation to trust its documentary style (Could,

for example, those different types of prisoners’ wagons be tied in to

Porphyrio’s classification of them?) must always be balanced by the sense

that the sculptors were in the business of recreating a moving, perhaps

messy and disorganized procession as a work of art—and one that was to

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

evoke the ceremony around four sides of a monument, in miniature and

12 meters above the ground. In that process, there would have been

strong reasons for constructively rearranging any “regular order” that

guided the procession and redistributing the prisoners throughout its

length.46

On the other hand, in literary representations, there were strong im-

peratives to link closely the general and his chief captive and, in focusing

on the relations of the victor and the prisoners “in front of his chariot,”

Captives on Parade

127

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 21:

The small triumphal frieze of the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (Fig. 10). The

procession runs all around the arch, leading from the group around the general in his chariot (bottom left, the northwest corner of the monument) to the Temple of Jupiter (top right). Approaching the temple is a series of animals for sacrifice, with their semiclad attendants ( victimarii). Through the rest of the procession the spoils of victory, carried shoulder-high, on fercula, and placards are interspersed with prisoners, some riding in carts (detail, Fig. 22), others walking.

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 22:

A pair of prisoners in an ox-drawn cart, from the small frieze of the Arch of

Trajan at Beneventum (Fig. 21, center of second register). Both are dressed in barbarian style, with cloaks and hats. One is chained, the other stretches out his hand in supplication—or horror.

to be blind to the diversity of the parade. The bottom line is that differ-

ent ways of seeing the procession conjured different processional orders.

EXECUTION

We seem to be on much firmer ground with the fate of the captives in

the procession. As the triumphal parade was reaching its last lap, pass-

ing through the Forum and about to ascend the Capitoline hill, the pris-

oners—or at least the most prominent, famous, or dastardly among

them—were hauled off for execution and worse, probably in the nearby

prison (carcer). So Josephus describes the closing stages of the triumph

of Vespasian and Titus: “Once they had reached the Temple of Jupiter

Captives on Parade

129

Capitolinus, they stopped. For it was ancestral custom to wait at that

point for the announcement of the death of the enemy commander.

This was Simon, son of Gioras. He had been led in the procession

amongst the prisoners of war; then, a noose round his neck, scourged by

his guards, he had been taken to that place next to the Forum where Ro-

man law prescribes that condemned criminals be executed. After the an-

nouncement came that he had met his end and the universal cheering

that followed it, Vespasian and Titus began the sacrifice.”47

Much the same procedure was mentioned briefly by Dio (to judge

at least from a Byzantine paraphrase) in his account of regular tri-

umphal procedure attached to the notice of Camillus’ triumph in 396;

and more emphatically by Cicero in one of his “speeches for the prose-

cution” (though never actually delivered in court) against Verres, one-

time governor of Sicily. After a flamboyant and implausibly complicated

attack on his opponent for having preserved the life of a pirate chief

against the interests of the state, Cicero offers a thundering contrast—

between Verres’ behavior and that of a triumphing general: “Why even

those who celebrate a triumph and keep the enemy leaders alive for

some time so that the Roman people can enjoy the glorious sight of

them being paraded in the triumphal procession and reap the reward of

victory—even they, when they start to steer their chariots out of the Fo-

rum and up onto the Capitoline, bid their prisoners be taken off to the

prison. And the day that ends the authority (imperium) of the conqueror

also ends the life of the conquered.”48

This practice of executing the leading captives as the triumphal pro-

cession neared its conclusion has launched all kinds of modern theo-

ries. Some scholars have seen it as a quasi-judicial punishment. Others

have taken it as ritual killing or human sacrifice—and have claimed,

through this lens, to glimpse the violent and murky origins of the cele-

bration (perhaps going back to the violent and murky Etruscans).49 But

it will presumably come as no surprise at this point in my account that

the “facts” are a much more fragile construction than they are usually

made to appear. In this case, we find strikingly few examples of captives

(more or less) unequivocally claimed to have been executed during the

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triumphal procession: apart from Simon in Vespasian and Titus’ tri-

umph, the list at its most generous comprises only Caius Pontius, leader

of the Samnites in 291 bce, pirate chiefs in 74, Vercingetorix in Caesar’s

triumph of 46, and Adiatorix and Alexander in Octavian’s celebration

of 29.50

By and large the more evidence we have on the fate of individual pris-

oners, the less certain what we might call the “Josephan model” of exe-

cution appears to be. Aristoboulus of Judaea, for example, was—accord-

ing to Appian’s confident assertion—the only prisoner put to death in

Pompey’s triumph of 61, “as had been done at other triumphs.” But

other writers have him escaping from Rome, making more trouble in

the East, being brought back to Rome once more—only to be sent back

to the East by Caesar in the civil war to raise support for the Caesarian

cause, before being poisoned by Pompeian allies (Pompey may have

wished he had put him to death in 61).51 Livy seems to have claimed that

Jugurtha also was killed in this way at Marius’ triumph in 104 bce; but

Plutarch has him imprisoned after the trial and dying of starvation sev-

eral days later.52

In fact, more often than not, even the most illustrious captives are

said to have escaped death. Some were imprisoned, apparently on a

long-term basis. King Gentius and his family were put into custody after

the triumph of Anicius Gallus in 167. (Livy’s story of the senate’s deci-

sion to have them imprisoned at Spoletum, the objections of the local

residents, and their final transfer to Iguvium raises key—if unanswer-

able—questions about how the practicalities of all this were managed.)

Others lived, if not (like Aristoboulus) “to fight another day,” then at

least to start a new Roman life. One version of Zenobia’s story was that

she was established—quite the Roman matrona, we may perhaps imag-

ine—in a comfortable villa near Tibur.53

These uncertainties and contradictions offer a sharp focus on some

important aspects of the culture of the Roman triumph; they are not

merely regrettable indications of how little we really know. The repeated

stories in ancient writers of violence not being wreaked on the poor tri-

umphal victims, and their generalizations about normal practice or ref-

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erences to the executions that took place “on other occasions,” undoubt-

edly served to keep the idea of the death of the captive high on the

cultural agenda of the Roman triumph. But that does not necessarily in-

dicate that celebrity executions toward the end of the procession were a

regular feature of the ceremony. Far from it. The economy of violence

and power is extremely complex, and it operated in Rome, as elsewhere,

by fantasy, report, threat, and denial as much as it did by the sword or

noose itself.

Modern historians, who often have a great deal invested in an image

of ancient Rome as an almost uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty society,

have generally been reluctant to read the myths of Roman violence

(whether in the arena, on the battlefield, or in the triumphal procession)

as anything other than a direct reflection of the acts of violence at which they appear to hint. But often, as here, there is a good case for seeing the

bloodshed more as part of a pattern of menacing discourse than of regu-

lar practice.

On the evidence we have, the killing of the leading captives was

not “ancestral custom” at all. Nor, by and large, was it treated as such by

ancient writers. Significantly, in fact, they never appear to give this

deathly practice an origin in the distant Roman past, in the triumphs of

Romulus and the other legendary heroes of the Republic. That is not to

say that victims were never put to death in the course of the proces-

sion. It would require some very special pleading to deny that. More

likely, a small number of executions, carried out for whatever reason

(in the Flavian case perhaps the parade of “tradition” by the new dy-

nasty), lay somewhere behind a custom that flourished most of all in

the telling and in the retelling—and in the opportunities that it offered

for denial and clemency. The clever cultural paradox is that Pompey

could become renowned for mercy by not doing something that was

rarely done anyway.

The exemplary, mythic quality of these executions can be seen in dif-

ferent ways in Cicero’s reference to the execution of the prisoners “on the

day which ends the authority of the conqueror.” Pulling this out of con-

text, as so often happens, and treating it as a general rule of triumphal

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practice is to miss the loaded argument that lies behind it—and to fall

into the trap that Cicero has set. For Cicero is attempting to make the

practice of killing the enemy captives seem universal, and thereby turn it into a stick with which to beat Verres for not killing his own pirate prisoner.

But this passage also exposes very clearly how the literary image of the

triumph increasingly does duty for the ceremony itself. In a speech in

praise of Constantine, dated to 310 ce, the emperor is congratulated for,

among other things, his decisive execution of a couple of rebellious

Frankish kings. This was heralded as a return to traditional ways: “Em-

peror (imperator), you have renewed that old confidence of the Roman

Empire, which used to impose the death penalty on captured enemy

leaders. For in those days captive kings added luster to the triumphal

chariots from the gates of the city as far as the Forum. Then, as soon as

the victorious general (imperator) started to steer his chariot up onto the Capitoline, they were taken off to the prison and slaughtered. Perseus

alone escaped such a harsh law, when Aemilius Paullus himself, who had

received his surrender, made a plea on his behalf.”54 The entirely errone-

ous claim here that Perseus was the only distinguished captive to be

spared the death penalty is striking. Striking too (and a hint at the modus

operandi of invented traditions) is the way that other forms of execution

merge into this particular form of triumphal slaughter. The death of the

Frankish kings was not a triumphal punishment in the traditional sense

at all; they were thrown to the beasts in the arena.55

Even more important is the literary reference. Whatever contact

the author of this Panegyric had with triumphal practice, the tradition

he refers to is drawn not from anything that happened on the streets

of Rome but straight from Cicero’s text—which is almost directly

quoted (cum de foro in Capitolium currus flectere incipiunt / simul atque

in Capitolium currum flectere coeperat). This is a clear instance of late Roman nostalgia for a “ritual in ink” as much as for the ceremony as per-

formed, and it is very little guide to the triumphal traditions of killing at

any period.

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133

VICTIMS AS VICTORS

The tales of prisoners’ suicide, true or not, imply that the triumphal pa-

rade was deemed to be an overwhelmingly humiliating experience for

the once proud kings and other noble captives. Ancient writers, how-

ever, lay little stress on the nature of that humiliation. We read in

Josephus of Simon being “scourged” before his execution, while the

late fourth-century Christian writer John Chrysostom referred (on the

basis of what information we do not know) to a triumphal victim as

“whipped, insulted and abused.” Other texts conjure up a picture of

captives as “chained,” “hands bound behind their backs,” “eyes cast on

the ground,” or “in tears,” and the repertoire of ancient images matches

up to these descriptions in some respects at least: chains are much in evi-

dence, faces stare at the ground, hands—not bound behind—stretch

out vividly in what is presumably sorrowful supplication (Figs. 23, 24;

see also Fig. 22). For the rest, it is not hard to imagine what the victim’s

experience might have amounted to, as the noisy crowd of spectators

took pleasure in feeling that they had at last the upper hand over (in

Cicero’s words) “those whom they had feared.”56 Jeers, taunts, and, one

might guess, the ancient equivalent of eggs and rotten tomatoes.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 23:

Part of a triumphal frieze from the Temple of Apollo Sosianus in Rome, 34–25

bce. Two prisoners, hands bound behind their backs, sit on a ferculum underneath a trophy of victory, which the Roman attendants get ready to lift. This frieze is probably intended to represent the triple triumph of Augustus (Octavian) in 29 bce.

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 24:

Terracotta relief (“Campana plaque”) showing prisoners in a triumphal proces-

sion; probably early second century ce. Here the Roman guards control (or harass) their captives with chains attached to their necks.

The degradation of the victims, however, is only one side of the

story. There is a competing logic in the display of Roman (or any)

victory. The successful general accrues little glory for representing his

victory as won by thrashing a mangy band of feeble and unimpressive

suppliants. The best conquests are won against tough and worthy oppo-

nents, not against those who look as though they could not have put up

much of a fight in the first place. As the Panegyric of Constantine put it, the captives “added luster to” (almost in the Latin “added dignity,”

honestassent) to the celebration.57 Hence in part the stress on the high

status of the prisoners; hence too the readiness of Pompey to steal some

of his Roman rival’s most impressive captives.

Indeed, throughout the stories of the triumph, we find—alongside

Captives on Parade

135

the idea of humiliation—repeated emphasis on the nobility and stature

of those “in front of the chariot.” In Marius’ triumph in 101 bce,

Teutobodus, king of the Teutones, made a splendid sight (or so some

said; other writers had him die on the field of battle). A man “of extraor-

dinary height” who was reputed to be able to vault over four, or even six,

horses, he “towered over the trophies of his own defeat.”58 It is an image

reflected in Tiepolo’s eighteenth-century version of Marius’ triumph in

104 over the impressive figure of Jugurtha (see Frontispiece). Other

monarchs too caught the eye. In Florus’ account, Bituitus starred in the

procession of Fabius Maximus in 120 bce, wearing the brightly colored

armor and traveling in the silver chariot in which he had fought.59

Zenobia was said to have been decked out for the triumph of Aurelian in

jewels and golden chains so heavy that she needed attendants to carry

them.60

The image of a regal victim surrounded by attendants carrying her

golden ornaments (albeit chains of bondage) cannot help but raise ques-

tions about exactly who was the star of the event. Quite simply, glamor-

ous and impressive prisoners were a powerful proof of the splendor of

the victory achieved. But at the same time, just like Piloty’s vision of

Thusnelda, the more impressive they appeared, the more likely they

were to steal the show and to upstage the triumphing general himself.

On several occasions Roman writers hint at just this scenario, and at a

slippage between victor and victim. For Florus (or his source), “nothing

stood out more” in Fabius’ triumph than the defeated Bituitus.61 Dio

also plays with this paradox when he describes the journey of Tiridates,

king of Armenia, to Rome in 66 ce. The idea was that, after the decisive

Roman victories under Corbulo, Tiridates was to come to the capital to

receive back his crown, as suppliant, from Nero. But with his royal reti-

nue and accompanying army, not to mention his personal appearance

and impressive stature, his journey from the Euphrates seemed to resem-

ble more a triumph in his own name than a mark of his defeat.62

Ovid had already developed this theme in a poem written about 10 ce

from his exile on the Black Sea, imagining the scene back home of a Ro-

man triumph over Germany. It is a tremendous tour de force that makes

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the most of the literary and representational complexities of the cere-

mony. In one particularly neat, and gruesome, touch, Ovid pictures (a

model of ) the river Rhine being carried in the procession—just like the

“two-horned Rhine” that Virgil had imagined at the climax of his Actian

parade. Ovid’s Rhine is a sorry specimen in comparison: he is, frankly, a

mess, “covered in green sedge,” “stained with his own blood”; his horns

have been “smashed.” But much of the poet’s attention goes to the hu-

man victims:

So all the populace can watch the triumph,

Read names of generals and captured towns

See captive kings with necks in chains and marching

Before the horses in gay laurel crowns

And note some faces fallen like their fortunes

And others fierce forgetting how they fare.

Several of the commonplaces of the triumphal procession are de-

ployed here: the victims are kings; they are chained; they cast their eyes

to the ground or project a grim absent-mindedness. But Ovid proceeds

to insinuate just how difficult it is to keep the captives in their place, as

he recounts the words of an imaginary spectator explaining the show—

starting from the victims—to his neighbors: “That one,” he begins,

“who gleams aloft in Sidonian purple was the leader (dux) in the war.”

Where, we are being asked to wonder, does the boundary lie between

triumphant general and this proud prisoner? Both are royally clad in

purple, aloft in their chariots, leaders (duces) of their people. What does it take to tell them apart?63

This problem underlies all mass spectacle: how do you control the

gaze of the viewer? Is it the emperor in his box who holds our attention

in the arena or the slave-gladiator fighting for his life? In the triumphal

procession, the grand nobility of the victims can draw the crowds. So

also can the pathos of the prisoners on display. The most notorious

case of this was the parade in Caesar’s triumph of 46 bce of the young

Egyptian princess Arsinoe, carried on a bier (or ferculum) like a regular

Captives on Parade

137

piece of booty. The sight of her in chains, in Dio’s account at least,

aroused the spectators to pity and prompted them to lament their own

misfortunes.64

A similar story is told of the triumph of Aemilius Paullus over King

Perseus in 167. According to Plutarch, it was the king’s children who

captured the attention of the crowd: “There were two boys and one girl,

too young to be entirely aware of the scale of their misfortunes. Indeed

they evoked even more pity—for the very reason that they would in due

course lose their innocence—so that Perseus himself walked along al-

most unnoticed. And so it was out of compassion that the Romans fixed

their gaze on the young ones and many ended up crying, and for all of

them the spectacle turned out to be a mixture of pleasure and pain until

the children had gone by.”65 Of course, we cannot be sure if this is a reli-

able or well-documented account of reactions on the day itself (we have

no reason to believe that Plutarch had, directly or indirectly, an eyewit-

ness source; and he had probably never seen a triumph himself ). But

even if he is by-passing the available evidence to exploit the rhetorical

traditions of pathos, Plutarch’s account shows exactly how, in the imagi-

nation at least, the pathetic victims could steal the show.

That ambivalence between victor and victim is a theme which informs

the accounts of Paullus’ triumph of 167 bce in other respects, too.

Perseus—“wearing a dark cloak and distinctively Macedonian boots,

struck dumb by the scale of his misfortunes”—may have made a less

moving sight than his children, but he rivaled the triumphing general in

a different sense.66 In fact, the ancient cliché about this particular tri-

umph rested on its threat to subvert the hierarchy of victor and victim.

For Paullus, at the very height of his glory, was afflicted by a disaster

that struck at the heart of his household: out of his four sons, two had

already been adopted into other aristocratic families in Rome (a not

uncommon practice); the two who remained to carry on his line died

over the very period of the triumph, one five days before, the other three

days later.67

Livy puts a speech into the mouth of Paullus, in which—after con-

trasting his own misfortunes with the good fortune his campaigns had

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brought to the state—he compares himself to Perseus: “Both Perseus

and I are now on display, as powerful examples of the fate of mortal

men. He, who as a prisoner saw his children led before him, prison-

ers themselves, nevertheless has those children unharmed. I, who tri-

umphed over him, mounted my chariot fresh from the funeral of my

one son and, as I returned from the Capitol, found the other almost

breathing his last . . . There is no Paullus in my house except one old

man.” Plutarch imagines the same moment, ending Paullus’ speech with

a pithier formulation along the same lines: “Fortune makes the victor of

the triumph no less clear an example of human weakness than the

victim; except that Perseus, though conquered, keeps his children—

Aemilius, though conqueror, has lost his.”68 The message is clear. Trium-

phal glory was a perilous and greasy pole. The victor was always liable to

exchange roles with the victim.

This slippage between victim and victor found a place in more gen-

eral ethical discussions, too. Seneca, for example, exploited it to grind

home a moral point—that, in the end, from a philosophical perspective,

the triumphal victor and victim were indistinguishable. You could, he

wrote, show equal virtue whether you were the one who triumphed or

the one dragged “in front of the chariot,” so long as you were “uncon-

quered in spirit.”69 Elsewhere, in a bold (and disconcerting) anachro-

nism, he puts into the mouth of Socrates a similar point about virtue

transcending misfortune, using a triumphal analogy. The sage claims

that—even if he was placed on a bier (ferculum) and made to “decorate

the procession of a proud and fierce victor”—he would be no more

humbled when he was driven in front of the triumphal chariot of an-

other than if he was the triumphing general himself.70 The triumph, in

other words, asks you to wonder who the victor really is and so what vir-

tue and heroism consist in.

There is even more to this than a paradox of triumphal ideology, im-

portant though that may be. Modern scholarship has, by and large, been

committed to a crude view of Roman militarism. Rome, we are repeat-

edly told, was a culture in which victory and conquest were universally

Captives on Parade

139

prized. Whether or not this ideology always translated directly into ag-

gressive imperialism is another matter (ideology may have a more com-

plicated relationship to practice than that). But, so the standard argu-

ment runs, military prowess was at all periods a guarantee of social glory

and political success; and apart from a handful of subversive poets, the

Romans were not the sort of people to question the desirability of win-

ning on the field of battle.71

Some of this is certainly true. It would be utterly implausible to recast

Roman culture in pacifist clothes. But the most militaristic societies can

also be—and often are—those that query most energetically the nature

and discontents of their own militarism. If we do not spot this aspect in

the case of Rome, the chances are that we have turned a blind eye to

those Roman debates, or that we have been looking in the wrong place.

Literary representations of the triumph, with all their parade of hesita-

tion and ambivalence over the status of victor and victim, are one of the

key areas in which the problems as well as the glory of Roman victory

were explored.

To take a final vivid example: when in 225 bce Lucius Aemilius Papus,

after his Gallic victory, made the chief captive tribesmen walk in their

breastplates up to the Capitol—“because he had heard that they had

sworn not to remove their breastplates until they had climbed the

Capitol”—he was not only rubbing their noses in their failed ambitions

(for they had foolishly imagined that their ascent of the hill would be in

their own seizure of Rome). The story also serves to remind the reader of

the fragile dividing line between victory and defeat, and their various

celebrations.72

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

Most modern accounts concentrate on the occasion of the triumph as a

processional moment, a single day—or at most a few days—of celebra-

tion or carnival. This tends to obscure the fact that the triumphal pro-

cession is also a single episode in a more extended narrative for victim

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1 4 0

and general alike. The ceremony should prompt the question “What

happened next?” One answer we have already explored. However fre-

quently or infrequently the triumph did in fact end in execution for the

leading captives, the often told story of execution gives a powerful narrative closure to the victims’ part in Roman history. As Cicero summed it

up, the triumph was their end. For the less illustrious, the outlook might

be no less bleak: Caesar’s prisoners of war are said to have become can-

non fodder in the arena.73 But a competing version represents it very dif-

ferently: not so much as finality but more as a rite of passage. Just as the

ceremony itself was no less the beginning of peace than it was the culmi-

nation of war, so the victims were both the humiliated and defeated ene-

mies of Rome and at the same time new participants, in whatever role,

in the Roman imperial order. The triumph was a key moment in the

process by which the enemy became Roman.

This is a theme we have already seen underlying the mythic triumph

of Statius’ Theseus, whose victim was about to become his wife. Other

writers emphasize a similarly domestic outcome for their triumphal vic-

tims. Perseus himself may have died, in strange circumstances, in captiv-

ity: according to at least one account, he got on the wrong side of his

guards, who kept him continually awake until he died of sleep depriva-

tion. One son and his daughter soon died, too, but the other son, the

aptly named Alexander, went on to learn metalworking and Latin—so

well that he eventually became a secretary to Roman magistrates, an of-

fice which (according to Plutarch) he carried out with “skill and ele-

gance.”74 Zenobia, too, in one version, settled down to the life of a

middle-aged matron outside Rome. Young Juba, who was carried as a

babe in arms in Caesar’s triumph of 46, went on to receive Roman citi-

zenship, to write famous historical works and eventually to be reinstated

on the throne of Numidia.75

At the same time, the progression of captives into Roman status

could prompt ribaldry or even insult. Scipio Aemilianus, for example,

the natural son of Aemilius Paullus who was adopted into the family of

Cornelii Scipiones, is said to have rebuked a rowdy gathering of Romans

in the Forum protesting against the murder of Tiberius Gracchus with

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141

the taunt: “Let those to whom Italy is a step-mother hold their tongues.

You won’t make me afraid of those I brought here in chains even now

they are freed.”76 This is a taunt that rests on the idea that prisoners had

a Roman life after their captivity. So too do some of the jibes made

against Julius Caesar for supposedly admitting Gauls to the senate itself.

One of the popular verses sung at the time, according to Suetonius,

made a direct connection between the appearance of Gallic prisoners in

Caesar’s triumph and their subsequent appearance in the senate:

The Gauls our Caesar led to triumph, led them to the

senate too.

The Gauls have swapped their breeches for the senate’s

swanky toga.77

This aspect of the triumph as rite de passage is most vividly encapsu-

lated by the career of Publius Ventidius Bassus, who celebrated a tri-

umph over the Parthians in 38 bce. In the competitive culture of trium-

phal glory, this celebration was particularly renowned. It was, as Roman

writers insisted, the first triumph the Romans had ever celebrated over

the Parthians (who had inflicted such a devastating defeat on Roman

forces under Crassus at the battle of Carrhae in 53 bce). But it was

notable for another reason, too—as the same writers insist. For

Ventidius Bassus was a native of the Italian town of Picenum and years

earlier had been carried as a child victim in the triumph of Pompey’s fa-

ther, Pompeius Strabo, for victories in the Social War. His career was

particularly extraordinary, then, as he was the only Roman ever to take

part in a triumphal procession as both victor and victim. Or, as Valerius

Maximus put it, “The same man, who as a captive had shuddered at the

prison, as a victor filled the Capitol with his success.” His is the limit

case, in other words, of the triumph as a rite of passage into “Roman-

ness”—the clearest example we have of the part the ceremony could play

in a narrative of Romanization. Not only that. It is also the limit case of

the potential identity of the triumphing general and his victim.78

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POETIC REVERSAL?

These ironies of the triumph were not lost on Ovid, whom we have

identified as our only surviving “voice of the victim.” In the second

poem of his collection of Amores he suffered “in front of the chariot” of

Cupid. But not for long. Ovid soon claims for himself the part of the

Ventidius Bassus of Love. By the middle of his second book of poems,

he has won a notable victory—albeit, as he goes on to confess (or to

boast), a bloodless one:

A wreath for my brows, a wreath of triumphal laurel!

Victory—Corinna is here, in my arms

. . . Thus bloodless conquest

Demands a super-triumph. Look at the spoils.79

On the erotic battlefield, our erstwhile victim has become a triumph-

ing general.

c h a p t e r

V

The Art of Representation

IMAGES OF DEFEAT

Cleopatra did not entirely escape display in Octavian’s triumphal pro-

cession, despite her suicide. For in place of the living queen was a replica

staging the moment of her death, probably a three-dimensional model

on a couch but perhaps a painting: a tableau mourant, as it were, com-

plete with an asp or two. This was one of the star turns of the triumph

for ancient viewers and commentators. “It was as if,” Dio writes, “in a

kind of way she was there with the other prisoners”; and Propertius, who

casts himself as an eyewitness of the celebration, claims to have seen

“her arms bitten by the sacred snakes and her body drawing in the hid-

den poison that brought oblivion.”1 It also greatly intrigued Renaissance

and later scholars, who assumed that the model had been preserved and

expended enormous energy and ingenuity in attempting to track it

down. One favorite candidate was the statue we commonly know as the

Sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican Museums (Fig. 25)—what we now inter-

pret as an armlet being identified as the snakes.2

An early sixteenth-century verse monologue by Baldassare Castiglione,

written as if spoken by this mute work of art, nicely captures the ambiv-

alent slippage between replica and human prisoner (here in a translation

by Alexander Pope):

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 25:

Sleeping Ariadne. This sculpture—a Roman version of a third- or second-century bce Greek work—very likely represents a classic theme of ancient art and myth: Ariadne, abandoned in her sleep by Theseus, whom she had helped to kill the Minotaur. In the Renaissance it was commonly entitled Cleopatra and believed to be the model of the Egyptian queen carried in the triumph of 29 bce.

Whoe’re thou art whom this fair statue charms,

These curling aspicks, and these wounded arms,

Who view’st these eyes for ever fixt in death,

Think not unwilling I resign’d my breath.

What, shou’d a Queen, so long the boast of fame,

Have stoop’d to serve an haughty Roman dame?

Shou’d I have liv’d, in Caesar’s triumph born,

To grace his conquests and his pomp adorn?3

Even as late as 1885 the hunt was still on, when the American artist John

Sartain penned a pamphlet to argue that a painting on slate supposedly

found at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli in 1818 and attributed to, among oth-

The Art of Representation

145

ers, Leonardo da Vinci was indeed nothing other than Octavian’s replica

of Cleopatra. His description is a mixture of art historical dispassion and

lascivious interest: “The right arm is bent in a right-angle, the forearm

being strongly foreshortened . . . The dark green, yellow-spotted snake

has inserted its teeth into the left breast, from which some drops of

blood ooze out.”4 Needless to say, the claims of this object to be what

was carried in the procession of 29 are about as weak as those of the

Sleeping Ariadne.

Cleopatra was not the only absent victim to be incorporated into

the parade as a painting or model, even if others have not proved to be

such compelling topics of modern speculation. So it was, according to

Appian, that Mithradates and Tigranes were displayed in Pompey’s tri-

umph as paintings. Again in 46 bce Julius Caesar paraded “on canvas”

the deaths of his adversaries in the civil war: Lucius Scipio throwing

himself into the sea, Petreius shafting himself at dinner, Cato disembow-

eling himself “like a wild animal.” These humiliating images nearly re-

bounded on the victor, as the audience groaned at the pathetic sight be-

fore settling down to applaud or mock some other less tragic final

moments. There was obviously a fine line to be drawn between the im-

pressive vaunting of success and the frankly bad taste of displaying pic-

tures of Roman citizens pulling their own guts out.5

But if the place of a live prisoner in the procession could be taken by a

mute representation, the further twist is that live victims themselves

could sometimes be seen in the guise of images or models. When Dio

gestured at the equivalence between the effigy of Cleopatra and the liv-

ing prisoners (“in a kind of way she was there with the others”), he si-

multaneously hinted that the equation might be reversed, and living

prisoners be likened to mute images. This idea is brought out even more

clearly in Josephus’ account of the Flavian triumph. He writes of the lav-

ish “floats” that were a conspicuous part of the parade, and on each one

he notes an “enemy general was stationed . . . in the very attitude in

which he was captured.” In a striking inversion, here the prisoners

themselves take on the role of actors, miming their moment of defeat on

the triumphal stage.6

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 26:

Fragment of a triumphal relief, showing captives in eastern dress under a tro-

phy, late second century ce. The small scale of these figures suggests either that the artist was literally cutting the victims down to size, or that what is represented here are sculptures, not live prisoners, being carried in procession.

This blurring of the boundaries of representation is also glimpsed in

some of the surviving sculptures of the procession. On several occasions

we see apparently “real” captives crouched down next to pieces of booty

and carried along shoulder high, as if they themselves were inanimate

objects. In fact, sometimes it is hard to tell whether the figures are meant

to evoke living captives or their representation or both (Fig. 26; see also

Fig. 23). Maybe this is how poor Arsinoe was displayed on her ferculum

in Caesar’s parade.7

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The procession, in other words, offered many different versions of

captives: not only as the walking, talking, live prisoners but also as im-

ages representing those who could not appear in the flesh, and as prison-

ers acting out the part of images and representations. This was one

distinctive element in the extravaganza of representation that was the

hallmark of Roman triumphal culture more generally—and especially of

the triumphal display of spoils, statues, curiosities, booty, gifts, treasures,

pictures, and models. Beyond the luxury and the embarrassment of

riches, we shall find in the triumph a context in which the potential of

the art of representation was exploited to the full, and its dilemmas and

ambivalences explored.

THE EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES

The triumph of Pompey in 61 was one of a series of Roman victory cele-

brations, from the third century bce on, whose lavish spectacles of

booty and the other paraphernalia of triumphal display were enshrined

in the Roman historical imagination. Among these iconic occasions was

the procession of Marcus Claudius Marcellus after the capture of the

rich Sicilian city of Syracuse in 211 bce. Marcellus had, in fact, been re-

fused a “full triumph.” Political in-fighting with its usual array of objec-

tions or ex post facto rationalizations (the war in Sicily was not com-

pletely finished; it would be invidious to grant him a third triumph; he

had conducted his campaign as proconsul not consul; his army was still

in Sicily) resulted instead in a triumph on the Alban Mount and an

ovatio in the city itself.8 But this did little to dim the reported splendor of the occasion or its lively, and controversial, ancient reputation.

It was, according to Plutarch, the first triumph to display works of art

as a spoil of victory: “He transported the greater part and the finest of

the objects that in Syracuse had been dedicated to the gods, to be a spec-

tacle for his triumph and an adornment for the city. For before that time

Rome neither possessed nor was even aware of these elegant luxuries,

nor was there any love in the city for refinement and beauty. Instead

it was full of the weapons seized from barbarian enemies and blood-

stained booty, and crowned with memorials of triumphs and trophies—

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not a pleasant nor a reassuring sight, nor one for faint-hearted spectators

or aesthetes.”9

Exactly how innovative Marcellus’ parade really was has been de-

bated. In the ancient world itself, there were other candidates for the

introduction of lavish displays into triumphal ceremony: Florus, for ex-

ample, pinpointed the triumph of Manius Curius Dentatus in 275 bce,

with its “gold and purple, statues and paintings” from Tarentum, as a

turning point in luxury: “Up to that time,” he wrote, “you would have

seen nothing [among the spoils] except the cattle of the Volsci, the

flocks of the Sabines, the carts of the Gauls, the broken weapons of

the Samnites.”10 Modern writers too have questioned the idea that

Marcellus’ ovation was such a radical break, listing the works of art said

to have been carried in triumphs before his.11

Nonetheless, an emphatic ancient tradition does see in this occa-

sion a crucial moment in the cultural revolution that we call the

“hellenization” of Rome. As Plutarch goes on to report (and to theo-

rize in terms of political and generational conflict), while some—the

rank and file, or demos—welcomed the works of art that appeared in

Marcellus’ ovation as elegant adornments for the city, “older people” ob-

jected to his display partly because so many of those wonderful objects

were sacred images taken from Syracuse: it was disgraceful that “not only

men but also gods were led through the city in triumph as if they were

prisoners.”12

Livy offers a brief catalogue of the booty Marcellus displayed in his

procession: “Along with a representation of the captured city of Syra-

cuse, catapults and ballistas and all kinds of other weapons of war were

carried in parade, plus the trappings that come with a long period of

peace and with royal luxury, a quantity of silver- and bronze-ware, other

furnishing and precious fabric and many notable statues with which

Syracuse had been adorned on a par with the leading cities of Greece. As

a sign that his victory had also been over the Carthaginians eight ele-

phants were in the parade.”13 Hints elsewhere can fill out the picture a

little. Cicero writes of a “celestial globe” in the house of Marcellus’

grandson—an heirloom that had come down through the family from

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the spoils of Syracuse. This made a pair with another globe, both the

work of the Syracusan scientist Archimedes, which Marcellus dedicated

in the Temple of “Honor and Virtue” (Honos et Virtus) that he had

vowed to the gods in the course of his campaigns. It is a fair assumption

that these objects were displayed in the procession, among “the trap-

pings that come with a long period of peace.”14

Other evidence too sheds light on the final destination of part of the

spoils. Whatever we make of Cicero’s improbable insistence that, apart

from the globe, Marcellus “took nothing else home with him out of the

vast quantity of booty,” we can tentatively follow some of the statues

out of the procession into particular public or sacred contexts in Rome

and elsewhere. Two republican statue bases from the city, the statues

themselves long lost, carry inscriptions recording the name of Marcellus

as the donor. One is specifically a dedication to Mars, and the findspot

suggests that it was originally placed in the temple of the god just out-

side the city, on the Appian Way. Both of the original statues were very

likely taken from those paraded in the ovation.15 Plutarch claims that

he also erected statues from his plunder in temples on the island of

Samothrace and at Lindos on Rhodes, while Livy points again to the

collection in the Temple of Honor and Virtue, as well as offering a nice

example of the plunderer receiving a taste of his own medicine.

Marcellus’ dedications in his temple were once of such high distinction

that they were a tourist attraction for foreigners; but by the time Livy

was writing, the majority were lost, presumed stolen.16

Some of the categories of booty mentioned in Livy’s catalogue are

found commonly in accounts of earlier celebrations. The display of cap-

tured weapons is a recurrent theme in narratives of triumph as far back

as the fifth century bce.17 Elephants too were part of the literary tradi-

tion of earlier celebrations. In fact, both Manius Curius Dentatus in 275

bce and Lucius Caecilius Metellus in 250 were credited as the first to dis-

play these terrifying live war machines as part of their captured spoils.18

But more significantly, the “menu” of booty in the procession of 211 bce

looks forward to the series of increasingly rich and elaborate triumphs of

the succeeding centuries—or at least richly and elaborately written up.

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We can almost use Livy’s admittedly skeletal register of Marcellus’ booty

as a basic template for some of the extravagant occasions that followed,

the “classic triumphs” of the surviving literary record.

Appian’s account of Scipio Africanus’ triumphal display in 201, for ex-

ample, divides into similar categories, including models of captured

towns and paintings showing the events of the war, the precious metals

(whether as coin, bullion, or art work), and the captured elephants,

while adding the “gold crowns” presented, willingly or not, to the victo-

rious general by “allies or the army itself ” and put on show in the pro-

cession along with the booty.19 In Livy’s description of the triumph of

Flamininus over the Macedonians in 194, no captured animals are listed,

but many of the other types of booty are highlighted, in enormous

quantity and sometimes specific detail. There were “arms and weapons”

(Plutarch notes precisely “Greek helmets and Macedonian shields and

pikes”), plus statues of marble and bronze, possibly including a statue of

Zeus that Cicero claims Flamininus took from Macedonia and dedi-

cated on the Capitol in Rome. Bronze and silver was on show in all

shapes and sizes, including 43,270 pounds of silver bullion alone, ten sil-

ver shields, and 84,000 Athenian coins known as tetradrachms. In addi-

tion, the gold amounted to 3,714 pounds of bullion, one solid gold

shield, 14,514 Macedonian gold coins, and 114 gifts of golden crowns.

The quantity was such that it took three days to process through the

streets of the city—the first three-day triumph.20

Even more vivid, extravagant, and exotic are the descriptions of two

later celebrations, which almost rival those of Pompey’s triumph. The

first is the procession, again over three days, celebrating the victory of

Aemilius Paullus against King Perseus in 167 bce—whose overflowing

booty, lovingly detailed by Plutarch among others, serves as a piquant

contrast with the personal tragedy and “impoverishment,” in another

sense, of the triumphing general himself. The first day of the show,

he writes, “was hardly sufficient for the captive figures, paintings, and

colossal statues, carried along in 250 carts.” The second day saw im-

pressive wagonloads of enemy weapons, newly polished: masses of hel-

mets, breastplates, greaves, Cretan shields, Thracian body armor, quiv-

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151

ers, swords, and bridles, “artfully arranged to look exactly as if they had

been piled up indiscriminately, as they fell.” They made a horrible

sound as they clanked along; and, Plutarch insists, the sight of them was

enough to inspire terror, even though they belonged to an enemy who

had been conquered.

Behind the weapons came the silver coins, “carried by 3,000 men, in

750 vessels” (each holding some 75 kilos), plus a considerable array of sil-

ver bowls, drinking horns, cups, and so on. The gold was not, according

to this account, brought out until the final day. This featured 77 further

vessels full of gold coins, a vast golden libation bowl inlaid with gems

and weighing in at some 250 kilos, which Paullus himself had commis-

sioned from the bullion, some distinctively eastern Mediterranean table-

ware (bowls known as Antigonids, Seleucids, and Thericleians, the first

two named after Hellenistic kings, the third after a Corinthian artist), as

well as all the golden vessels from the Macedonian royal dining service.

These were followed by Perseus’ own chariot, which carried the king’s

weapons and his royal diadem laid on top. This part, at least, is strongly

reminiscent of Livy’s brief reference to the “trappings that come with

royal luxury.”21

Other aspects of the story of Flamininus’ triumph are echoed in

Josephus’ account of the procession of booty at the parade of Vespasian

and Titus in 71 ce. It was, he trumpets, “impossible to give an adequate

description of the extent of those spectacles and their magnificence in

every conceivable way—whether as works of art, riches of all sorts, or as

rarities of nature. For almost everything that people of good fortune

have ever acquired piecemeal, wonderful treasures of diverse origin, all

these were on display together on that day and demonstrated the great-

ness of the Roman Empire.” His self-confessed “inadequate” description

lists silver, gold, and ivory “flowing like a river”; tapestries and gems (so

many that you realized you had been wrong to think them rare); and

enormous, precious statues of the Roman gods.

But even these wonders were overshadowed by the moving “floats” or

“stages” (the Greek word pÃgmata means literally any structure “fitted to-

gether”), three or four stories high, covered in tapestries around a frame-

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work of gold and ivory. Each one depicted an episode from the war—

from the devastation of the land of Judaea or the demolition of the Jew-

ish fortifications to the deluge of blood and rivers flowing through a

country that was still in flames. It was here that the Jewish generals were

stationed, acting out the moment of their capture. The rest of the spoils

(“heaps” of them) are passed over quickly, with not even a mention of

the “balsam tree” that Pliny implies was one of the notable spectacles of

the procession—except for what had been taken from the temple itself.22

Just as the hostile accounts of Marcellus’ ovation emphasize his parade

of the sacred images of the enemy, here Josephus, the Jewish turncoat, in

a disconcertingly deadpan fashion and offering careful explanations for

his non-Jewish readers, lists the sacred objects plundered and on display

in the procession: the golden Shewbread Table, the menorah (“a lamp

stand made quite differently from that in general use”), and last of all

the Jewish Law. His description matches closely the sculptured panel of

just this scene on the Arch of Titus (see Fig. 9).23

Josephus carefully notes the destination of these objects after the tri-

umph. The majority of the spoils, sacred and other, were in due course

transferred to Vespasian’s new Temple of Peace (completed in 75 ce and

dedicated to a strikingly appropriate—or inappropriate—deity). “In-

deed,” as Josephus puts it, “into that temple were accumulated and

stored all those things which, previously, people had traveled the world

over to see, longing to catch a glimpse of them while they were still in

their different countries.” Only the Jewish Law and the purple hangings

from the Temple in Jerusalem were treated differently: these, he ex-

plains, were kept in the imperial palace itself.24

What happened next, especially to the menorah, has been a subject of

modern controversy from at least as far back as the eighteenth century.

Various hypotheses have imagined the menorah criss-crossing the Medi-

terranean in the Middle Ages and falling into the hands of some unlikely

owners—moved to Constantinople in 330 at the foundation of the new

capital of the Empire and installed in its own shrine in the new imperial

palace; robbed from Rome by the Vandal Geiseric in 455 and carted off

to Carthage; robbed back by Belisarius and shipped to Constantinople;

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returned to Jerusalem but plundered by the Sassanians in 614; stolen

from Constantinople by crusaders in 1204; and so on. One particularly

picturesque version, based on nothing so dull as plausible historical evi-

dence, has the menorah lost in the Tiber on October 28, 312 ce, falling

into the river from the Milvian Bridge during the flight of Maxentius

from his victorious rival, Constantine.25

An alternative idea, however, persists in Jewish urban legend: that the

menorah never left the city of Rome at all, and that it remains stored

away in the basement of the Vatican. In 2004, when Israeli chief rabbis

visited the ailing Pope John Paul II, they are reported to have consid-

ered asking permission to search his storerooms for that and other Jew-

ish artifacts. Only half seriously, no doubt—but it would have been con-

sistent with an official request made the previous year by the president

of Israel for a list of all Jewish treasures held by the Vatican, and the de-

mand in 2001 by the Israeli minister of religion for a formal inquiry to

determine the menorah’s location. These diplomatic negotiations pro-

ceeded in the usual way: Israeli claims of “meaningful breakthroughs”

and rather more carefully judged optimism on the part of the chief rab-

bis were balanced by Vatican denials and earnest protestations of com-

mitment to multi-faith understanding and cooperation.26

Of course, no thorough search of forgotten cupboards at the Vatican

is likely to uncover the lost menorah, any more than the Vatican Mu-

seums are likely to hold Octavian’s replica of Cleopatra. The treasures of

the Jewish Temple much more probably lie at the bottom of the Medi-

terranean. Yet the continuing conflicts around this single piece of Ro-

man plunder offer vivid testimony to how the moral, religious, and cul-

tural controversies of the triumph and its parade of spoils can continue

to matter in our own world, too.

“THE TRIUMPHS OF CAESAR”

These extravagant accounts of late republican and early imperial tri-

umphs, with their emphasis on unimaginable wealth, exotic treasures,

and the artifices of display, have determined the modern image—both

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popular and academic—of the procession of spoils. They lie behind

what is probably the most influential visualization of the Roman victory

parade ever: Andrea Mantegna’s series of nine paintings of the Triumphs

of Caesar, commissioned by the Gonzaga family of Mantua at the end

of the fifteenth century, acquired by King Charles I in 1629, and brought

to Hampton Court Palace in England, where they are even now on

show.

As a placard displayed on the second canvas clearly proclaims (“To

Imperator Julius Caesar, for the conquest of Gaul”), the series evokes the Gallic triumph of Julius Caesar, which occupied one day of his quadruple celebration in 46 bce for victories also over Egypt, the Black Sea

kingdom of Pontus, and Africa (victory over King Juba masking what

was also a campaign of civil war against his Roman enemies). Ancient

writers offer vivid glimpses of these occasions: the effect of Arsinoe on

the crowd on the Egyptian day; the distasteful paintings of Caesar’s Ro-

man enemies; the broken axle; the inventive songs chanted by the sol-

diers; the placard in the Pontic triumph with the famous phrase “I came,

I saw, I conquered”; the representations (probably three-dimensional) of

the Rhine and Rhone, along with a “captive Ocean” in gold; a working

model of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, complete with flames.27 But no

detailed narrative survives. Hence, in recreating the parade of plunder

and captives, with Caesar himself riding on his triumphal chariot in the

ninth and final canvas (Fig. 27), Mantegna has had to look elsewhere.

He seems to have used such ancient images as the panels on the Arch of

Titus and (filtered no doubt through Renaissance scholarly treatises on

the triumph) those accounts we have just been considering—the elabo-

rate descriptions of various notable celebrations by Appian, Josephus,

Livy, Plutarch.

The second canvas in the series (Fig. 28), for example, vividly captures

a number of the elements detailed in the written versions: colossal stat-

ues balanced precariously on carts; models of (presumably) captured

towns carried on high; behind them the wooden contraptions belonging

to enemy siege engines; then more statues and model towns, some on

small wagons, some hoisted by hand; and finally in the background suits

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155

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 27:

A. Mantegna, Triumphs of Caesar, 1484–92, Canvas IX: Caesar on His Triumphal Chariot. In this final scene the triumphing general is shown seated (not standing, as in a Roman triumph), holding a branch of palm, and being crowned with a wreath by an an-gelic boy. On top of the arch behind, the captives crouched beneath a trophy are reminiscent of Roman scenes (Figs. 23 and 26).

of armor paraded on poles. The next canvas foregrounds piles of weap-

onry—shields (including a particularly fine half-moon specimen featur-

ing a centaur carrying a naked woman on his back), greaves, spears,

helmets, swords, quivers, and pikes—“artfully arranged,” to quote Plu-

tarch, “to look exactly as if they had been piled up indiscriminately.”

This is followed by a bier (ferculum), derived almost certainly from the

Arch of Titus, on which are carried “vessels” brimming with coin, as well

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 28:

Triumphs of Caesar, Canvas II: The Bearers of Standards and Siege Equipment.

Among the loot of victory, statues, models, and military equipment, the placard strikes an ominous note. The triumph, it explains, was decreed for Caesar’s victory over Gaul, “after envy had been conquered and scorned.” It is hard to resist seeing the phrase as a wry reflection on the assassination—whether due to envy or not—that would soon be Caesar’s fate.

as a mixture of classical and decidedly Renaissance-style dining- and

drinking-ware.

The first canvas (Fig. 29) probably aims to show the multi-storey

pÃgmata from Josephus’ account. Although these are now usually imag-

ined to be “platforms” or “floats,” Mantegna has pictured them as two-

tiered paintings or banners, reflecting in one case (bottom right of the

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157

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 29:

Triumphs of Caesar, Canvas I: The Picture-Bearers. Mantegna launches his triumphal procession with a blast of trumpets and elaborate images of the destructive success of the Roman campaigns, which he seems to have derived from Josephus’ account of the triumph of Vespasian and Titus in 71 ce, rather than from any account of Caesar’s celebrations in 46 bce.

second banner) the scenes of devastation that Josephus claims were de-

picted: here we can just make out the sack of a city and a row of gallows.

Throughout the series, the impression is one of lavish display, wealth,

and excess.28

Mantegna’s paintings take a prominent place in modern views of the

triumphal procession. Indeed, they are not infrequently reproduced to

accompany, and bring to life, even the most technically academic discus-

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sions of the procession.29 For these Triumphs offer a much more evoca-

tive vision of the procession of spoils than any images that survive from

antiquity itself, with the exception perhaps of the main relief sculptures

from the Arch of Titus. No other ancient image of the procession even

hints at the profusion, the dazzling array of treasures, or the seething

mass of riches. We are usually faced instead with some frankly rather

subdued evocations of the parade of plunder: some modest placards; a

few fercula bearing nothing more exotic than despondent prisoners, an

occasional model of a river god, golden crowns, or a couple of dishes—

not a miniature town, siege engine, or statue in sight, still less pÃgmata

or elephants (Fig. 30).30 Admittedly, these representations are often on a

relatively small scale or in a subordinate position on an arch or other

major building; they were not ever intended to be the center of attention

in the way that Mantegna’s were. Nonetheless, the contrast is striking.

Whatever other versions of the parade of spoils there were, and how-

ever paltry most of the “real life” celebrations may have been compared

with what is shown in the Triumphs of Caesar, the image of wealth and

excess hovers over the ceremony for ancient and modern commentators

alike. Ironically, though, there is another, very different sense in which

these paintings offer a model for our understanding of the triumph.

However vivid and dramatic they may appear when reproduced in mod-

ern textbooks, they are in fact a fragile, half-ruined palimpsest of re-

peated restoration and radical repainting that has gone on since at least

the seventeenth century.

The interventions have been drastic, including a wholesale covering

of the original egg-tempera with oil paint around 1700, a botched resto-

ration by Roger Fry in the early twentieth century (which, among other

things, restored the black face in the first canvas as white), and complete

waxing in the 1930s, followed by an only partially successful attempt to

get back to the genuine article in the 1960s.31 What we now see and ad-

mire is in almost no part the original fifteenth-century brushwork of

Mantegna. Instead, it is the historical product of centuries of painting

and unpainting. As such, it may stand better as a symbol of the complex

processes of loss, representation, and reconstruction through which we

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159

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 30:

Part of a triumphal frieze from the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. To

judge from his appearance and attributes (bearded, naked to the waist, leaning on a vessel from which water flows) the figure on the ferculum is a river god: presumably the river Jordan over whom the Romans had been victorious.

must try to understand the triumphal procession than as the vivid evo-

cation of the ancient parade that it is often taken to be.

THE PROFITS OF EMPIRE

The various riches of the triumph have taken a prominent place in the

modern academic imagination. Economic historians have used the fig-

ures recorded for the coin and bullion paraded through the city to track

the growing wealth of Rome, as conquest delivered new imperial territo-

ries.32 Art historians have lingered longingly on the masterpieces cap-

tured as booty in the Greek world starting in the late third century bce

and first seen in Rome by a mass audience in triumphal parades. One

conservative modern calculation has estimated that by the first century

ce fourteen statues by Praxiteles had arrived in Rome, eight by Skopas,

four by Lysippos, three each by Euphranor, Myron, and Sthennis, plus

two each by Pheidias, Polykleitos, and Strongylion—a good proportion

of which would have played their part in some victory parade or other.33

Such works of art, it is commonly argued, heralded and catalyzed the

“hellenizing” revolution in Roman art and culture of the last centuries of

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the Republic. It was to be a spiraling effect. Triumphal booty as it was

displayed after the ceremony itself changed the visual environment of

the city and whetted the Roman appetite for more. Among the trium-

phal captives were artists and craftsmen who brought with them the ar-

tistic expertise of the Hellenistic world, and the cash that was paraded

by the wagonload provided the means of acquiring exactly what new

taste (or political expediency) demanded.34

At the same time, and no less important in the art historical narrative,

the other representations on display in the procession—the paintings of

the conflict, the models of towns or the defeated enemy—also made a

significant contribution to the practice of Roman art and image-mak-

ing. In part, the usual story runs, these were influenced by the tech-

niques and devices of processional display developed in the Greek world:

so that, in a perhaps uncomfortable paradox, the conquered territories

provided the artistic inspiration for the celebration of their own defeat.

But in part the artistic style adopted in these images of the campaigns

was a distinctively “native” tradition, driven by Roman imperatives and

their concern for documenting and publicizing their victories. In this

sense, the art of the triumph, both in subject matter and style, has been

seen as the direct ancestor of that distinctive strand of “documentary re-

alism” in Roman art best known from Trajan’s column or the battle pan-

els on the Arch of Septimius Severus.35

Other historians, more recently, have moved beyond the specifically

financial, visual, or artistic impact of the ceremony to emphasize the

wider importance of the triumph in the culture of Roman imperialism

and in the imaginative economy of the Romans. Parading the varied

profits of conquest—from heaps of coin to statues, trees, and all manner

of precious novel bric-à-brac—the procession served as a microcosm of

the very processes of imperial expansion; it literally enacted the flow of

wealth from the outside into the center of the Empire. The glaring

foreignness of some of the spoils of war, along with the various represen-

tations of the conquest, delineated a new and expanding image of im-

perial territory before the eyes of the spectators (or of those who later

read of these occasions). As one recent commentator on triumphal cul-

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161

ture in the first century ce has put it, the triumph “is an imperial geog-

raphy”; and he characterizes the ceremony “as a performance of the

availability of new territory to Rome . . . train[ing] the gaze on the city

of Rome, where new discoveries have been brought in from the edges for

theatrical display.” Or, as another critic has more succinctly punned,

“the triumphal procession . . . brings the orbs [world] within the walls of the urbs [city].”36

These are all important aspects of Rome’s triumphal culture, vividly

illustrated by ancient discussions of the ceremony. Writers certainly in-

sisted on the vast sums of money sometimes paraded through the streets:

Velleius Paterculus, for example, had 600 million sesterces carried in

Caesar’s quadruple triumph—a colossal sum, equivalent to the mini-

mum subsistence of more than a million families for a year, and outbid-

ding even the biggest estimates of Pompey’s war profits. And other eye-

opening figures are scattered through notices of triumphs.37 More to the

point, the effects of the influx of wealth that came with lavish tri-

umphs prompted rare economic observations even from ancient writers,

who were not usually much concerned with such topics. Famously,

Suetonius notes that “the royal treasure of Egypt, brought into the city

for Octavian’s Alexandrian triumph, caused such growth in the money

supply that, as the rate of interest fell, the price of land rose sharply.”38

Nor can there be any doubt at all that the triumphal procession was

one major route through which not only cash but the artistic traditions

of the eastern Mediterranean were brought to a Roman audience—a

dramatic entrypoint for a whole array of masterpieces amidst the razz-

matazz, the cheers, the electricity of a big public occasion. The triumph

also provided a highly charged focus around which the conflicts of

hellenization (or, as many Romans would have called it, “the growth of

luxury”) were debated. It was, of course, the preceding conquest—the

victory, not the victory parade—that was the main agent in delivering

wealth and “luxury” to Rome. Nonetheless, controversy could focus

more narrowly on the triumphal display, which was a convenient sym-

bol of the whole process of expansion.

We have already seen how the triumph of Cnaeus Manlius Vulso in

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187 bce was strongly linked to a story of cultural change—the intro-

duction of not only such dangerous luxuries as one-legged tables but

also of the whole art of cookery. But other triumphal processions too

take their place in a narrative of innovation. Pliny identifies the tri-

umph of Scipio Asiaticus in 189 bce as a key moment of change, or—

curmudgeonly moralizer that he was—decline: “The conquest of Asia

first brought luxury to Italy, since Lucius Scipio in his triumph exhibited

1,400 pounds of chased silverware and 1,500 pounds of golden vessels,”

while the silver statues of Pharnaces and Mithradates displayed in the

triumph of Pompey give the lie, Pliny insists, to the idea that such ob-

jects were a novelty of the reign of Augustus.39

Several ancient discussions of triumphal ceremonies do also highlight

the role of the procession in the dramatization of imperialism and the

geography of empire. When, for example, Plutarch specifies the dif-

ferent varieties of tableware in the triumph of Aemilius Paullus—

Antigonids, Seleucids, and Thericleians—their very names conjured Ro-

man victory over eastern cities and dynasties, prompting readers to

think of the triumph as a model of imperial expansion. So too when

Plutarch emphasizes the details of the distinctive weaponry of the de-

feated peoples, or when Pliny reminds us that even exotic trees could be

paraded in the triumphal procession on their way to become “tax-paying

subjects” of Rome.40 But some ancient writers make more explicit points

about the triumph’s role as a model of imperialism.

When Polybius, for example, claims that the procession was a means

for generals to bring “right before the eyes of the Roman people a vivid

impression of their achievements,” he is in essence saying that it re-pre-

sented imperial conquest at the center of the Roman world.41 Josephus

goes even further in theorizing the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. He

not only defines the objects on parade as a demonstration of “the great-

ness of the Roman Empire,” but by likening the stream of riches flowing

into the city to a river, he also emphasizes the naturalness of—he natu-

ralizes—the imperial process. If other parts of his description cast the

triumph as a magnificent disruption of the natural order (those gems,

for example, which in their extraordinary profusion called into question

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the very notion of natural rarity), here he offers a glimpse of Roman im-

perialism, seen in the ritual of the triumph, as unstoppably elemental.42

Alternatively, in a rather simpler sense, the parade of riches could be un-

derstood as an inducement to further military expansion. Plutarch in-

sists, for example, that it was the sight of all the riches in Lucullus’ pa-

rade in 63—in particular the royal diadem of Tigranes—that spurred

Crassus to plan his own campaigns in Asia; though, as he further ob-

serves, Crassus, who was killed fighting the Parthians, would discover

that there was more to barbarians than spoil and booty.43

Yet, important as these aspects are in ancient and modern representa-

tions of the triumphal processions, modern enthusiasm for Roman im-

perialist excess has tended to occlude other ways of seeing the parade of

captured booty and the representational devices that went along with it.

CUTTING THE SPOILS DOWN TO SIZE

How far can we take at face value those lavish accounts of the triumphal

parade? Of course booty did flow in to Rome through the period of its

imperial expansion, sometimes in huge quantities. But how common a

sight were the extravagant displays that form our image of the cere-

mony? And how far can we trust those sometimes very precise tallies

given by ancient writers? As with the details of the captives, these ques-

tions reveal the tantalizing uncertainties about the triumphal ritual as it

was enacted on the streets of Rome. Yet more is at stake here, not least

because of the general modern assumption that—thanks to archives of

various sorts which were available to ancient writers—accurate records

of the content of triumphal display have been transmitted to us.

It goes without saying (though it is perhaps not actually said often

enough) that of the 320 triumphs that Orosius claimed had been cele-

brated at Rome between Romulus and Vespasian, only a small propor-

tion can have included the parade of lavish booty and all those other ac-

coutrements that we so readily associate with the ceremony. On the

most generous estimate, we are dealing with something in the order of

fifty occasions between the third century bce and 71 ce; and even that

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figure involves both taking on trust some of the overblown descriptions

of triumphal riches that we have and assuming a splendid show of

magnificence in the case of many triumphs where we have almost no ev-

idence at all, reliable or not, of what was on display. The true total is

probably much lower.

Obviously, riches on the scale of the popular image could not possibly

have been a feature of early celebrations. Although ancient writers may

have filled the gaps in their knowledge by retrojecting the idea of opu-

lence back into their triumphal accounts of the sixth and fifth centuries

bce, Florus cannot be too far from the mark when he writes of cattle,

flocks, carts, and broken weapons being the major triumphal spectacle

until the increasingly lucrative campaigns of the third century and later.

Rome’s enemies in the early period simply did not possess the wealth

that could have made a showy parade.44 But even much later not all tri-

umphs can have been loaded with lavish profits of war and expen-

sive props. Occasionally Livy makes a point of mentioning the lack of

spoils, as in the case of Cnaeus Octavius in 167 bce or of Lucius Furius

Purpureo, who is said to have triumphed in 200 bce with no captives,

no spoils, and no soldiers (omissions stressed by Livy on this occasion to

drive home how little he deserved the celebration).45

At other times too we can reasonably infer that the processions were

on a modest scale. It is hard, for example, to imagine that Caius Pomptinus

put on much of a show in his procession of 54 bce. He had quashed a

revolt of the Gallic tribe of the Allobroges in 62–61 bce (not so fruitful

a source of riches as Eastern monarchies), and he is said to have waited

outside Rome for at least four years before he was, controversially,

awarded a triumph—which raises the question of where any substan-

tial booty would have been stored in the interim (or, more cynically,

whether what was on display in the parade bore much relation to what

he brought back with him from Gaul).46

In fact, the practical details of the treatment and display of the spoils

are predictably murky. We have only the most fleeting hints of how the

spoils were handled (such as Appian’s claim about the thirty days it took

to transfer Mithradates’ furniture stores to the Romans); still less on how

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and where it was kept in Rome in anticipation of the parade, or how it

was managed once the parade ended.47 The idea has been floated that in

the procession itself the cash and bullion at least might never have

reached the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus but may have been di-

verted to the treasury en route. There is no ancient evidence for this,

merely the convenient location of the treasury building (the Temple of

Saturn) near where the road turned up from the Forum to the Capitol

(see Plan).48

Equally unclear is what proportion of the spoils of war plundered

from the enemy cities, palaces, and sanctuaries would have ended up in

the parade at all, and in what form. Some were certainly kept by the

rank and file soldiers. Some were sold off on the spot and converted into

cash. But how those divisions were made, or were expected to be made,

we do not know. Aemilius Paullus was famous for cutting a particularly

mean deal with his troops, when he left them only a small part of what

they had pillaged—albeit a particularly prudent one for state finances.

(“Had he given in to his troops’ greed,” argued Livy, “they would have

left nothing to be made over to the treasury.”) But how deals of this kind

were usually brokered between the soldiers, the general, and the interests

of the state is a matter of guesswork.49

We do not even fully understand to whom Roman war booty for-

mally belonged—whether it was public property that was to be directed

by the general to the public good, or whether all (or part) was entirely at

the disposal of the general to do with as he wished. This issue has raised

considerable controversy—fueled, as so often, by limited ancient evi-

dence which is itself contradictory, by our own desire to impose consis-

tency and rule on Roman practice, and by apparently technical Latin

terms used differently in different contexts. The definitions of two main

words for “booty,” manubiae and praeda, were debated in antiquity itself, and modern scholarship has certainly not resolved the question (de-

spite a popular view that manubiae were a subsection of the wider praeda and one over which the victorious general had a particular interest if not

control).50 In this case, the difficulties and uncertainties may be over-

stated, since in practice the general seems to have taken the leading role

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in disposing of the booty, and questions of formal ownership may only

have become relevant (and various incompatible theories improvised)

when his dispositions were for some reason challenged.

But occasionally such conflicts offer a glimpse of the triumph, too.

One vivid example is the puzzling incident connected with the triumph

of Manius Acilius Glabrio over King Antiochus in 190 bce. When he

was standing for the office of censorship a couple of years later, his polit-

ical rivals prosecuted him “on the grounds that he had neither carried in

his triumph nor delivered to the treasury an amount of royal money and

booty seized in Antiochus’ camp.” Key witness for the prosecution was

Marcus Porcius Cato (also running for the censorship), who claimed

that “he had seen some gold and silver vessels amongst the other royal

booty when the camp had been captured, but he had not seen them in

the triumph.” Whatever this says about the legal rights of control over

booty (note that Livy does not say exactly what the legal charge against

Glabrio was), or about the politics of the early second century ce (the

trial was in fact abandoned), it offers a rare pointer to the possible

importance of individual pieces of triumphal treasure—and their recog-

nizability. Whether or not we believe Cato’s confident testimony (and

Livy’s account suggests that many Romans did not), it offers an intrigu-

ing picture of a Roman notable scanning intensely the items as they

passed by on parade, and matching them up with his memory of bat-

tlefield plunder. It raises the question, to which we shall return in a

slightly different form, that what is on display might not be exactly what

it seems.51

Less controversial, but hardly any better understood, are the organiza-

tion and conventions of the display of the spoils and art works in the pa-

rade. Minute analysis of the visual images has led to the (not wholly sur-

prising) conclusion that those who carried the objects in the procession

and controlled the captives included not only low-grade porters and

guards but also more senior officials directing operations.52 A few brave

attempts have also been made to deduce from written accounts of tri-

umphs a standard order of display—to sort out, in other words, the reg-

ular processional choreography of the golden crowns, elephants, model

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rivers, vessels of coins, and so forth—on the assumption that ancient au-

thors more or less accurately reflected the original order of ceremonies.53

But even if that assumption were correct, unconvincing special pleading

is always necessary to iron out the discrepancies or to incorporate the

various “exceptions”—as, for example, when the quantity of booty de-

manded the procession be spread over several days, or when (according

to Plutarch) Lucullus chose in 63 bce to decorate the Circus Flaminius

with the captured weapons and siege engines, rather than carry them in

procession.54 Besides, no order suggested in any literary account is re-

motely compatible with that on the small frieze of Trajan’s Arch at

Beneventum (see Figs. 10 and 21), where the fercula (just six in all) carrying booty and a couple of golden crowns are distributed throughout the

procession in front of the general, intermingled with the prisoners.

The bottom line, of course, is that there is always a gap, even in a con-

temporary eyewitness description, between that messy aggregate of indi-

vidual movements, displays, stunts, and human beings that make up

“the parade” and the literary (or, for that matter, visual) representations

that capture it in text (or stone). And for no triumph at all do we possess

the full roster of the objects on display. At best, each of the literary ver-

sions we have has selected elements from the parade with their own pri-

orities in mind. One obvious case of this is the two descriptions of the

triumph of Germanicus in 17 ce: Strabo the geographer concentrates on

the various German prisoners, while Tacitus the cynical analyst of impe-

rial power emphasizes the simulacra (replicas) of the mountains, ri-

vers, and battle, with the full panoply of imperial (dis)simulation in his

sights. At worst (worst, that is, for anyone trying to get back to the

procession as it appeared on the streets), those accounts are a confec-

tion of exaggeration, misinformation, misunderstandings, and outright

falsification.

THE LIMITS OF GULLIBILITY

Occasionally we can spot a story of triumphal spoils that we can be sure

is false. Something is certainly wrong with Livy’s tale of the gilded

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shields carried in the triumph of Lucius Papirius Cursor (309 bce) being

divided up “among the proprietors of the banks [or money changers]”

and used for decorating the Forum; for there was no coined money to

speak of in Rome at that date, still less were there “money changers.”

And similar doubts have been raised about the denominations—some of

them anachronistic or impossible in other ways—in which Livy ex-

presses the coins carried in the processions. He claims, for example, that

vast quantities of cistophori from Pergamum were displayed in a series of

triumphs around 190 bce, even though these coins are now generally

thought not to have been minted until later in the second century. Livy

(or his source) may well have been mistakenly retrojecting a currency

back into an early triumph—or possibly translating an unfamiliar cur-

rency into a more familiar name.55

Usually we must rely on first principles and on the limits of our own

gullibility in deciding how suspicious to be about any of the objects on

display. By and large, modern historians of the triumph (and of other

ancient parades and processions) have erred on the side of credulity.

Pompey’s extravagant display in 61 bce has not been seriously called into

question (even that gold statue of Mithradates eight cubits tall), nor

have many of the vast figures for bullion in some implausibly early tri-

umphs, such as the 2,533,000 pounds of bronze supposedly raised from

the sale of captives and displayed at the triumph of Lucius Papirius Cur-

sor in 293 bce.56 None of this, however, matches the credence generally

given to the account (by one Callixeinos of Rhodes, though preserved

only as a quotation in a later, second century ce compendium) of a royal

procession sponsored by King Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria in

the early third century bce—a hellenistic parade of a type often assumed

to have influenced, directly or indirectly, the form, grandeur, and artifice

of the Roman triumph.

Maybe we can envisage, as most scholars have wanted to, Callixeinos’

“twelve-foot tall statue . . . [which] stood up mechanically without any-

one laying a hand on it and sat back down again when it had poured a li-

bation of milk”; given the wealth and sophistication of the city of Alex-

andria, maybe the vast carts pulled by 600 men, chariots towed by

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ostriches, or a golden phallos 180 foot long all seem plausible. But surely

not a “wine-sack made of leopard skin and holding 3,000 measures”

which slowly dribbled its contents onto the parade route. To give some

idea of scale, this container made of stitched animal skins and towed

through streets of Alexandria is supposed to have had a capacity rather

larger than three modern road tankers.57

Gullibility? The modern scholarly alibi for trusting the accuracy of

both Callixeinos and many of the Roman triumphal accounts is the con-

fidence that they are based on archival records, and that—whatever the

strategic omissions or the inevitable gap between the performance and

the written record—many of the objects described and listed derive

from some form of official documentation. In the case of the Ptolemaic

procession, this is hinted only by a brief reference in Callixeinos’ ac-

count itself to “the records of the five yearly festivals.”58 For the triumph

we have rather clearer evidence of an infrastructure of record-keeping as-

sociated with the procession and the handling of booty in general.

The key text is a passage from Cicero’s attack on Verres where he con-

trasts his adversary’s illicit plundering from Sicily with the properly scru-

pulous conduct of Publius Servilius, who celebrated a triumph over the

Isauri in 74 bce. According to Cicero, Servilius brought home all kinds

of statues and works of art which “he carried in his triumph and had

fully registered in the public records at the treasury”; and he goes on to

claim that these records contained “not only the number of statues, but

also the size of each one, its shape and attitude.”59 Combine this and

other hints of such record keeping, with the precise figures sometimes

given by ancient writers for the quantity of bullion or coin (“14,732

pounds of silver, 17,023 denarii, 119,449 silver coins of Osca”) or the

amount of statuary on parade (“785 bronze statues, 280 marble”) and the

idea that a documentary basis underlies the accounts of triumphal booty

may seem both appealing and reassuring.60

That indeed is what most historians have usually assumed—for want

of any obvious argument to the contrary, as well as a strong desire to

find for once some firm evidence to build on and a propensity to be

more trusting of ancient figures that do not end (when converted to

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modern numeration) in 000. In particular they have seen in the austere

and relatively standardized records of triumphal booty given systemati-

cally by Livy from 207 bce until the end of his surviving text in 167 bce

evidence that derives directly or more likely indirectly (through the ear-

lier historians on whom Livy drew) from an archival record.61 True, the

argument goes, there may be embellishment at the margins; and true,

ancient numerals are always liable to have been garbled by repeated

copying from one manuscript to the next. So complete trust is not in or-

der. But, in its essentials, the data on Roman triumphal booty that we

read particularly in Livy’s later books, but also sometimes in other au-

thors who offer similarly precise lists, are based on some kind of official

archives.

A prime candidate, but not the only one, is some official record or in-

ventory of the Roman treasury. This is suggested both by Cicero’s eulogy

of Servilius (though no surviving literary account of any triumph goes

anywhere near to detailing the size or attitudes of the statues as Cicero

claims Servilius did) and also by Livy’s common expression in listing the

cash or bullion in the triumph: “The general delivered to the treasury

. . .” It may also be reflected in Livy’s account of the details of the plun-

der at the sack of New Carthage, where he claims that a quaestor (a ju-

nior Roman magistrate, sometimes directly connected with the treasury)

was on hand supervising the weighing out and counting of the coin and

precious metal.62

Certainly there were archives at Rome which were concerned in dif-

ferent ways with booty in general and with the triumphal ceremony in

particular, and there is a reasonable chance that some of the data we

have on the objects in the procession (as well as the plunder seized on

the battlefield) goes back ultimately, even if circuitously, to this source.

Yet whether these were themselves sufficiently systematic, accurate, and

accessible to validate the literary accounts is quite another matter. Part

of the problem is that for the great majority of triumphs we are dealing

with information on the display of booty and cash provided by only one

author, most often Livy. It is an uncomfortable truth of modern studies

of the ancient world that we often find it easier to be confident of our

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evidence the less of it we have. Nothing can contradict a single account;

more often than not two accounts of the same event prove incompatible