The Roman Triumph

or at least different in significant details. So it is with ancient descrip-

tions of triumphs, archivally based or not.

We already spotted some flagrant contradictions and awkward diver-

gences in the versions of Pompey’s celebration in 61 bce. Similar issues

emerge almost every time that more than one ancient writer gives details

of a particular procession. It would be tempting to imagine, for exam-

ple, that Diodorus Siculus’ account of the three-day triumphal display

of Aemilius Paullus goes back to an archival inventory. The repertoire

for each day is carefully distinguished, and detailed information (albeit

tending toward round numbers) is offered: 1,200 wagons full of em-

bossed shields, 12 of bronze shields, 300 carrying other weapons, gold in

220 “loads” or “carriers” (probably the Greek phorÃmata is a translation

of fercula), 2,000 elephant tusks, a horse in battle gear, a golden couch

with flowered covers, 400 garlands “presented by cities and kings,” and

so on.63 But if some archival source does stand behind this, we need to

explain why Plutarch’s no less full version is so different. He divides the

booty up between the three days in a way that directly contradicts

Diodorus’ account (not armor on the first day but statues and paint-

ings), and throughout he specifies quite different details (77, not 220,

“vessels” or “caskets” of gold, for example).64 And it is not only between

different authors that such discrepancies are found: Livy himself offers

two different figures for the amount of uncoined silver carried in the

ovation of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior (191 bce) on the two occasions when

he mentions it.65

Unsettling in a different way are the accounts, in Plutarch and Livy,

of the cash and bullion carried in the three-day triumph of Titus

Quinctius Flamininus over Macedon in 194 bce. At first sight they look

reassuringly compatible. Plutarch cites the authority of “the followers

of Tuditanus” for his specific information on the amount of gold and

silver: “3,713 pounds of gold bullion, 43,270 pounds of silver and 14,514

gold ‘Philips’ [that is, coins bearing the head of King Philip]”; and these

figures almost exactly match (but for a single pound of gold bullion)

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those given by Livy.66 This has usually been taken to suggest that Livy

and Plutarch were dependent on the same historical tradition, which

(via the second-century bce historian Caius Sempronius Tuditanus, whose

work has not survived) extended back to a documentary or archival

source. Of course, other explanations for the match are possible: that

Plutarch took his figures (directly or indirectly) from Livy; that both

were dependent on the “information” of an earlier historian, who had

nothing to do with any archival tradition.

But it is more complicated than that. In fact, the text of Livy as pre-

served in the manuscript tradition is significantly different from what

we now usually see printed, and it agrees much less closely with Plu-

tarch: while the figures for “Philips” and for gold bullion are the same,

Livy’s manuscripts have “18,270 pounds of silver,” not 43,270. Quite

simply the manuscripts have been emended by modern editors of the

text to bring Livy’s figures into line with Plutarch’s. There is a case for

doing this: ingenious critics have correctly pointed out that in Roman

numerals 43 (XLIII, as in 43,270) is different by only one digit from 18

(XVIII, as in 18,270), so corruption somewhere along the line of trans-

mission is plausible.67 But at the same time it shows a scholarly incentive

to normalize the variant accounts of triumphal processions and their

contents that extends to “improving” the Latin texts themselves. It will

come as no surprise that the difference between Livy’s two figures for

Nobilior’s silver has often been massaged away by a similar technique.68

Where does this leave any modern attempt to reconstruct the displays

in the triumphal procession? As so often in the study of ritual occasions

in antiquity (or of any other occasions, for that matter), we scratch the

surface of what appears to be the clearest evidence and that clarity soon

disappears. Accounts of the processions given by Greek and Roman

writers almost certainly owe something, sometimes, to archival or of-

ficial records; they may also derive in part from eyewitness accounts and

popular memory (however reliably or unreliably transmitted), as well as

being the product of misinformation, wild exaggeration, over-optimistic

reinvention, and willful misunderstanding. The problem is that it is

now next to impossible to determine the status of any individual piece

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of “evidence” in the accounts we have: which is a bona fide nugget from

an official archive, which is a wild flight of fancy, or which is a plucky

ancient guess dressed up with spurious precision as if it were one of

those archival nuggets? The outright incompatibilities between different

accounts alert us to the difficulties. But the overlaps are not necessarily

reassuring either: they may indicate a standard authoritative tradition,

or they may equally well indicate copying of the same piece of misinfor-

mation.

One thing is fairly clear. Seen inevitably, like the triumph itself, through

centuries of efforts of reconstruction and repainting, Mantegna’s ambi-

tious and influential exercise in recreation is a misleading image to have

in mind when we think back to the triumphal procession of, say, Caius

Pomptinus as it made its way through the Roman streets in 54 bce.

Mantegna’s image is a memorable aggregate of the most flamboyant de-

scriptions of just a handful of the most notoriously extravagant displays

of booty, wealth, and artifice in the whole history of the triumph. We

should do well to try to call to mind also those occasions where, at most,

a few wagonloads of coin and bullion, plus some rather battered cap-

tured weapons, were trooped up to the Capitol. We should not allow, in

other words, the modest and orderly procession of Trajan’s Arch at

Beneventum to be entirely swamped by the grandiloquent Renaissance

version that plays so powerfully to (and is in part responsible for) our

larger-than-life picture of the ceremony.

PROCESSIONAL THEMES

Mantegna’s image of the triumphal procession and its riches cannot, of

course, be dismissed so easily. When Romans conjured the triumph in

their imaginations, one important image in their repertoire was indeed

larger than life. It is a fair guess that, by the second century bce at least,

even the most down-beat triumphal ceremony could be reinvented as a

blockbuster in the fantasies of the victorious general. Nonetheless, the

preoccupations of these ancient literary recreations of the triumph do

not match up entirely with the preoccupations of modern historians.

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Modern accounts have made much of the individual works of art that

flowed into Rome through the triumphal procession: masterpieces by

Praxiteles, Pheidias, and other renowned Greek artists that were to revo-

lutionize the visual environment of the city. In fact, there is hardly a sur-

viving ancient account of a triumphal procession that identifies any such

work of art. All kinds of precious or curious objects are singled out, and

occasionally special mention is made of particularly extravagant statues

of notable victims or victors (such as the “six foot” solid gold statue of

Mithradates carried in Lucullus’ triumph of 63 bce, overshadowed by

the “eight cubit” version paraded by Pompey).69 In one instance Livy

notes that a statue of Jupiter was part of the triumphal booty from the

Italian city of Praeneste.70 But nothing is ever said about any individual

masterpiece from the hand of a famous Greek artist. Their presence in

the procession we infer by putting together references to wagonloads of

statues with notices of particular gifts or dedications of sculpture by fa-

mous generals.

It is hard to imagine, for example, that the Athena by Pheidias, which

was dedicated according to Pliny by Aemilius Paullus at the Temple of

“Today’s Good Fortune,” was not one of the “captive figures, paintings

and colossal statues” that Plutarch imagines “carried along in 250 carts”

at Paullus’ triumph.71 But no ancient author actually says so. The main

stress in their accounts is on volume and value, not on artistic distinc-

tion. This is a very different set of priorities from those of the trium-

phant procession into Paris in 1798 of Napoleon’s haul of masterpieces

from Italy, where each of the major works (including such renowned

classical pieces as the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere) were individu-

ally identified, sitting inside their “grandiloquently inscribed packing

cases.”72 If Napoleon paraded particularly renowned chefs d’oeuvre as the

reward of military victory, ancient triumphal culture put the accent on

wealth and quantity. This chimes well with repeated stress on monetary

value in, for example, Livy’s brief notices of triumphs. However accurate

they are, these delineate each ceremony, in its essentials, in financial

terms: the amount of coin and bullion on display (or transferred to the

treasury), the amount of cash given as a donative to the soldiers.73

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175

Also prominently in view in ancient triumphal accounts are the dis-

plays of weapons and other military equipment captured from the en-

emy. Of course, not all the detritus of arms and armor from the bat-

tlefield arrived in Rome. In fact, we have a series of references to the

ceremonial burning of enemy equipment in the war zone.74 But those

that were selected for the parade are often given star billing. This could

be as objects of luxury and wonderment in their own right. Lucullus’ tri-

umph in 63 bce apparently featured a marvelous shield “studded with

jewels.” And among the lists of precious metals in other triumphs we

find shields of silver and even gold (parade armor presumably, else the

Romans would have had easy victories) rubbing shoulders with the pre-

cious drinking cups and dinner plates.75 At the same time, the distinctive

foreign weapons, sometimes explicitly given a national identity (“Cretan

shields, Thracian body armor”) might serve to highlight—no less than

the exotically clad prisoners—the Otherness of Rome’s enemies. But

such objects evoked the realities of conflict, the bottom line of victory

and defeat, too.

In his account of Paullus’ triumph, Plutarch lingers for several lines

on the display of arms, picking out the various types of equipment,

while passing over most of the precious booty in a brisk list. The armory

was, he insists, enough to inspire terror—or at least that frisson that

comes from looking at the firepower of those whom you have just de-

feated. Such was the impact surely of the siege engines, ballistas, fighting

ships (or their bronze rams), and enemy chariots trundling through the

streets of the city. It was the closest you could get to the experience of

battle without actually being there—hearing, as Plutarch imagined it,

the eerie clanking, or seeing, with Propertius, “the prows of Actium

speeding along the Sacred Way” (presumably on wheels, though this is

another case where the practical technology of the triumph leaves us

guessing).76 On the other hand, the conversion of the enemy weapons

into an object of spectacle on Rome’s home territory drew the sting of

that fear, as well as adding to the humiliation of the defeated. From mili-

tary standards to state-of-the-art artillery, their arsenals were now open

to the gaze of the conquerors, while—as more than one Roman sculp-

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ture portrays it—captives might be made to perch on fercula under care-

ful arrangements of their native armor now reappropriated as a trophy

of Roman victory (see Figs. 23 and 26).77

It is also these weapons, rather than masterpieces of art, whose his-

tory, after the triumph itself, ancient writers chose to highlight. In sev-

eral instances triumphal narratives explicitly give the arms and armor a

story that continues after the parade has reached the Capitol. Some are

said to have ended up on show in temples and public buildings, both in-

side and outside Rome.78 Others, like the rams from ships captured by

Pompey, are reported to have adorned the private house of the general

himself.79 In other locations the message must have been rather differ-

ent. The arms hanging in the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Syracuse,

which, according to Livy, were presented to King Hiero by the Roman

people, must have been a double-edged gift. They were spoils from Ro-

man conquests in Greece and Illyria, captured from the enemy and pre-

sumably (though the connection is not spelled out) paraded in triumph,

before being passed to the Syracusans. As such, they both shared with a

loyal ally the symbols of Roman victory and offered a warning of what

the price of disloyalty might be.80

Even more striking, though, are the stories of the reuse—and with

it the resignification—of these objects of triumphal display. Spurius

Carvilius, for example, in the early third century bce is supposed to have

turned the bronze weapons captured from the Samnites into a statue of

Jupiter on the Capitol, “big enough to be seen from the sanctuary of Ju-

piter Latiaris” (on the Alban Mount); “and from the filings he had a

statue of himself made which stands at the feet of the other.” True or

not, this offers a nice image of captured arms being converted into both

a symbol of Roman religious power and a memorial of the glory of the

triumphing general.81

But even the display of arms in a temple or house was not necessarily

the end of their story. Despite Plutarch’s assertion that the spoils of war

were the only dedications to the gods which were never moved or re-

paired (echoing Pliny’s view of the permanence of the spoils decorating

the general’s house), weapons from a past triumph could find themselves

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conveniently recycled.82 In the desperate stages of Rome’s fight against

Hannibal, criminals were enlisted and were said to have been armed

with the weapons taken from the Gauls and paraded in the triumph of

Caius Flaminius seven years earlier.83 The partisans of the tribune Caius

Gracchus in 121 bce made use of armor on display in the house of

Fulvius Flaccus, who had triumphed in 123, in the violent conflicts in

which the tribune himself was eventually killed.84 Indeed, we know of

those spoils given to Hiero only because, after the king’s death and the

assassination of his successor, they were torn down from the temple and

put to use by the insurgents.85

Some of these stories hint once more at the darker side of the Roman

ideology of victory. For it was one thing to appropriate the Gallic spoils

as a last ditch weapon against the Carthaginians. It was surely quite an-

other, and a warning of the fragility of power, glory, and political stabil-

ity, to see triumphal spoils turned against Romans themselves and play-

ing their part in the civil war between Gracchus and his conservative

enemies; or for that matter to see the gifts to Hiero used against the sup-

porters of his grandson and successor (albeit under a slogan of “liberty”).

We find a hint here too of a more complicated configuration of impe-

rial power than most modern interpretations allow. Certainly the trium-

phal parade could be seen as a model of the imperial process, a jingoistic

display of the profits of empire and the consequences of military vic-

tory to the Roman spectator (and reader). But the spoils and booty also

gave a glimpse of an altogether bigger narrative of historical change and

transfer of power. That is partly the lesson of the recycling of the weap-

ons—and with it the reappearance of the instruments of past conflicts

and the symbols of past Roman victories in different hands and under

different political and military regimes. This lesson was also stressed

by some of the displays of precious booty—a point made particularly

clearly by Appian in his account of Scipio Aemilianus’ triumph over

Carthage in 146 bce. This was (as so often) “the most splendid triumph

of all,” partly no doubt because it was “teeming with all the statues and

objets d’art that the Carthaginians had brought to Africa from all over

the world through the long period of their own continuous victories.”86

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What had been the profits of one empire now appeared in the victory

parade of another, so that the triumph heralded not simply the Empire

of Rome but at the same time the changing pattern of imperial power

itself.

Seen in this light, Pompey’s reputed use of the cloak of Alexander the

Great was not just an instance of a Roman general taking on the mantle

of his most famous predecessor, but a larger gesture portraying Rome as

the successor of the empire of Macedon. How far this prompted people

to wonder, more widely, if Rome also one day would have a successor,

we do not know. But for Polybius, at least, the despoiling of Syracuse by

the Romans in 211 bce (the campaign for which Marcellus was awarded

an ovation) raised acute issues about the ambivalence and transience of

domination: “At any rate,” he concluded his reflections, “the point of

my remarks is directed to those who succeed to empire in their turn, so

that even as they pillage cities they should not suppose that the misfor-

tunes of others are an honor to their own country.”87

PERFORMANCE ART

Modern historians of Roman art and culture have often been overly en-

thusiastic in their desire to pinpoint the origin of distinctively “Roman”

forms of art in the institutions of the city of Rome and in the social

practices of its elite members. It took a very long time indeed for them

to give up the idea that the whole genre of portraiture (and particularly

the “hyper-realistic” style often known as “verism”) could be traced back

directly to death masks and the rituals of the aristocratic Roman funeral.

The idea clung tenaciously despite an almost total absence of evidence

in its favor, and a considerable amount to the contrary.88

A similar theory that the traditions of Roman historical painting and

some of their most distinctive conventions of narrative representation in

sculpture derive from artwork associated with the triumph is still re-

markably buoyant—despite having no more to recommend it than the

shibboleth about portraiture. For a start, we have very little idea about

the artistic idiom of any of the paintings or models carried in the trium-

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phal procession. None survive, pace all the optimistic rediscoveries of the image of Cleopatra. And the few tantalizing hints we read about their

workmanship—such as Pliny’s claim that Paullus asked for an artist

from Athens “to decorate his triumph,” or the references to the model

town in Caesar’s triumph in 45 being made of ivory (in contrast to the

wooden versions in the procession of his subordinates)—are not enough

to give any general impression.89

It is little more than a guess to suggest, as art historians often do, that

the paintings were rendered in the style of a group of third-century

tomb paintings found on the Esquiline hill in Rome, which apparently

show scenes from Roman wars with the Samnites.90 In fact, the vocabu-

lary used by ancient authors to evoke the triumphal representations does

not always allow us to be certain whether they have paintings, tapestries,

or three-dimensional models in mind—or, for that matter, whether the

towns they refer to were miniature replicas or personifications. There

are, for example, any number of possibilities for the “representation of

the captured city of Syracuse” (simulacrum captarum Syracusarum) in

Marcellus’ ovation. Was it a painting or a sculptural model? A female

Syracuse in chains, a map of the city, or the ancient equivalent of a card-

board cutout?

Even more to the point, there is a much bigger gap than is usually

supposed between whatever might have been carried in the triumphal

parades and the famous series of references, for the most part from Pliny,

to early “historical painting” at Rome. These included such works of art

as the painting of a battle between the Romans and Carthaginians,

erected by Manius Valerius Maximus Messala in the senate house in 263

bce; the painting in the shape of Sardinia, with “representations of bat-

tles” on it, dedicated in 174 bce by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in the

Temple of Mater Matuta; and those pictures exhibited in the Forum by

Lucius Hostilius Mancinus in 145 bce showing the “site of Carthage and

the various attacks upon it”—beside which Mancinus stood, giving a

running commentary on the campaigns and so endearing himself to his

audience that, according to Pliny, he won the consulship at the next

elections.91 The usual argument is that these pictures started life as pa-

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rade objects at their generals’ triumphs, that they ended up on perma-

nent display in various locations of the city when the celebration was

over, and that they inspired that whole Roman “documentary” tradition

in art, which captured historical events using such techniques as bird’s-

eye perspective and continuous narrative (where different episodes of

the same story are depicted within the same overall composition).

In fact, this plausible argument is a decidedly flimsy one. No evidence

exists, beyond modern wishful thinking, that the paintings commis-

sioned by Valerius Messala and the rest were ever carried in triumphs be-

fore finding a permanent place of display. And that would certainly have

been impossible in the case of Mancinus’ painting of Carthage, for he

never celebrated a triumph at all (despite what is sometimes erroneously

claimed for him in modern literature). Besides—although the evidence

is admittedly rather thin—the triumphal paintings, as they are very

briefly described in ancient accounts, appear to feature significantly dif-

ferent themes from the historical paintings on permanent display.

Where historical paintings seem mostly to focus on the victorious

campaigns of the Roman armies and their general, the triumphal images

are most often said to depict the defeated enemy and the devastation of

the conquered territory. Of course, this could be a matter of the differ-

ent emphasis, or focalization, of the different accounts: the same paint-

ing of a battle can, after all, be described from the point of view of the

conquerors or the conquered. But the stark insistence on the fate of the

defeated in the references we have to the images carried in the triumph

(the disemboweling of Cato, the deluge of blood through Judaea) hardly

supports any argument that would link them to those other traditions of

historical painting. There is, in fact, very little to be said for putting tri-

umphal painting at the head of the genealogy of the narrative and docu-

mentary tradition in Roman art.

Yet there are connections between the ceremony of triumph and Ro-

man arts of representation at a rather more significant level. Just as the

traditions of Roman aristocratic funerals and the commemoration of an-

cestors provided a social context for the development of portraiture,

even in the absence of any direct link between the origins of the genre

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and death masks (or any other sort of mask for that matter), so too tri-

umphal culture as a whole provided a crucial arena within which issues

of representation were explored and debated. Ancient authors focus not

only on the plunder and the spectacular images in the procession; they

return repeatedly to how the display was staged, as if representation it-

self—its conventions, contrivances, and paradoxes—was a central part of

the show. The triumph is, in other words, construed as being a cere-

mony of image- making as much as it is one of images. It is the place

where, in many written versions, representation (or mimesis) reaches its

limits, and where the viewer (or reader) is asked to decide what counts as

an image or where the boundary between reality and representation is to

be drawn.

The poet Ovid explores these issues with particular verve. In one of

his poems from exile on the Black Sea (from 8 ce to his death nine or so

years later) he conjures up the image of a triumph in Rome, lamenting

his own absence from the spectacle and his reliance on his “mind’s

eye”—in contrast to, in Ovid’s words, “the lucky people who will get the

real show.” Part of the joke, for us at least, is that the triumph he pre-

dicts, for the heir-apparent Tiberius to celebrate his victories over the

Germans, never actually took place; it was never a “real show” at all. But

there is another joke, too, on the idea of reality. For “what exactly,” as

one critic has recently asked, “is the ‘real spectacle’ on show? Largely

a parade of feignings, images of events and places far off, pictures,

tableaux, personifications, imitations which supply the matter for the

second-order fictive imitations of the poet.” The “real” procession, in

other words, is no less fictive than Ovid’s “fictive imitations.”92

In another of his poems from exile, written—we usually assume—to

mark the triumph of Tiberius over Illyricum, celebrated in 12 ce, Ovid

hints at the problems of triumphal illusion even more economically,

in just three words. Here he lists the highlights of mimetic ingenuity

featured (he imagines) in the procession, including “barbarian towns,

mimicking their sacked walls in silver, with their painted men.” With

their painted men (cum pictis viris)? The question this raises for the

reader goes directly to the heart of the representational flux of the (repre-

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sentation of the) triumph. Are these men painted on the images of the

towns being paraded (like the silver walls)? Or are they images of painted

men—men smeared with woad or tattooed, after the habit of northern

barbarians? Is the paint a means of representation or is it what is repre-

sented, the signifier or the signified? And how could the reader tell the

difference?93

Ovid is not the only writer—determined as he so often is to exploit

the lurking ambivalences of Roman culture—who directs our attention

to the triumph’s representational complexity. Historians too take up

these issues. Appian’s account of Pompey’s triumph of 61, for example—

at first sight a relatively straightforward narrative of the procession—in

fact leads the reader through a series of reflections on representation and

its limits, both in the triumph itself and in its written versions. When he

notes that one of the paintings on display depicted the “silence” of the

night on which Mithradates fled, he is not only emphasizing the extraor-

dinary realism of this art. By introducing this literary paradox (for only

in writing can a painting show sound or its absence) Appian is also

pointing to the inevitable mismatch between the visual images and his

own written description of the ceremony—and at the same time he is

prompting his readers to consider where the mimetic games of the tri-

umph plunge into implausibility, if not absurdity.94

A different aspect of the representational paradox follows almost in-

stantly in Appian’s account, with the mention of the “images [eikones] of

the barbarian gods and their native costume.” In this case, as with Ovid’s

“painted men,” the very nature of the representation and the mimetic

process is elusive. In contrast to Mithradates and his family (whose im-

ages took the place of the human beings who, in other circumstances,

might have been present in the procession themselves), these gods could

appear in no form other than images. The eikones here, in other words,

were not standing in for captives who were unavoidably absent; they

were the “real thing,” the captive gods themselves, dressed like the other

prisoners in their exotic foreign garb. At least that is the case if we imag-

ine that eikones were the statues of these divine figures brought from the East. But we cannot be sure that they were not paintings of those divine

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images ( eikones of eikones), a second order of representation on painted canvas. In Appian’s written representation of the triumph, statues and

paintings of statues are impossible to distinguish.95

It makes a nice contrast with Josephus’ hints on this theme in his

account of the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. There the procession

is said to have included “images of the Roman gods, of amazing size

and skilled workmanship, and all made of some rich material.” Roman

statues of this kind (such as Pompey’s pearl head) may have been a regu-

lar presence in triumphal processions, and if so would have contributed

to the slippage we have already noted between victor and victim—the

treasures of the victors being an object of spectacle no less than those

of the vanquished. But they would have been a particularly loaded pres-

ence in this case, when, of course, there could have been no images

of the Jewish god. His place was taken by representations of a quite

different order, the holy objects from the temple and the written text of

the Law.96

Such mimetic games raised important and difficult questions of inter-

pretation and belief. How did you make sense of what you saw? And

could you trust your eyes? Appian directly confronted the problem of

belief when he made it absolutely clear that he was none too sure that

Pompey really was wearing the genuine cloak of Alexander the Great.

But Ovid, again, offers a particularly sophisticated and witty variation

on this theme, when he presents the triumphal procession in his Ars

Amatoria (Art of Love) as a good place for his learner-lover to impress

and pick up a girl. The idea is that Ovid’s girl (being a girl) cannot work

out for herself who or what the personifications of conquered places and

peoples are meant to be; and so the boy is advised to play the interpreter

and (with confident, if spurious, learning) to produce a plausible set of

names to identify the figures, models, and images as they pass.

. . . “Here comes Euphrates,” tell her,

“With reed-fringed brow; those dark

Blue tresses belong to Tigris, I fancy; there go Armenians,

That’s Persia, and that, h’r’m, was some

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Upland Achaemenid city. Both those men are generals.”

Give the names if you know them; if not. . .

Invent a likely tale.97

The joke in this passage turns on the slipperiness of triumphal imagery.

It is partly, of course, on the girl, who cannot make sense of what she

sees. But it is on the boy and the narrator, too, as well as on the conven-

tions of the whole charade—and so also on the reader.

After all, just how plausible are the confidently spurious identifica-

tions the boy and the narrator between them devise? They may sound

reasonable enough to start with, but a moment’s thought will surely sug-

gest otherwise. Was it not a dumb decision, for example, to pretend to

distinguish so easily the two rivers that are the natural twins of the

world’s waterways?98 Has not the boy just revealed the very superficiality

of his own patronizing bravura? Maybe. But any readers who were to

take pleasure in their own superiority in this guessing game of interpre-

tation would risk falling into exactly the same trap as the learner-lover.

For part of the point of the passage is to insinuate the sheer under-deter-

minacy of the images (kings, rivers, a chieftain or two) that pass by in a

triumph. Besides, another question mark hovers here—over the victory

itself that is being celebrated. Ovid hints that he has in mind some fu-

ture triumph of Gaius Caesar (one of Augustus’ long series of ill-fated

heirs), for a victory over the Parthians. The chances are then that it will

be just another one of those diplomatic stitch-ups, passing as military

heroics, that characterized most Augustan encounters with that particu-

lar enemy. But who cares when the “real” conquest is the girl standing

next to you?

In the end, as always, the poet has the last laugh, insinuating a more

sinister agenda into this mimetic fun and disrupting the conventional

distinction between representation and reality. Suppose we banish the

suspicion that these processional images are overblown symbols to bol-

ster bogus heroics and take them straight as memorials of a series of suc-

cessful Roman massacres in the East. There is then an odd mixture of

times and tenses in Ovid’s account: “That is Persia,” “that was . . . ” At The Art of Representation

185

first sight this seems to be tied to the perspective of the boy and girl, as

the present tense of what they see now, gives way to a past tense of

what has just passed by. But more is hanging on the verbs than that. For

“that was some upland Achaemenid city” is literally true in another

sense. Whatever this nameless town used to be, the chances are that,

following our glorious Roman victory, it exists no more: it has only a

past. All that is “real” about it now is the brilliant cardboard cutout

or painting carried along in the procession. Representation has become

the only reality there is.

FAKING IT?

The boundary between models, representations, and replicas on the one

hand and fakes and shams on the other is an awkward one—just as

Tacitus insinuated in his account of Tiberius’ triumph over Germany

when he cast the simulacra in the procession as an appropriate com-

memoration for a victory that was itself only a pretense. The final twist

in the complicated story of triumphal representation comes with the ac-

counts of the triumphs or projected triumphs of the emperors Caligula

and Domitian; here mimesis is turned into deception.

Both of these scored hollow military victories and planned, even if

they did not celebrate, equally hollow triumphs. But where were the vic-

tims or the booty to come from? According to Suetonius, to celebrate his

triumph over the Germans, Caligula planned to dress up some Gauls to

impersonate bona fid e German prisoners. They were chosen with the

usual desiderata for triumphal captives in mind (“He chose all the tallest

of the Gauls”)—and, in fact, the emperor is credited with the nice coin-

age (in Greek) axiothriambeutos, or “worth leading in a triumphal pro-

cession,” to describe the qualities he was looking for. To make the cha-

rade more plausible, he was going to get them to dye their hair red, learn

the German language, and adopt German names. This is the occasion

that the satirist Persius probably refers to when he sends up Caligula’s

wife for arranging contracts for “kings’ cloaks, auburn wigs, chariots

(esseda) and big models of the Rhine.”99 Much the same story is told of

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the triumphs of Domitian, but he is credited also with a bright idea

for the fake spoils: according to Dio, he raided the palace furniture

store, presumably for the kind of royal couches, thrones, and dinner ser-

vices that featured in accounts of blockbuster triumphs during the late

Republic.100

True or not, these stories raise crucial questions about the practice of

imperial rule, and the nature of that bigger charade that cynical Roman

observers saw as the heart of the imperial political system. Here the

sham is exposed in the fake victories celebrated with a display of fake

victims. But it reflects more specifically on the culture of triumphal rep-

resentation, too. In Roman imperial ideology, one of the characteristics

of monstrous despots is that they literalize the metaphors of cultural pol-

itics, to disastrous effect: Elagabalus is said to have responded to the

loaded metaphors of ambivalent gendering in his Eastern religion by “re-

ally” attempting to give himself a vagina; Commodus is supposed to

have sought the charisma of the arena by literally jumping over the bar-

rier to make himself a gladiator.101 In the stories of despotic triumphs,

transgressive rulers play out “for real” the mimetic games of the proces-

sion by faking the captives and the spoils that validated the whole show.

Despots’ triumphs, in other words, literalize triumphal mimesis into

sheer pretense; the culture of representation is turned into (or is exposed

as) the culture of sham.

c h a p t e r

VI

Playing by the Rules

THE FOG OF WAR

In 51 bce Cicero—Rome’s greatest orator but not, by a long way, its

greatest general—began to nurture hopes of being awarded a triumph.

He had been appointed, much against his will, to the governorship of

the province of Cilicia, a large tract of land in what is now southern Tur-

key (with the island of Cyprus tacked onto its jurisdiction). For a man of

untried military mettle, it was uncomfortably close to the kingdom of

Parthia, which had inflicted a devastating defeat on the Roman forces

under Crassus just two years earlier. The Parthian victory celebrations

had, according to Plutarch, included a parody of a Roman triumph,

with a prisoner dressed in women’s clothes taking the part of the tri-

umphing Crassus; and they had ended with the general’s severed head

used as a prop in a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae, standing in for

that of the dismembered king Pentheus.1

It was not so much a sense of danger that put Cicero off his overseas

posting but rather the enforced absence from the city of Rome. He kept

up with the gossip and political in-fighting by letter, giving his friends

and colleagues news, in return, of his work in the province. Some of this

correspondence survives.2 It offers the most vivid glimpse we have of Ro-

man provincial government and of the frontline military activity that of-

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ten went with it. In fact, it represents the only day-to-day first-person

account of campaigns to have survived from antiquity. It also sheds im-

portant light on the run-up to the celebration of a triumph. In what cir-

cumstances might a general decide to seek the honor? How might he

best support his case? On this occasion at least, the award (or not) hung

on a complex combination of demonstrable military achievement, ener-

getic behind-the-scenes negotiation, and artful persuasion.

In one of these letters, written probably in September 51, a month or

so after Cicero had arrived in Cilicia, one of his younger correspondents,

the smartly disreputable Marcus Caelius Rufus, trailed the hope that he

might secure just enough military success to earn a triumph: “If we

could only get the balance right so that a war came along of just the

right size for the strength of your forces and we achieved what was

needed for glory and a triumph without facing the really dangerous and

serious clash—that would be the dream ticket.”3 It was a characteristi-

cally naughty piece of subversion on Caelius’ part to cast a military vic-

tory as merely a useful device in the pursuit of a triumph, rather than

seeing a triumph as due honor for military victory; and how seriously

Cicero was supposed to take it, we do not know.

But in his reply, sent in mid-November (it could take a couple of

months for letters to travel between Rome and Cilicia), he was able to

tell Caelius that everything had worked out as he had wanted: “You say

that it would suit you if only I could have just enough trouble to earn

a sprig of laurel; but you are afraid of the Parthians because you don’t

have much confidence in my troops. Well that is exactly what has hap-

pened.” In the face of a Parthian incursion into the neighboring prov-

ince of Syria, Cicero had moved into the Amanus mountain range, be-

tween the two provinces, and terrorized the inhabitants who had long

resisted Roman takeover. “Many were captured and slaughtered, the

rest scattered. Their strongholds were taken by our surprise attack and

torched.” Cicero himself was hailed imperator by his men, a customary

acknowledgment of a significant victory (which went back probably to

the late third century bce) and often seen as a first step in the award of a

triumph.4

Playing by the Rules

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By a happy coincidence, this ceremony took place at Issus, where in

333 the Persian king Darius had been defeated by Alexander the Great—

“a not inconsiderably better general than either you or I,” as Cicero re-

marked to Atticus, in a mixture of wry self-deprecation and misplaced

self-importance. The campaign culminated in more slash and burn

(“stripping and plundering the Amanus”) and a long siege of the fortress

town of Pindenissum. It was from here that Cicero wrote to Caelius, an-

ticipating the “immense glory” that this success would bring him, “ex-

cept for the name of the town.” No one had heard of it.5

The main outlines of Cicero’s campaigns in his province are clear

enough.6 But the details—from the structure of command to the iden-

tity of the enemy and the significance of Roman victories—are murky

and confused now, as they were at the time. The letters often give sig-

nificantly different stories to different people, not to mention the fact

that information was slow to travel and hard to interpret. When Cicero

arrived in Cilicia, his predecessor Appius Claudius Pulcher was still in

the province and (despite Cicero’s arrival, on which he may not have

been fully informed) continued to act as governor by holding assize

courts in one of its remoter parts. Cicero even suspected that his prede-

cessor was hanging onto three cohorts of the provincial army; at least,

Cicero had no clue where these detachments of his forces were.7

In the next-door province of Syria, exactly the reverse was the prob-

lem. The new governor, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, had not arrived be-

fore the Parthians had invaded and the response was left to the second in

command, Caius Cassius Longinus (best known as one of the assassins

of Julius Caesar). One version of the story, as Cicero tells it to Caelius, is

that Cassius scored a notable success in driving the Parthians out of

Syria. He certainly wrote fulsomely to Cassius himself on these lines, as

Cassius left for home late in 51 after Bibulus had at last arrived: “I con-

gratulate you, both for the magnitude of what you achieved and for the

timeliness of your success. As you leave your province, its thanks and

plaudits speed you on your way.”8

But other versions circulated, too. Cicero was capable of claiming to

Atticus, fairly or not, that the real reason for the Parthian withdrawal

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had been his own advance into the Amanus and that the senate had been

suspicious of Cassius’ dispatches announcing his victory. In fact, the

whole story of a Parthian incursion into Syria became controversial, as

some rumors held that the invaders were not Parthians at all but Arabs

“in Parthian kit.” Caelius at one stage reports the idea (later to prove

unfounded) that Cassius had made it all up: “People were suspecting

Cassius of having invented the war so that his own depredations should

appear to be the result of enemy devastation—and of letting Arabs into

his province and reporting them to the senate as Parthians.”9

TRIUMPHAL AMBITIONS

In this climate of misinformation, it would have been hard to judge

whether any victory was worthy of a triumph. But this did not stop all

three of the provincial governors in the region from planning to claim

one—and perhaps it even encouraged them. We know almost nothing

of Appius Claudius’ military activity in Cilicia, but he returned to Rome

making no secret of his hopes. Despite Cicero’s awkward relations with

his predecessor and his low opinion of Appius’ government of the prov-

ince (“It is completely and permanently ruined”), he managed some po-

lite words to Appius himself on the prospect of his “certain and well-

deserved” triumphal celebration: “Although it is no more than my own

judgment of you . . . nevertheless I was extremely pleased with what

your letter had to say about your confident—indeed, assured—expecta-

tion of a triumph.” Only a casual aside about such a grant enhancing

Cicero’s own prospects of the honor is noticeably double-edged. In the

event, Appius was faced with a legal prosecution and gave up his ambi-

tion for a triumph in order to enter the city and fight the case.10

Bibulus too, once he had arrived in Syria, was rumored to be on the

hunt for triumphal honors and went with his army to the Amanus range

looking for an easy victory—or, as Cicero put it, “looking for a sprig of

laurel in a wedding cake” (laurel was one of the ingredients in Roman

wedding cake and, in that context, was presumably hard to miss). He

ended up, as Cicero gloats no less than he regrets, losing a large number

Playing by the Rules

191

of men. More fighting apparently followed in Syria, and it may be from

this conflict that Bibulus’ hopes of triumphal glory sprang. These hopes

were never realized, overtaken—it seems likely—by the outbreak of civil

war between Caesar and Pompey in 49 bce. But not before Cicero had

expressed his irritation with Bibulus’ ambitions and their (in his view)

ludicrous mismatch with the achievements on the ground: “So long as

there was a single Parthian in Syria he didn’t take a step outside the city

gates.” And not before their rivalry had spurred Cicero’s own triumphal

ambitions: “As for me, if it wasn’t for the fact that Bibulus was pressing

for a triumph . . . I would be quite easy about it.”11

Cicero’s pursuit of a triumph falls into two halves: first the campaign

for a supplicatio, a ceremony of thanksgiving to the gods voted by the

senate, which regularly preceded a triumph; then, once that vote was

achieved, the second round of campaigning, ultimately unsuccessful, for

another senatorial vote to award a triumph proper.12 His correspondence

documents the intense behind-the-scenes machinations; and in some

cases the surviving letters are the frontline weapons in Cicero’s bid for

triumphal glory, the very medium through which those machinations

were carried out. Given that, some favorite themes in modern discus-

sions of the ceremony are striking by their absence. There is no mention

at all of any formal rules or qualifications that governed the award of a

triumph, except the requirement to remain outside the city before the

ceremony. Instead, the letters immerse us in a world of delicate negotia-

tions that center round personal ambition and amour propre, bad faith,

pay-backs, and rivalry—or alternatively, depending on the correspon-

dent, deny (whether with philosophical hauteur or down-to-earth real-

ism) all but a passing interest in such a superficial honor as a triumph.

Cicero claims that he wrote to every member of the senate except for

two—one an inveterate enemy, the other the ex-husband of his daugh-

ter—to persuade them to vote for his supplicatio. 13 That would have

meant a total of around six hundred letters, which (even if many fol-

lowed a standard formula) must have amounted to several days’ work for

Cicero and his secretaries. Three of these letters survive. Two, probably

written within a few weeks of the fall of Pindenissum, were addressed to

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the consuls of 50, Gaius Claudius Marcellus and Lucius Aemilius

Paullus: “So I earnestly beg that you make sure that a decree is passed in

the most honorific terms possible concerning my achievements, and as

soon as possible too.”14 In neither of these did he restate what those

achievements were but referred back to the dispatch he had sent to the

senate. By contrast, his long begging letter to Marcus Porcius Cato

opens with pages of detail on the military operations.

Cato, whose probity in such matters often verged on curmudgeon,

was obviously thought to be a less easy target and, as Bibulus was his

son-in-law, he was likely to have received an alternative and no doubt

more dismissive account of Cicero’s victories. What Cicero offers here is

broadly compatible with the narrative he gives in other letters, but it is

expertly tailored to impress. He makes no jokes about Alexander the

Great (only a pointed reference to his camp being near a place known as

“Alexander’s Altars”), but he does insinuate that behind his none too in-

famous opponents lay the much more serious military threat of Parthia:

“They were harboring runaways and eagerly awaiting the arrival of the

Parthians.”

The rest of the letter uses various lines of persuasion to secure Cato’s

vote for a supplicatio. After trading on the history of their mutual admi-

ration (“I have not merely shown tacit admiration for your outstanding

qualities [for who doesn’t?]; I have extolled you publicly beyond any

man we have ever seen or even heard of.”), Cicero makes a parade of his

own vulnerability and his need for marks of esteem. In his early career,

he explains, he could afford to disdain such baubles, but since his period

in exile he has been understandably anxious for public honor, “to heal

the wound of the injustice against me.” He ends by meeting Cato’s

philosophical pretensions half-way, stressing how his military achieve-

ments were backed up by the highest principles in provincial govern-

ment. It was the case, after all, “that throughout history fewer men were

found who could conquer their own desires than could conquer the

forces of the enemy.” Cicero had been victorious on both fronts.15

The senate discussed the request for a supplicatio sometime during

April or May 50, and Caelius instantly reported back to Cicero, still in

Playing by the Rules

193

his province, that the result was a success, although some hard work had

been necessary behind the scenes. Other factors had come into play, par-

ticularly the anxiety of the tribune Caius Scribonius Curio that a cere-

mony of thanksgiving, which could last for days, would occupy some of

the time available for legislation and so get in the way of his political

aims. In a deal brokered by Caelius, the consul Paullus agreed to circum-

vent this (Cicero must have felt that his letter had not been in vain),

guaranteeing that the supplicatio would not actually take place till the

next year.

Meanwhile there was potential opposition from one of the two men

to whom Cicero had not written. Hirrus threatened to make a long

speech, but Caelius and his friends persuaded him not to (“We got to

him”)—so successfully that he did not even attempt to hold up business

by objecting, as he could have, that the meeting was not quorate when

the number of animal victims to be sacrificed at the thanksgiving was

decided. The vote in the end went Cicero’s way, though we do not

know how many days of thanksgiving were agreed (the silence suggests

that it was rather few), nor indeed whether they were ever held; having

been postponed in the deal with Curio, they were presumably lost in the

outbreak of civil war early in 49. According to Caelius, the voting pat-

tern was maverick: some voted for the honor without wanting it to

succeed (they assumed wrongly that Curio would veto the decision);

Cato, by contrast, spoke about Cicero in most honorific terms but voted

against.16

Cato proceeded to write to Cicero in a letter that has been vari-

ously judged by modern readers as “ponderous pedantry,” “priggish and

crabbed,” or “entirely free of rudeness or insult.” His main point was to

justify his vote on the grounds that a supplicatio implied that the responsibility for the victory lay with the gods, whereas he gave the credit to

Cicero himself. But he also warned that a triumph did not always follow

a thanksgiving—and that, in any case, “much more glorious than a tri-

umph is for the senate to judge that a province has been held and pre-

served by the governor’s mild administration and blameless conduct.”17

For Cicero and his secretaries, a further flurry of correspondence must

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have followed. Thank-you letters survive to Marcellus and to his prede-

cessor in Cilicia, Appius Claudius, who had worked for Cicero’s

thanksgiving as Cicero (whatever the mixed feelings) had worked for

his.18 To Cato, Cicero managed a reply in superficially gracious terms.

Nothing, he wrote, could be more complimentary than the speech

which Cato had made in the senate in praise of his achievements; in

fact, if the world were populated by the likes of Cato, then such an

encomium would be worth more than any “triumphal chariot or laurel

crown.” But, of course, the real world was not run along Catonian

lines, and there these honors counted. Cicero concluded with an awk-

ward passage of fence-sitting—and perhaps calculated understate-

ment—about just how important to him the thanksgiving or projected

triumph was. It was more a question, he emphasized, of not being averse

to it, rather than especially wanting it. A triumph was “not to be un-

duly coveted,” but at the same time it was certainly not to be rejected

if offered by the senate. His hope was that the senate would consider

him “not unworthy” of such an honor, especially as it was such a com-

mon one.19

The letters penned over the next few months, during Cicero’s final

weeks in Cilicia and through the journey back to Rome, return time

and again to the possible triumph. In these, too, the themes of ambition

and the desire for glory are prominent: how far was it proper actively to

want (or to be seen to be wanting) a triumph? Cicero repeatedly stresses

that he is not going to do anything that smacks of “eagerness” for the

honor—though he could wish, on occasion, that Atticus showed himself

a little more “eager” for Cicero to achieve it. He also takes care to blame

his ambitions on others—on Caelius who “put the idea in his head”

(when in fact a safe return home would be “triumph” enough) or on his

friends who “beckon” him back to a triumph.20

Nonetheless, the letters also document how energetically he was can-

vassing for the award, with Pompey and Caesar among others. And

when Bibulus was voted a thanksgiving of (probably) twenty days, with

Cato this time strongly behind the motion, there was no concealing,

from Atticus at least, his eagerness and jealousy: “As far as the triumph is

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195

concerned, I wasn’t ever at all eager for it until Bibulus sent those outra-

geous letters which resulted in a thanksgiving on a most lavish scale . . .

the fact that I did not win the same honor is a humiliation for you as

well as for me.”21

Inevitably, his ambitions had wider implications. Cicero was anxious

about the cost of any triumph, especially in the face of a loan repayment

to Caesar: “What I find most annoying is that Caesar’s money has to be

repaid and the means of my triumph diverted in that direction.”22 He

also found that his triumphal aspirations seriously affected his political

position in Rome during the run-up to civil war. He tried to use at least

one of the constraints to his advantage: the prohibition on a general en-

tering the city before a triumph seemed a convenient excuse for not be-

coming involved in the dangerous and compromising negotiations that

were going on there.23

But any such advantages were rare. When Pompey advised him not to

attend the senate (presumably meeting outside the city boundary) in

case he ended up getting on the wrong side of potential supporters of his

honor, we may suspect that Pompey might have had other motives for

wanting Cicero well clear of the senatorial debates.24 Perhaps even worse,

far from keeping him out of things, his presence just outside the city,

while he still possessed military authority (imperium), made him a sit-

ting target for being sent off to take charge of a region such as Sicily in

the looming civil conflict.25 He himself put the dilemma neatly when he

wrote to Atticus: “Two parts that it’s impossible to play simultaneously

are candidate for a triumph and independent statesman.”26

The last occasion on which we know that Cicero’s prospective tri-

umph was part of public business was on January 7, 49 bce, at the meet-

ing of the senate which marked the formal outbreak of civil war. Cicero

claims that, even at this moment of crisis, “a full senate” demanded a tri-

umph for him, but the consul procrastinated by saying (not unreason-

ably, given the circumstances) that he would put it to the vote when he

had settled the urgent matters of state.27 But his triumphal ambitions

did not fade away at once. He continued to consult Atticus on the mat-

ter and—as a consequence of not laying down his office from which he

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hoped to triumph—to be encumbered by his official attendants (or

lictors) with their fasces, or rods of office, wreathed in fading laurel. It seems that he did not dismiss these men until 47 and in the process gave

up all hope of a triumphal ceremony.28

GENERALIZING FROM CICERO?

Cicero’s correspondence brings to the surface significant problems in the

award of triumphal honors. It is clear, for a start, that lack of reliable in-

formation about military achievements in a distant province, and com-

peting versions from different parties, made any decision about granting

a triumph a delicate one. Major military success was certainly seen as a

basic requirement; but whose story was to be believed? To make matters

more complicated, the uncertainty in the chain of command (particu-

larly at the time of transition from governor to governor) was liable to

raise questions about whose responsibility any victory was. Suppose that

Cassius really had scored a major success against a Parthian invasion be-

fore Bibulus had even reached the province of Syria. Would Bibulus, as

overall commander (and the holder of imperium), have been the candi-

date for triumph? Or Cassius, despite his subordinate position?

And as the exchange of letters with Cato reveals, in perhaps an unusu-

ally extreme form, different parties might hold different ideas about

what kind of victory counted as triumph-worthy. Here we find the sug-

gestion that the conduct of the victorious general might count, as well as

simple fact of an enemy defeated. But how was that to be assessed? It

must partly be because of the gaps in information, and the dilemmas

facing anyone who tried to judge competing claims, that the role of per-

sonal canvassing was so crucial. Cicero’s letters ask for his triumphal

claims to be taken seriously on, as Romans might have seen it, the best

of all possible grounds: his standing, connections, and friendships.

The letters also expose various ways in which the triumph and its pre-

liminaries could impact on politics more widely. In practical terms, a

thanksgiving or triumphal celebration was inevitably an intrusion—wel-

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197

come or not—into the political business of the city, with consequences

(as Curio’s anxieties show) for other aspects of public life. Its timing and

length were almost bound to be the subject of loaded negotiations and

conflicting claims. And for this reason, if for no other, triumphal debates

would often be drawn into political wheeling and dealing.

In the wider competition for public status, too, the triumph ranked

high. Cicero’s insistence on not appearing too “eager” for the honor

hints at some of the social ground rules of the competitive culture of

the late-republican Roman elite: in this area at least, ambition was veiled

as much as it was displayed; and protection from the possible public

humiliation of failure might be secured by a contrived insouciance. But

equally, the triumph was a hugely desirable mark of distinction and

crucial in the relative ranking of prestige. When Cicero fulminates at

Bibulus’ success in achieving a lengthy thanksgiving, it is not merely an

indication of personal pique; it shows how the triumph and its associ-

ated rituals were a key element in the calibration of glory and status

among the elite—and inevitably “political” for that.

Yet Cicero’s extraordinarily vivid insider’s story on the preliminaries

to a triumph has rarely been central to modern studies of the cere-

mony.29 Why? Part of the reason must be that Cicero never did achieve

his ambition; so, as a noncelebration, this tends to fall through the

cracks in the roster of triumphal history and its chronology of awards.

Part also, I suspect, is that Cicero’s military career as a whole is never

treated seriously, as critics tend either to take his own rhetorical self-dep-

recation literally or alternatively to recoil from the glimpses of pompos-

ity and pride that the correspondence simultaneously offers. Any com-

parison between Cicero and Alexander the Great does seem, after all,

faintly ridiculous; so too does the image of him apparently so desperate

for triumphal glory that he spent the first two years of a cataclysmic civil

war traipsing around Italy and Greece with a posse of lictors in tow, car-

rying their laurel-wreathed fasces. Equally unappealing is the energetic

postal campaign to some six hundred senators urging their support for

his supplicatio—although in the absence of comparable evidence for

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other occasions, there is in fact no reason to suppose that this was not a

fairly normal procedure: Flamininus, Aemilius Paullus, Mummius, and

Pompey may all have tried to ensure a favorable vote in just that way.

An even more significant reason for passing over Cicero’s would-be

triumph must be the sense that the messy negotiations and trade-offs

that the letters expose are a feature of the political collapse of the period,

bringing with it a decline in triumphal propriety and order. By this

stage, so the argument would go, the honor was a trinket to be squab-

bled over by generals with only a paltry victory to their name—a far cry

from the framework of rules and regulations within which the third-

and second-century triumphal debates described by Livy appear to take

place, and from the major military successes with which they are con-

cerned. It is to those rules (however highly politicized or partisan their

application might sometimes have been) that we should turn if we wish

to reconstruct the principles on which the award of a triumph was tradi-

tionally made. From this perspective, the simple fact that Cicero and his

correspondents seem hardly bothered with any formal qualifications for

requesting or granting the honor is a good gauge of how far the system

as a whole had sunk into mere in-fighting. Only Cato appears to touch

on something remotely like a rule (albeit a negative one) with his asser-

tion that a triumph does not always follow a supplicatio—and so, pre-

dictably enough, this nugget alone has often been extracted by modern

historians from such a rich vein of material.30

Such comparisons, however, are hazardous. On the basis of the num-

bers of triumphs celebrated, it is misleading to claim that the final years

of the Republic were a particularly easy time to achieve a triumph as tra-

ditional standards broke down: if anything, the early and middle years

of the first century bce show a dearth rather than a bumper crop of cele-

brations. There is also the question of whether we are comparing like

with like. After all, the general’s view of the day-to-day negotiations as

they progress will inevitably create a different impression from a retro-

spective historical narrative whose job is to impose order on events as

they unfolded, sometimes chaotically. It is perfectly conceivable that

Cicero’s correspondence took the rules and regulations that framed a tri-

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umphal award for granted, without a mention. No less conceivable is it

that, had they survived, the private letters of (say) Aemilius Paullus

would reveal just as intricate and messy a series of negotiations and un-

certainties.

Underlying the whole problem is the issue of what kind of decision-

making process we are looking for in the award of a triumph. Starting

from Cicero allows us to rethink some of the most hotly debated ques-

tions in the history of the ceremony: how, and under what conditions,

did a general secure a triumph? This is a very different aspect of the cere-

mony and its scholarship from the display of wealth and conquest that

has been my main theme so far; and it requires attending carefully to

contradictory details of principles, procedure, and technicalities, as they

are described by ancient writers. Yet the picture that will emerge from

this is of a ceremony much less rigidly governed by rules and formal

qualifications than has often been assumed. In fact, the triumphal ac-

counts in Livy turn out to be rather more “Ciceronian” in character than

is usually recognized.

ARGUING THE CASE

Triumphs were claimed or demanded by a general; they were not usually

bestowed on him spontaneously by a grateful senate or people.31 During

the Republic at least (the Empire was very different) the assumption of

most surviving accounts is that the initiative lay with the victorious

commander. It was always liable to be a politically contentious claim;

and all the more so because it is far from clear now—and almost cer-

tainly was not much clearer in the ancient world itself—who in the state

had the final authority to grant or withhold a general’s “right” to cele-

brate a triumph. Most of the debates on this question that are replayed

(or reinvented) in the pages of Roman writers are set in the senate, and

the senate is regularly said to allow or refuse the honor. Yet we have no-

torious examples of men who apparently triumphed in the face of sena-

torial refusal, with or without the support of the people; and these tri-

umphs, not only those celebrated outside Rome on the Alban Mount,

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had sufficient official status to appear in the inscribed list in the Forum.

An adverse senatorial decision did not in itself, in other words, deny

legitimacy to the celebration.32

How a triumph was claimed in the earliest period of the Republic

is frankly anyone’s guess, and the different formulations used by writ-

ers such as Livy probably do not bear the weight of speculation placed

on them. When he describes an early triumph simply as the com-

mander “returning to Rome in triumph,” this may—or may not—im-

ply an archaic version of the ceremony that was little more than a victo-

rious re-entry into the city, without formal regulation.33 What is clear,

however, is that both Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus not infre-

quently envisage political conflict in the triumphal celebrations from the

very earliest period.

Dionysius, for example, recounting the triumph of Servilius Priscus

in 495, explains that the senate refused authorization for narrowly politi-

cal reasons and that Servilius took his case instead to the assembly of

the people, who enthusiastically endorsed it.34 Half a century later, Livy

elaborates (probably fancifully) on the supplicatio and triumph of

Valerius Publicola in 449. The thanksgiving of a single day decreed by

the senate was thought too mean, and the people spontaneously cele-

brated an extra one. The senate subsequently refused a triumph, which

was granted by an assembly of the people, proposed by a tribune. One

objector is supposed to have claimed that, in leading the motion, the tri-

bune was paying back a personal favor, not honoring military success.35

Fanciful or not, these incidents clearly show that in the Roman histori-

cal imagination, political conflicts surrounding the triumph could go

back (almost) as far as the institution itself.

Later in the Republic, from at least the end of the third century bce,

we can detect clearer signs of a regular procedure—although, as with

most aspects of the triumph, not as fixed as many modern scholars have

liked to imagine.36 There are, indeed, all kinds of diverse tales of how a

general might obtain the honor. Pompey’s first triumph, for example,

was written up by Plutarch as a favor granted by the dictator Sulla. And

writing of the confused period after the assassination of Julius Caesar,

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Dio casts Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia as the power behind the grant of a

triumph to Lucius Antonius. He had, according to this account, done

little to deserve one, but once Fulvia had given the nod “they voted for it

unanimously” (who “they” are is not clear)—“and she gave herself rather

more airs than he did, and for a better reason; for to give someone the

authority to hold a triumph was a much greater achievement than to

celebrate it as the gift of another.”37 But, of course, the fact that Plutarch

and Dio pointedly chose to tell the story of these triumphal grants in

terms of personal, autocratic, or transgressively female power does not

prove that no other public procedures of decision-making took place

even in these cases. As Dio’s reference to the “unanimous voting” shows,

he imagines Fulvia as dominating, rather than replacing, the regular pro-

cess of triumphal awards.

That process is usually seen—largely on the basis of accounts given

by Livy for triumphs of the late third and early second centuries bce—

in two stages. The first took place in the senate, the second before the

people. On his return to Rome, if a victorious general wanted to seek a

triumph, he would convene the senate outside the pomerium, a favorite

location being the temple of the appropriately warlike goddess Bellona.38

This would not be the first the senate knew of the general’s ambi-

tions. He would have sent official dispatches from the field of conflict

(“laureled letters”—literally, it seems, letters decorated with laurel) or

an official envoy, as well as private letters to his friends and colleagues.

He might well have emphasized his acclamation as imperator by his

troops. And very likely he would have already requested and been awarded

a thanksgiving: out of some sixty-five republican supplicationes, just eleven are known not to have been followed by a triumph, Cicero’s and Bibulus’

included.39 Nonetheless, in front of the senators he would put his case

for a triumph in a formal address.

The best direct evidence for these communications, whether the speech

of the general himself or of his intermediaries, is thought to come not

from any historical account but from the late third-century to early sec-

ond-century bce comedies of Plautus, which on several occasions appear

to parody elements of triumphal celebration. The Amphitruo, in particu-

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lar, which focuses on the tragicomic return home of the victorious

Theban general (and cuckolded husband) Amphitruo, makes a point of

mimicking triumphal language. Early in the play, Amphitruo’s slave

messenger Sosia explains to the audience the circumstances of his mas-

ter’s return: “The enemy defeated, the victorious legions are return-

ing home, this mighty conflict brought to an end and the enemy exter-

minated. A city which brought many casualties to the Theban people

has been defeated by the strength and valor of our troops and taken

by storm, under the authority and auspices (imperio atque auspicio) of

my master Amphitruo, especially.” The formality of expression and the

clipped style echo such traces we have of apparently official records of

Roman military achievement, suggesting that Plautus was offering, to

those in the know, a wry parody of the traditional language in which re-

quests for triumphs were expressed.40

The vote of the senate was vulnerable to objections of all kinds (in-

cluding outright veto of the decision by one of the ten tribunes, as

was threatened by Curio in the case of Cicero’s thanksgiving). If the

claim went through, the senate then arranged that an assembly of the

people should formally grant the triumphing general imperium within

the sacred boundary of the city for the day of his celebration.41 Accord-

ing to Roman law, that military authority was normally lost when the

pomerium was crossed and was only extended by this vote on a special

and temporary basis. Hence, until the day of the triumph itself, the

general had to wait outside that boundary (or, at least, that was the

consistent pattern up to the quadruple triumph of Caesar in 46 bce).

It was perhaps not such a hardship as it might at first seem: by the

late Republic, considerable parts of the built-up area of the city fell out-

side the pomerium. All the same, the exclusion of republican triumphal

hopefuls from the heart of the city is a striking feature of these pre-

liminary procedures. Sometimes that exclusion could last years. Gaius

Pomptinus, who scored a victory in Gaul in 62–61 and probably re-

turned to the city in 58, did not triumph until 54 bce.

This pattern of decision-making seems, at least, broadly compatible

with Cicero’s attempts to secure a triumph for himself. But, as we have

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seen before, such a seamless template for triumphal procedure is also

misleading. This is partly, again, because of the scanty evidence behind

some of these confident claims of standard practice. The vote of the peo-

ple to extend the imperium of the general is not a regular feature of an-

cient descriptions of the triumph; it is mentioned on only three occa-

sions, which may or may not be special cases.42 And this technical issue

is further and almost impenetrably complicated by the theory strongly

advocated by some modern scholars that imperium in itself was not a re-

quirement for a triumph, but more precisely the “military auspices”

(auspicia)—which regularly, though not always, came with imperium. 43

More practically, the occasional references to “laureled letters” are cer-

tainly not enough to prove them a permanent feature of the procedure.

(Where, after all, did the laurel come from? Or did every general pack

some in his luggage, just in case?)44 Worryingly too for the idea of a con-

ventional idiom of triumphal requests, Cicero’s formal dispatches to the

senate bear no especially strong resemblance to the style of the Plautine

parodies. But, even more serious problems and inconsistencies underlie

the standard account of procedure.

I have already noted that an adverse senatorial vote did not necessarily

impede a valid triumph.45 Why then go through the senate at all? One

practical consideration may have been financing. In discussing the dis-

tribution of power in the Roman state, Polybius reflects on how the sen-

ate exercised control over generals. Triumphs, he argues, were one of the

senate’s weapons: “For they cannot organize what are known as ‘tri-

umphs’ in due style, and sometimes they cannot celebrate them at all,

unless the senate agrees and provides the funds for the purpose.” One

“unauthorized” triumph is certainly said, albeit by a much later author,

to be held at the general’s own expense.46 Yet financing cannot be the

only issue: after all, some of the most successful Roman commanders

would have had little trouble raising funds independently, while Cicero

was still anxious about the expense of a celebration even when he was

anticipating senatorial approval.

More puzzling is how a general could triumph legitimately with the

backing of neither the senate nor an assembly of the people. This seems

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to have been the position of Appius Claudius Pulcher, who in 143 noto-

riously rode roughshod over the will of both senate and people in pro-

ceeding with the ceremony. The story was that his daughter (or sister)

who was a Vestal Virgin leapt into the triumphal chariot with him, to

give him religious protection against the attack of a hostile tribune.47 But

how, in these circumstances, without a vote of the people, was the neces-

sary imperium extended? We simply do not know. One modern scholar

has ingeniously speculated that Appius Claudius might have used the

good offices of the priestly college of augurs (with which he had strong

family connection) to invest him with the appropriate auspicia instead

of relying on the assembly.48

In fact, this is only one of many areas where considerable ingenuity

must be deployed to make sense of the supposed triumphal rules on im-

perium. Why, for example, did magistrates who were celebrating tri-

umphs during their year of office (when, according to modern recon-

structions of Roman law, they possessed imperium within the pomerium

anyway) need to go through the formal process of extending their au-

thority? Perhaps they did not. Maybe, as some have argued, this was a

necessary step only for those attempting to triumph after their year of

office had ended (which might help with the Appius Claudius problem,

whose celebration took place during his consulship).49 Yet, if that were

the case, why did they also need to stay outside the pomerium up to the

moment of their celebration? Maybe more than one kind of imperium

was at stake here—and what was being granted to the triumphing gen-

eral was specifically military authority within the city, which even serv-

ing magistrates did not possess.50 But, again, why the emphasis on not

crossing the pomerium? If there had to be a special grant anyway, why

could it not be made after the general had entered the city?

Perhaps, as others have suggested, this prohibition on crossing Rome’s

sacred boundary is not specially connected with imperium or the other

aspects of legal authority which that implied, but harked back to differ-

ent form of “ceremonial inhibition”—the idea perhaps that the triumph

was originally an “entry ritual,” which could not properly be celebrated

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if the pomerium had been crossed and the city already entered.51 Answers

can be devised for all these questions. But as no ancient definition of im-

perium survives, nor any definition of its possibly different varieties (military, domestic, and so on), those answers are inevitably modern con-

structions.52

The varied evidence we have clearly suggests that we should not be

thinking only in terms of a fixed and regulated procedure, even in the

later Republic. The ceremony of triumph was not merely an extraordi-

nary public mark of honor to an individual commander; it also involved

the entry into Rome of a general at the head of his troops. This broke all

those key cultural assumptions of Roman life which insisted on the divi-

sion between the sphere of civilian and military activity, and which un-

derlay many of the legal niceties that grew up around the idea of the

pomerium or imperium. The fundamental question was this: how and in what circumstances could it be deemed legitimate for a successful general to enter the city in triumph?

One answer—and probably the safest—was to obtain the support of

the senate and to parade respect for the legal rules which policed the

very boundaries that a triumphal celebration would break. That was the

answer inscribed in the “traditional procedure” as it is usually painted—

though the carping remarks of Cato to Cicero, pointing out that a tri-

umph did not always follow a thanksgiving, shows how the edges of that

“tradition” could be blurred even for Romans. Yet, uncongenial as it

must seem to the generations of modern scholars who have cast the

Romans as legalistic obsessives, this was not the only way of claiming

legitimacy for a triumph. To go over the heads of the senate directly to

the assembly of the people as arbiters of the distribution of glory was an-

other. Sheer chutzpah was another option, albeit rare. Indeed, though

many more triumphs may have been celebrated in the general’s head and

then rejected as wishful thinking, and others transferred to the Alban

Mount in the face of senatorial rejection, we know of no triumphal pro-

cession that was ever launched onto the streets of Rome and not subse-

quently treated as a legitimate ceremony.

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MORE RULES AND REGULATIONS

The variants in procedure, then, were numerous. Nonetheless, the sen-

ate is usually portrayed as the main arena in which a commander’s

request for a triumph was debated, endorsed, decried or postponed—

and through which, if we are to believe Polybius, his triumph was

funded.53 These senatorial proceedings are vividly recreated by Livy,

whose account of the years 211 to 167 (where his surviving text breaks

off ) includes a series of debates for and against the triumph of individual

claimants. In 211, for example, Marcus Claudius Marcellus returned

from Sicily and, meeting the senate in the Temple of Bellona, requested

a triumph. Livy tells of a long discussion. On one side, some insisted

that it would be illogical to deny the general a triumph, when a

supplicatio for his victories had already been agreed to (not an argument

that Cato would have approved). On the other side, some objected that

the war could not be regarded as finished if his army had not been

brought back to Rome. As a compromise, he was granted an ovatio, and

he also celebrated a triumph in Monte Albano. 54

A decade later, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus, who had held a special

command in Spain, not as a regularly elected magistrate, made a re-

quest for a triumph. The senate, Livy tells us, agreed that his achieve-

ments were worthy of a triumph but that “no precedent had been

handed down from their ancestors for someone to triumph who had not

achieved his successes either as dictator or consul or praetor.” Again, an

ovatio was voted as a compromise, but this time in the face of opposition

from a tribune, who argued that the lesser award did not solve the prob-

lem and, in fact, “was just as out of step with traditional custom.”55

The arguments and counter-arguments produced in these narratives,

combined with a few surviving discussions of “triumphal law” by schol-

ars in antiquity itself, have been largely responsible for one of the most

curious academic industries of the last century or so: the repeated at-

tempts to say exactly what criteria the senate applied in deciding whose

triumph to ratify and whose not. This industry is fueled, rather than

dampened, by the evident contradictions in the decisions described. For

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example, how do we account for the grant of a triumph to Lucius Furius

Purpureo in 200, despite the fact that he had not brought his army

home, while that is said to have been the main reason for refusing

Marcellus just a decade earlier? Only the occasional voice has ever sug-

gested that these decisions were ad hoc, if not arbitrary; most have tried to detect the system, or at least the pattern, underlying the confusing

evidence.56

One influential view is that a clear set of rules always governed the

awards made by the senate, even if they might have been reformed and

recast over the course of the Republic, with additional criteria (such as a

minimum number of enemy casualties) introduced from time to time—

and even if they were sometimes disrupted by all kinds of personal and

political interests, favors, and back-scratching. Theodor Mommsen, for

example, identified the crucial, nonnegotiable qualification as the pos-

session of the highest form of imperium by a serving magistrate; so that

no general could properly triumph if, for example, he had won his vic-

tory while a second-in-command, or after he had resigned his magis-

tracy. Others, as I have noted, stressed instead the religious qualification

of auspicium, that is, command and authority seen in terms of the right

to conduct relations with the gods on behalf of the state.57

This approach is characteristic of that strand of nineteenth-century

scholarship which was set on recovering the main principles and details

of Roman constitutional law. In reaction to its rigid systematization,

more recent critics—while often still stressing the importance of impe-

rium—have suggested a much greater degree of improvisation on the

part of the senate, especially as they adjusted the traditional rules to the

changing circumstances of military leadership and the increasing use by

the Romans of generals who were not serving magistrates or held various

types of “special commands.” The triumphal debates in Livy, for exam-

ple, have been scrutinized to reveal an increasing willingness to grant tri-

umphs to men who were commanding armies in the, formally, more ju-

nior office of praetor rather than consul, while the same evidence has

been used to expose the introduction of various other qualifications for

an award—such as the stipulation applied to Marcellus that no triumph

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could be awarded to any commander who had not brought his army

back home. But for all the apparent flexibility of this approach (“The ac-

tual record demonstrates the Senate had few general principles in this

area which it was determined to make stick,” as one historian has frankly

observed), it still tends to fall back on the language of fixed criteria (even

if they were only temporarily fixed). We read, for example, of the “minor

rules, ” “certain requirements, ” and “commanders in the field struggling to conform with new stipulations. ”58

The truth is that this refreshing emphasis on flexibility does not usu-

ally go far enough, nor does it fully reflect the problems of the ancient

evidence on which this whole scholarly edifice has been based. It is

partly the fact that evidence never quite fits the rules proposed, leading

modern scholars to accommodate disjunctions and inconsistencies by

postulating some special circumstance, some particular change of policy,

or simply disobedience to the law. So, for example, that requirement for

a general to bring home his army in order to qualify for a triumph was,

we are told, introduced (or at least first heard of ) with Marcellus in 211,

“dropped” soon after, and “suddenly reappears” in 185. And Mommsen

was so confident of the legal framework he had reconstructed for the tri-

umph that he was happy enough to include in it a “rule” that the

Romans never strictly enforced.59 Of course, regulations are not always

obeyed, and they may not be systematically applied, but nonetheless

there is something decidedly circular about many of these arguments.

The whole process is uncomfortably similar to reconstructing the rules

of the road from a series of disconnected video-clips of traffic flow and a

handful of parking tickets.

There are, however, even more imponderable issues raised by the an-

cient accounts of triumphal decision-making on which our modern re-

constructions of the rules and criteria depend. Livy was writing in the

reign of the emperor Augustus, almost two centuries after the major se-

ries of triumphal debates he describes. We cannot know whether the dif-

ferent arguments he puts into the mouth of his third- and second-cen-

tury senators reflect accurately or not the points raised at the time. It

would not be impossible for him to have had at least indirect evidence of

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the tenor and content of such senatorial discussions. But it is much

more likely that some element, at least, in his representation of these

senatorial sessions derived from his own attempts (or those of his imme-

diate sources) to make sense of the decisions reached.60

Like us, Livy may well have been confronted with apparently con-

flicting and changing practice in the award of triumphs, which he at-

tempted to explain by the arguments from rule, precedent, or political

rivalry put into the mouths of his senatorial participants. Why did they

decide not to vote a triumph to X? Because he had not brought his army

home, because he held an irregular command or fought with an army

technically under the control of another . . . and so on. It cannot be ir-

relevant to this process (and has potentially serious implications for the

modern emphasis on imperium as the crucial qualification for a tri-

umph) that the period in which Livy was writing was exactly the period

when the first emperor was restricting the institution of triumph to in-

clude only himself and his family, and may well have been using his own

overriding imperium as one of the central justifications for that restric-

tion (as we will see in Chapter 9).

Similar problems underlie the attempts of ancient scholars them-

selves to systematize the triumphal rules. The key text here comes from

Valerius Maximus’ Facta et Dicta Memorabilia (Memorable Deeds and

Sayings), a compendium of themed moral and political anecdotes drawn

from republican history composed in the reign of the emperor Tiberius.

One chapter is concerned specifically with the criteria for celebrating a

triumph, including the famous requirement that a minimum of 5,000

of the enemy needed to have been killed in a single battle. This has often

been taken as an authoritative guide to “triumphal law.”61 The probabil-

ity is, however, that Valerius Maximus was operating in much the same

way as modern scholars, in extrapolating rules from the various argu-

ments and contradictory practices in republican triumphal history—

that he was, in other words, a Mommsen avant la lettre. The more

we scratch the surface of his rules and regulations, the more fragile they

seem.

Valerius’ chapter starts with two “laws” (leges). The first is the 5,000-

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dead rule. The second, “passed by Lucius Mar[c?]ius and Marcus Cato

when they were tribunes,” penalized generals who lied about enemy ca-

sualties or Roman losses and demanded that “as soon as they enter the

city they take an oath before the city quaestors that their dispatches to

the senate had been truthful in both these respects.” In fact, neither rule

is ever explicitly referred to in any account of triumphal debates by any

surviving classical author whatsoever. We have no idea at what date the

first law, such a favorite of modern discussions, is supposed to have been

passed, but its existence is hinted at only once in any other writer. The

Christian historian Orosius, discussing in the early fifth century ce the

contested triumph of Appius Claudius Pulcher in 143 bce, claims that he

first lost 5,000 of his own men, then killed 5,000 of the enemy. This

claim has all the appearance of those favorite (and imaginary) Roman le-

gal conundrums (what do you do about the man who has killed 5,000 of

the enemy but has lost exactly the same number of his own men?) and is

more likely dependent on Valerius Maximus rather than independent

confirmation of his “facts.”62

The second law certainly reflects the general concern about false re-

porting evident in the discussions at the time of Cicero’s thanksgiving.

But it is entirely unattested anywhere else, never appealed to, and raises

a host of tricky questions. Where was this swearing supposed to take

place, inside or outside the pomerium? And if it was a law passed by

Cato, is it not strange that neither he nor Cicero made even passing allu-

sion to it in their exchanges over Cicero’s triumph?63

The rest of Valerius Maximus’ chapter is mostly taken up with cases

of disputed triumphs and hardly inspires confidence in a clear and

agreed upon framework of triumphal law—or, at least, not as he re-

constructed it. The first case focuses on the dispute between praetor

Quintus Valerius Falto and consul Caius Lutatius Catulus after a naval

victory in 242 bce. Falto had destroyed a Carthaginian fleet off Sicily

while Catulus had been resting up, lame, in his litter; and for his suc-

cess Falto claimed a triumph. Valerius describes a complex (and dis-

tinctly implausible) process of legal adjudication, ending up with the

decision that Catulus, not Falto, should triumph because he was in over-

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all command. In fact, the list in the Forum attributes a triumph to both

generals.64

In another case, Valerius Maximus explains the failure of two com-

manders to secure triumphs for quashing revolts against Rome by refer-

ence to a regulation that such honors were awarded only “for adding

to the Empire, not for recovering what had been lost.” This is “definitely

mistaken,” as one historian has recently put in, reflecting on the scores

of triumphs which, by no stretch of the imagination, celebrated an

increase of Roman territory.65 In yet another example, stressing how

“well-guarded” triumphal law was, he examines the refusal of triumphs

to Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus in 206 and Marcus Claudius

Marcellus in 211. Strikingly, in explaining the senate’s decision to grant

Marcellus no more than an ovation, he appeals to a quite different regu-

lation from Livy: while Livy cited the argument that Marcellus had

failed to bring his army back home, Valerius put it down to the fact that

“he had been sent to conduct operations holding no magistracy.”66

These contradictions and “mistakes” do not, of course, show that ar-

guments from precedent and “rule” would have played no part in sena-

torial discussions on the award of triumphs, or that these were not

sometimes couched, and perceived by participants at the time, in legal

or quasi-legal terms. Unless Livy and Valerius Maximus were writing en-

tirely against the grain of Roman assumptions in their ex post facto rationalizing explanations, their appeals to established (or invented) prece-

dent were all very likely the weapons of choice in the contested process

of deciding who was, or was not, to triumph—not to mention claims of

fair reward for success and the occasional call to adjust tradition to new

circumstances.

This was necessarily a shifting set of precedents and arguments. For

the senate’s job was not to adjudicate whether any particular com-

mander qualified for a triumph against a clear framework of prescriptive

legal rules. The question before it was whether he should or should not

celebrate one on this occasion, in the light of his request, the achieve-

ments he reported, and all the particular circumstances. The stakes were

high, and there was a repertoire—as time went by, a widening reper-

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toire—of potentially conflicting factors that might steer the senate to-

ward a decision. Precedents could be remembered or forgotten, rules

defended, invented, adjusted, or discarded, and political partisanship

dressed up as principle. This is a far cry from the systematization of “tri-

umphal law” imagined by the majority of modern scholars.67

Even more important, perhaps, is that fact that Livy (especially) sug-

gests a much more varied set of criteria and a wider range of dilemmas

facing the senate than is usually recognized—and indeed closer to some

of the issues prominent in the triumphal correspondence of Cicero.

Much as they have replayed Cato’s sound-bite on the relationship of

the triumph and thanksgiving, modern legally inclined historians have

tended to lay enormous emphasis on the occasional claims in Livy’s tri-

umphal debates that might pass as a rule or firm principle: “It was estab-

lished that up to that time no one had triumphed whose successes had

been achieved without a magistracy,” or “The reason for refusing him a

triumph was that he had fought under another person’s auspices, in an-

other person’s province.”68 In doing so, they have often failed to pay at-

tention to the more general texture of Livy’s discussions and to those less

obviously “legal” issues that he presents as central to the debates and de-

cision-making.

The first of these is the question of responsibility and achievement.

The priority of Livy’s senate is to reward the man responsible for scoring

a decisive success on behalf of Rome, or—where appropriate—to divide

the honor of a triumph fairly between two commanders.69 The dilemma

it repeatedly faces is how to make a decision on those terms, particularly

in the complicated, messy, and unprecedented situations that war threw

up. True, the technical issue of imperium is relevant here. It was one po-

tential guarantee of where ultimate command lay, and it ensured that

the victory was achieved by an official acting for the Roman state (the

triumph was not intended to reward private brigandage, however many

barbarians might have been killed). In fact, the majority of Roman com-

manders in major military engagements during the Republic did possess

imperium—and so, therefore, did the majority of those who triumphed.

But Livy also depicts his senators grappling with more practical and

Playing by the Rules

213

awkward considerations. For example, when they decided to award a tri-

umph to the praetor Lucius Furius Purpureo in 200, despite the fact that

he had not brought his army back home and that, in any case, the army

was technically under the command of an absent consul, one of the fac-

tors they were said to have borne in mind was simply “what he had

achieved.” That was just the argument Livy later put into the mouth of

Cnaeus Manlius Vulso, who triumphed in 187. While his opponents ac-

cused him of illegal war-mongering, he rested his (successful) defense on

the idea of military necessity and the outstanding results of his actions.70

Who was actually in command could be a more pressing and compli-

cated question than asking who had formal authority.71

Likewise the question of what counted as a decisive Roman success

could be trickier than either simply counting up the casualties or check-

ing that war had been properly declared. Livy himself gives us a glimpse

of one of the surprising limit cases here, when he records what he calls

the first triumph awarded “without a war being fought.” The consuls

Marcus Baebius Tamphilus and Publius Cornelius Cethegus had in 180

marched against the Ligurians, who had promptly surrendered; and the

whole population of about 40,000 men (plus women and children) was

resettled away from their mountain strongholds, thus bringing the war

to an end.72 Livy does not on this occasion script any senatorial debate

on the consuls’ triumph, but Cato’s stress on the “principles of govern-

ment” rather than brute conquest would surely have been one of the rel-

evant considerations here.

More striking still is Livy’s portrayal of the senate’s concern with ob-

taining proof of the victory claimed, and their repeated anxiety over how

competing claims might be adjudicated. In the case of Purpureo’s tri-

umph, he reports that some senior senators wished to postpone a deci-

sion until the consul returned to Rome, since “when they had heard the

consul and praetor debating face to face, they would be able to judge the

issue more accurately.” And indeed, he claims, when the consul did

finally return to Rome, he protested that they had heard only one side of

the case, as even the soldiers (as “witnesses of the achievements”) had

been absent.73 Just three years later, in 197 bce, a triumph was refused to

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Quintus Minucius Rufus, who had reputedly fabricated the surrender of

a few towns and villages “with no proof.”74

In 193 Livy stages a much more elaborate dispute over a celebration

claimed by Lucius Cornelius Merula. The senatorial vote was post-

poned because of a clash of evidence: Merula’s dispatches were contra-

dicted by the account of his military campaigns in letters written “to a

large proportion of the senators” by Marcus Claudius Marcellus, an ex-

consul, serving as one of Merula’s legates, and it was felt that the dis-

agreements ought to be resolved with both men present.75 To be sure,

we have no means of knowing how far these issues presented by Livy

accurately reflected the concerns of the senatorial debates at the time.

Yet accurate or not, it is arresting to look beyond Livy’s nuggets of ap-

parent legalism and to find his senators facing very similar issues to those

faced by Cicero’s colleagues—stories about military victories that were

not entirely trustworthy and a flood of letters from one of the interested

parties.76

ON WANTING OR NON-WANTING A TRIUMPH

There is, however, a twist in the stories of the victorious commander’s

campaign for a triumph—a campaign that Livy once archly insinuated

might be the cause of “greater strife than the war itself.” Many of the

moral lessons pointed by Roman writers at the eager general do indeed

stress the dangers of wanting a triumph too much and the virtue of a

certain reluctance to grab the honor. “The prospect of a triumph” (spes

triumphi) was one thing; and indeed “trying out the prospect of a tri-

umph” was a regular way of expressing the general’s proper petition to

the senate. Being seen to be too eager for the honor was quite another.

Cicero was not the only one who criticized cupiditas triumphi. Livy, for

example, scripts a tribune in 191 bce objecting to an immediate trium-

phal celebration for Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica on the grounds

that “in his rush for a triumph” he had lost sight of his military priori-

ties. The desire for true glory was, in other words, different from a han-

kering after its baubles.77

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215

The impact of such triumph-hunting, and of the senate’s desire to

curb it, on what we might now call Roman “foreign policy” is clear

enough. On the one hand, there was a repeated pressure to pick up

easy victories wherever they might be found, so further driving Roman

conquest. On the other, it is a fair guess that one of the factors that lay

behind the senate’s decision to offer alliances to various peoples in the

mid to late Republic was—if not to protect them from their own gener-

als on the look out for a triumph—at least to attempt to limit the ex-

cesses of such triumph-hunting. Not necessarily successfully: Roman

generals were perfectly capable of attacking those who were not Rome’s

enemies, or those who had come to terms with Rome.78

But at the same time, on the individual level, there were dangers in

being seen not to want a triumph. In Rome no less than other societies,

the rejection of such marks of honor might not only signal high-minded

disinterest in the insubstantial trinkets of public acclaim; it might also

imply a disdain for the system of values and priorities that those “trin-

kets” legitimated. To put it another way, if true honor goes to those who

have turned down a triumph, where does that leave those who have cele-

brated one? This dilemma is nicely captured by two very different tales

of triumphs refused told by, again, Livy and Valerius Maximus.

The first is the story of the consul Marcus Fabius Vibulanus, who

supposedly turned down a triumph that was spontaneously offered to

him by the senate after a victory in 480 bce, because both the other con-

sul and his own brother had been lost in the fighting. “He would not, he

said, accept laurel blighted with public and private grief. No triumph

ever celebrated was more renowned than this triumph refused.”79 The

opposite lesson is drawn by Valerius Maximus in another case history in

his chapter on “triumphal law.” It concerns one Cnaeus Fulvius Flaccus,

who “spurned and rejected the honor of a triumph, so sought after by

others, when it was decreed to him by the senate for his successes.” We

know nothing else of this incident, nor can we plausibly identify or date

the commander concerned. But Valerius insists that he was suitably

punished for his disdain of the prize: “In his refusal he anticipated no

more than what actually came about. For when he entered the city, he

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was instantly convicted in a public trial and punished with exile. So, if

he broke the religious law by his arrogance, he expiated the offence with

the penalty.”80

This theme is explored at much greater length and complexity in

Cicero’s speech In Pisonem (Against Piso), the written up and no doubt

reworked version of his attack on Lucius Calpurnius Piso delivered in

the senate in August 55 bce. From Cicero’s point of view, Piso’s main

claim to infamy lay in the fact that he had been consul in 58, the year

in which Cicero had been sent into exile, but the speech, as published,

is a comprehensive attack on Piso’s character, his Epicurean philosophi-

cal interests, and his political career—including his governorship of

the province of Macedonia, from where he had only just returned. This

province was, in Cicero’s bald phrase, more “triumphable” (triumphalis)

than any other, implying a ranking of imperial territory according to

how likely (or not) it was to produce a triumph for its elite Roman

masters.81

So far as we can tell through the dense fog of Cicero’s oratory, Piso

had had a very successful tenure: he had secured a considerable victory

against Thracian tribesmen, and had been hailed “Imperator” by his

troops.82 Cicero, of course, denigrates. After a litany of typically ba-

roque, if unspecific, accusations of sacrilege, murder, extortion, and rob-

bery, he claims that Piso was not even present at the crucial battle (an-

other case where the senate might have found assigning responsibility

tricky).83 But even more venom is reserved for Piso’s return to Italy, a

pointed contrast with Cicero’s own return home from exile. Whereas

Cicero came back to what was almost, even if he does not use the word

itself, a triumph or “a sort of immortality,” Piso did not even ask for a

triumph, despite his supposed victory and acclamation as imperator.

Over what is now several pages of written invective, Cicero pokes fun

and spite at that refusal, exposing in the process some crucial tensions in

the idea of “triumph-seeking.”84

At one point Cicero ventriloquizes Piso’s objections to triumphal

honors. It is, of course, a nasty parody and rests on a crude misrepresen-

tation of Epicurean views on the undesirability of worldly glory and

Playing by the Rules

217

fame, and on the importance of physical pleasure.85 But it is nevertheless

the only glimpse we have of what the views of a triumphal refusenik

might be (as well as being—although this has almost never been recog-

nized—the only republican summary of the ceremony that we have):

What is the use of that chariot? What of the generals in chains before the

chariot? What of the model towns? What of the gold? What of the silver?

What of the lieutenants on horseback and the tribunes? What of the

cheering of the soldiers? What of the whole ostentatious parade? It is

mere vanity, I assure you, the trifling pleasure one might almost say of

children, to hunt applause, to drive through the city, to want to be no-

ticed. In none of this is there anything substantial to get hold of, nothing

you can associate with bodily pleasure.86

But no less striking is Cicero’s framing of the opposite side of the ar-

gument. Far from distancing himself from “triumphal eagerness,” he in

fact elevates cupiditas triumphi to a leading principle of Roman public

life. In fact, more than that—a triumph is the single most approved

driving force in a man’s career, the acceptable face of other less accept-

able ambitions:

I have often noticed that those who seemed to me and others to be rather

too keen on being assigned a province tend to conceal and cloak their de-

sire under the pretext of wanting a triumph. This is exactly what Decius

Silanus used to say in the senate, even what my colleague used to say. In

fact, it is impossible for anyone to desire an army command and openly

canvas for it, without using eagerness for a triumph as a pretext.87

And he goes on to praise Lucius Crassus, who “went through the Alps

with a magnifying glass” looking for a triumph-worthy conflict where

there was no enemy, and Gaius Cotta, who “burned with similar desires”

although he also was unable to find a proper opponent. But irony is an

even sharper weapon. Poor old Pompey, “He really has made a mistake,”

he sighs at one point. “He never had the appetite for your sort of philos-

ophy. The fool has already triumphed three times.” As for “the likes of

Camillus, Curius, Fabricius, Calatinus, Scipio, Marcellus, Maximus,” he

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thunders, listing an honorable clutch of famous triumphing generals,

“Fools the lot of you!”88

Different circumstances inevitably call for different arguments. No

doubt Cicero could have been equally, but quite differently, devastating

if the target of his invective had been a man who was lingering outside

the pomerium, plus army and lictors with their fading laurel, just waiting for the senate to say yes. But the cultural logic of Cicero’s case against

Piso is nevertheless striking. Why was Piso’s disdain for triumph-seeking

a powerful rhetorical weapon? Why the insistence here on cupiditas

triumphi as a positive force? There were presumably immediate rhetori-

cal factors to be considered. Cicero was playing to the assumptions

about triumphal ambitions among his listeners, and later readers. If the

majority of the senate shared aspirations for triumphal glory, to mock

someone who did not share those aspirations would have been as dis-

tancing of Piso as it was bonding for the collectivity. Who did Cicero

wish to seem more ridiculous? Those keen characters who hoped that

even an unlikely backwater of the Alps might allow them to follow in

the triumphal footsteps of the heroes of the past? Or the triumphal re-

fusenik, Piso? Piso, of course.

Yet this hints a broader structural point too. What Cicero implies by

his attack on Piso is that the desire for a triumph played an important

role in the structural cohesion of the Roman political and military elite.

For all the elegant denial of excessive desire for such rewards that Cicero

and others might on occasion display, the shared goal of triumphal glory

was one of the mechanisms through which the ambitions of the elite

were framed and regulated. A rash of trivial triumph-hunting was much

less dangerous to the collectivity than a rash of men choosing to disdain

the traditional goals and the procedures through which they were po-

liced. It is, in fact, a powerful marker of the end of the competitive poli-

tics of the Republic that the first emperor, Augustus, is able not only to

monopolize triumphal glory to himself and his family but also to turn

repeated triumphal refusal into a positive political stance.

c h a p t e r

VII

Playing God

TRIUMPHATOR?

Some years before the fragments of the triumphal Fasti were excavated

from the Roman Forum and installed in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on

the Capitoline hill, another major triumphal monument had been put

on display in the same building. This was a large marble sculptured

panel, measuring three and a half by almost two and a half meters, de-

picting the second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius, attended by a fig-

ure of Victory, in a triumphal chariot drawn by four horses (Fig. 31).

It was usually assumed to represent his triumph of 176 ce. Long part

of the decoration of the small church of Santa Martina at the northwest-

ern end of the Forum, it was removed in 1515 to the courtyard of the Pa-

lazzo dei Conservatori, along with two other matching panels, one de-

picting the emperor receiving the submission of barbarians, the other

showing him performing sacrifice. In 1572 all three were installed in-

doors, on the landing of the monumental staircase, where they remain

to this day.1

They are an intensely controversial group of sculptures. Debates have

raged for well over a hundred years on many aspects of their history and

archaeology: from the precise identification of the events depicted, to

the style and location of the monument from which they came.2 But the

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 31:

The triumph of Marcus Aurelius, one of a series of panels from a lost monu-

ment in honor of the emperor, 176–80 ce. The vacant space in front of Marcus was once occupied by his son Commodus, who was erased after his assassination in 192 (and the lower left-hand corner of the temple in the background awkwardly extended).

sense in which this triumphal panel captured the idea of “triumph” is

clear enough. In contrast to those few surviving ancient representations

that attempted to encompass the procession as a whole, this image

trades on an emblematic shorthand for the ceremony that is still familiar

from many sculptures and literally thousands of Roman coins—and

in antiquity would have been even more, perhaps oppressively, famil-

iar as the standard theme of the free-standing sculptural groups that

Playing God

221

once stood on top of commemorative arches, dominating the imperial

cityscape.3 This is the triumph seen without the paraphernalia of prison-

ers, booty, paintings, and models but instead pared down to the figure

of the triumphing general, aloft on his chariot, accompanied by only his

closest entourage, divine and human. The image more or less conflates

the ceremony of triumph with the triumphing general himself; or—to

use for once the favored modern term, which I have otherwise deliber-

ately avoided (largely because it is not attested in surviving Latin be-

fore the second century ce)—the image conflates the triumph with the

triumphator. 4

A BUMPY RIDE

In this scene, the triumphant emperor stands against a background of a

temple and an awkwardly attenuated arch. Various attempts have been

made to identify these buildings and so, of course, to support different

theories on the triumphal route.5 But to attempt to read this visual evo-

cation of triumphal topography literally is probably to miss the point.

The image itself hints otherwise—with its team of horses that simulta-

neously turns through and swerves away from the arch, the fasces that

signify magisterial authority not carried, as they would have been, at the

ceremony itself but etched into the pillar of the arch, and the mag-

nificent trumpet which, impossibly, fills the whole passageway.

The viewer is being prompted to remember this ceremony as one em-

bedded in the cityscape, rather than to pinpoint any particular stage of

the procession, and—no less important—to recapture the sounds of its

musical accompaniment. We cannot know how musicians were de-

ployed through the parade (and they are certainly not so prominent in

the sculptures of the complete procession as they are here). But ancient

writers do sometimes imagine trumpets “leading the way” or “blaring

around” the general, and Appian refers to a “a chorus of lyre players and

pipers” in the parade.6 In fact, a rare republican representation of a tri-

umphal procession—a little-known and frankly unprepossessing frag-

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ment of relief sculpture from Pesaro—depicts a trio of two pipers and a

lyre player in front of what appears to be a group of barbarian prisoners

(hence the identification as a triumph).7

On the Capitoline panel, Marcus Aurelius rides in a lavishly deco-

rated chariot—the figures have been identified as Neptune, Minerva,

and the divine personification of Rome—beneath a pair of Victories

holding a shield that is largely hidden behind the horse. As usual, the

practical details are as elusive as they are intriguing. Most representa-

tions of a triumph depict a chariot of very much this design: two large

wheels, high suspension, tall sides, with a curved front and open back,

often richly ornamented. This tallies well enough with Dio’s claim, as re-

ported at least in Byzantine paraphrase, that it was “like a round tower.”

Dio also insists that the triumphal chariot proper did not resemble the

version used in warfare or in games.

If he is correct (by Dio’s time chariots had played no part in regular

Roman warfare for centuries), it is far from clear when the chariot took

on its recognizable form and distinctively ceremonial character, and

what the implications of that were for its manufacture and possible re-

use.8 Were triumphal chariots in Rome stored away, ready to be brought

out again next time? Or if they were made specially for each occa-

sion, what happened to them when the ceremony was over? One of

the few hints we have comes from accounts of Nero’s quasi-triumph in

67 ce for his athletic and artistic victories on the Greek festival circuit:

both Suetonius and Dio claim that he rode in the very triumphal chariot

that Augustus had used to celebrate his military victories.9

What is clear is that these chariots must have offered the general an

uncomfortable ride. This did not escape the notice of J. C. Ginzrot, the

author—some two centuries ago—of one of the most thorough studies

ever of ancient chariots, who used his rare practical expertise as “Inspec-

tor of Carriage-Building at the Bavarian Court” to throw light on the

Roman traditions. It would have been very difficult, he pointed out, af-

ter a careful study of the surviving images, to keep upright all day in

such a means of transport: whatever the upholstery, the passenger would

be standing directly over the axle and, without the possibility of sitting

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223

down, “the jolting would have been almost intolerable for the elderly.”10

Ginzrot was in part echoing the sentiments of Vespasian after his tri-

umph of 71. According to Suetonius, the emperor, “exhausted by the

slow and tiresome procession,” made one of his famous down-to-earth

quips: “I’ve got my come-uppance for being so stupid as to long for a tri-

umph in my old age.”11

Yet this bumpy vehicle was one of the most richly symbolic of all the

triumphing general’s accessories. However cheap, everyday, or do-it-

yourself the reality may often have been, in their mind’s eye ancient

writers as well as artists repeatedly imagined the triumphal chariot in ex-

travagant terms. It was not only Ovid’s triumphant Cupid who was said

to ride in a chariot of gold. Other poets and historians play up the ex-

quisite decoration and precious materials: Pompey’s chariot in 61, for ex-

ample, was pictured as “studded with gems”; Aemilius Paullus was said

to have ridden “in an astonishing chariot of ivory”; Livy’s roster of the

honors associated with a triumph includes a “gilded chariot” (or perhaps

“inlaid with gold”).12 In fact, second only to “laurel,” the word “chariot”

(currus) was often used as a shorthand for the ceremony as a whole, and

the honor it implied. “What good did the chariots of my ancestors do

me?” asks the shade of Cornelia from beyond the grave, in one of

Propertius’ poems—meaning “What good did their triumphs do?” as

they could not save her from death.13

But more than that, the physical image of the chariot was itself con-

scripted into those Roman ethical debates on the nature of triumphal

glory and the conditions of true triumphal honor. In a particularly

memorable passage at the start of his Facta et Dicta Memorabilia (Memo-

rable Deeds and Sayings), Valerius Maximus tells the story of the flight

of the Vestal Virgins from Rome in 390 bce, when the city had been

captured by the Gauls. Weighed down with all the sacred objects they

were rescuing from the enemy, the Virgins were given a lift to safety

in the town of Caere by a local farmer, who (“as public religion was

more important to him than private affection”) had turfed his wife and

daughter out of his wagon to make room for the priestesses and their

precious cargo. So it came about that the “rustic cart of theirs, dirty as it

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was . . . equaled or even surpassed the glory of the most brilliant trium-

phal chariot you could imagine.”14 Again, as so often in triumphal cul-

ture, we are being asked to reflect on the different forms that honor and

glory might take.

However difficult the ride may have been, there is something even

more decidedly awkward about the pose of the passengers in Marcus

Aurelius’ triumphal chariot. The winged Victory, who in visual images

usually took the place of the slave that is such a favorite of modern

scholars, was originally holding a garland above the emperor’s head—as

the trace of a ribbon still hanging from her left hand shows. But she

is precariously balanced, not to say uncomfortably squashed, behind

the emperor, despite the fact that there is plenty of space in front of

him. This is because, as other marks on the stone (and the unsatisfac-

tory reworking of the lower left-hand side of the temple) indicate, an-

other, smaller passenger once stood in the chariot whose figure has been

erased.15

It seems to have been, or become, the custom that the general’s

young children should travel in the chariot with him, or, if they were

older, to ride horses alongside. We have already seen Germanicus shar-

ing his chariot in 17 ce with five offspring. Appian claims that Scipio

in 201 bce was accompanied by “boys and girls,” while Livy laments

the fact that in 167 bce Aemilius Paullus’ young sons could not—

through death or sickness—travel with him, “planning similar tri-

umphs for themselves” (a nice interpretation of the ceremony as a

prompt to ambition and a spur to the continuation of family glory).16

Notably, the newly discovered monument from the battlesite of Ac-

tium depicting the triumph of 29 bce shows two children, a boy and

a girl, beside the figure of Octavian (Augustus). The excavator is de-

termined to see in these figures the two children of Cleopatra by Mark

Antony, Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios.17 But Roman tradi-

tion would strongly suggest that they were the children or young rela-

tives of the triumphing general himself. If, as Suetonius claims, Ti-

berius and Marcellus rode alongside Octavian’s chariot on horseback,

then the slightly younger Julia and Drusus (the offspring respectively of

Playing God

225

Octavian and Livia from their first marriages) are the most likely candi-

dates.18

On the Aurelian panel, the erased figure must have been Marcus

Aurelius’ son, the future emperor Commodus (aged fifteen in 176 and

hailed imperator for victories over the Germans and Sarmatians along

with his father). Coins and medallions show him sharing the chariot.19

Here, he was presumably deleted after his assassination in 192 ce. This is

a pointed reminder not only of the uncertainties in the transmission of

triumphal glory but also of the risks that might lurk in the permanent

memorialization of such a dynastic triumph. In this image, the awk-

wardly vacant chariot acts as a continuing reminder of the figure which

had been obliterated.

DRESSED DIVINE?

The triumphant emperor here cuts a sober figure. He looks studiously

ahead, dressed, so far as we can see, in a simple toga. Though a military

ceremony in many respects, there is no sign that the general ever ap-

peared in military garb. Quite the reverse: his war was over. What

Marcus Aurelius originally held in his hands on this panel we cannot

know. The right hand with its short staff is a much later restoration, and

the left has lost whatever it once contained—so giving perhaps a mis-

leadingly plain, uncluttered impression of his accessories. More sig-

nificantly, however, there is no indication whatsoever of the flamboyant

colors and idiosyncrasies of the general’s clothes and “make-up” that

were noted by ancient writers and have been the subject of intense mod-

ern interest.

Of course, the plain marble of the sculpture would not have been the

best medium to capture any gaudy display. Paint might have compen-

sated; but if it was ever applied to this stone, no trace of it remains. In

fact, this is another case where we find a striking disjunction between vi-

sual and literary evidence for the ceremony. In no surviving image of a

triumphal procession (unless we fancy that some barely detectable pat-

terning on Tiberius’ toga on the Boscoreale cup is meant to indicate the

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elaborate toga picta) do we see anything like the fancy dress that the gen-

eral is supposed to have sported.20

We would certainly never guess from this particular sculpture that the

general’s costume had been the crucial factor in launching certainly the

most dramatic and probably the most influential theory in the whole of

modern triumphal scholarship: namely, that the victorious commander

impersonated the god Jupiter Optimus Maximus himself, and that for

his triumph he became (or at least was dressed as) “god for a day.” We

have already noted the implications of divinity in the words whispered

by the slave. Even clearer signs of super-human status have been de-

tected in the general’s outfit. The red-painted face, mentioned by Pliny,

is supposed to have echoed the face of the terracotta cult statue of Jupi-

ter in his Capitoline temple (which was periodically coated with red cin-

nabar). What is more, Livy on one occasion expressly states that the tri-

umphing general ascended to the Capitol “adorned in the clothes of

Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”21

Unsurprisingly, this view was enthusiastically promoted by the found-

ing father of anthropology, J. G. Frazer, who saw in the figure of the

general welcome confirmation of his own theory of primitive divine

kingship. Once you have recognized that the general was the direct de-

scendant of the early Italic kings, he argued, then it was obvious (to

Frazer, at least) that those kings had been in Frazerian terms “gods.”22

But radical recent theorists of religious representation have also stressed

the godlike aspects of the costume and have seen in the general a charac-

teristically Roman attempt to conceptualize the divine. As one argu-

ment runs, the general oscillated between divine and human status

through the course of the procession; he constituted both a living image

of the god himself and, simultaneously, a negation of the divine presence

(hence the slave’s words).23

These arguments have not been without their critics. The early years

of the twentieth century saw some fierce (even if not entirely persuasive)

challenges to the whole idea of the divine general. Sheer absurdity was

one objection—even though absurdity in not necessarily a significant

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227

stumbling block in matters of religious truth. If the general was really

seen as the god Jupiter, it was argued, why on earth would he ride in

procession to his own temple to make offerings to himself? Another was

a perceived discrepancy between the general’s attributes and the god’s.

Why, in particular, did he have no thunderbolt, when that was the de-

fining symbol of Jupiter? One partisan even went so far as to throw

down a challenge: “If anyone can produce a coin or other work of art on

which he [the general] is represented as holding the thunderbolt, I

should at once reconsider the whole question.” No one could. And there

was also a rival explanation for the costume waiting in the wings—the

symbolism and dress associated with early Etruscan kings of Rome.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, refers to the marks of sover-

eignty said to have been offered by ambassadors from Etruria to King

Tarquin: “a gold crown . . . an eagle-topped scepter, a purple tunic sewn

with gold, an embroidered purple robe.” These not only include several

elements with an obvious triumphal resonance; but he goes on explicitly

to note the continued use of such objects by those “deemed worthy of a

triumph.”24

The current orthodoxy has been reached by combining these two po-

sitions. In his 1970 study, Triumphus, H. S. Versnel, by an elegant theo-

retical maneuver (or clever sleight of hand, depending on your point of

view), argued that the general represented both god and king. In any case, as he pointed out, the iconography of Jupiter was inextricable from

(and partly derived from) the insignia of the early Etruscan monarchy,

and vice versa. Versnel was drawing on the then fashionable scholarly

ideas of “ambivalence” and “interstitiality” and, partly for that reason,

found a ready and appreciative audience among specialists. At almost

exactly the same moment, L. Bonfante Warren reached a not wholly dis-

similar conclusion by a different route. She too accepted that the figure

of the general showed characteristics both of the Etruscan kings and of

super-human divinity (after the model of Jupiter himself ). But she ex-

plained these different aspects by the historical development of the cere-

mony itself. The insignia of the Etruscan kings could be traced back to

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the Etruscan period of the triumph’s history; the idea of divinity, she ar-

gued, entered under Greek influence at a later period, perhaps around

the third century bce. Thereafter they coexisted.25

Most modern studies, whatever other influences or historical develop-

ments they detect and whatever explanation they offer, have supported

the basic idea that the triumphing general shared divine characteristics. I

too shall be returning to the links between the general and the gods, but

not before taking a harder look at the evidence for this famous costume.

For its character and appearance, never mind its interpretation, turn out

to be more elusive than is usually supposed.

For Romans, triumphal costume certainly conjured up an image in

purple and gold. These colors are consistently stressed in ancient ac-

counts of the ceremony and are so closely linked with the figure of

the general that writers can describe him simply as “purple,” “golden,”

or “purple-and-gold.”26 We also find a clear assumption in ancient au-

thors that the general’s ceremonial dress did represent a distinctive, spe-

cial, and recognizable ensemble. Marius, for example, caused offense by

wearing his triumphalis vestis (triumphal clothes) in the senate; and, as

we shall see, there are several references to specific elements of this

constume such as the toga picta. 27 But how far there was ever a fixed triumphal uniform, let alone how it changed over time, is a much more

debatable point. As with our own wedding dress, a basic template can al-

low, and even encourage, significant variations. Pompey, after all, was re-

puted to have worn the cloak of Alexander the Great at his triumph in

61—which can hardly have been part of the traditional garb.

The truth is that, despite our own fascination with the topic, ancient

writers do not often pay more than passing attention to what the general

wore, and we have no detailed description (reliable or not) of any indi-

vidual general’s outfit as a whole, still less of any regular, prescribed

costume; and the surviving images are for the most part as unspecific as

the Aurelian panel.28 The modern textbook reconstruction of the gen-

eral’s ceremonial kit— toga picta and tunica palmata (“a tunic embroidered with palms”), the variety of wreaths, the amulet round his neck,

plus iron ring, red face, eagle-topped scepter, armlets, laurel, and palm

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branches—is another of those optimistic compilations.29 Take a more

careful look and you find glaring contradictions or, at the very least, a

suspiciously overdressed general.

So, for example, the only way to come close to deriving a coherent

picture out of the different crowns and wreaths associated with the tri-

umph is to have the general wear not one but two: a heavy gold crown

held above his head by the slave and a laurel wreath worn directly on

his head beneath it (although this is certainly not how visual images

normally depict him, and even in this reconstruction the term corona

triumphalis, “triumphal crown,” must refer on different occasions to dif-

ferent types of headgear).30

Similar problems arise with the ceremonial toga. Leaving aside Festus’

brave attempt to trace a historical development from a plain purple gar-

ment to an embroidered (picta) one, the regular modern pairing of a

tunica palmata under a toga picta is not quite as regular in ancient writing as we might be tempted to assume. Both Martial and Apuleius, for

example, refer to a toga (not a tunica) palmata. Was it simply, as one careful modern critic is driven to conclude, that “in the principate the

terminology became less precise”?31 And what did these “palmed” gar-

ments look like anyway? Festus does not make it any easier when he as-

serts that “the tunica palmata used to be so termed from the breadth of

the stripes [presumably a palm’s breadth], but is now called after the

type of decoration [palms].”32

The exact nature of his divine costume also proves puzzling. It is true

that Livy refers to “the clothes of Jupiter Optimus Maximus,” and a few

other writers, albeit less directly, appear to chime in.33 But what would

this mean? Clothes like those worn by Jupiter? Clothes kept in the Tem-

ple of Jupiter? Or the very clothes worn by (the statue of ) Jupiter in his

temple on the Capitoline? This most extreme option appears to be sup-

ported by one piece of evidence: a very puzzling passage in a tract of

Tertullian that briefly discusses “Etruscan crowns,” the name Pliny gave

to the gold wreath held over the triumphing general’s head. The text of

the original Latin is far from certain, but it is often taken to mean some-

thing like: “This is the name given to those famous crowns, made with

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precious stones and golden oak leaves, which they take from Jupiter, along with togas embroidered with palms, for conducting the procession to

the games.” Tertullian is not talking about a triumph here, but on the

assumption that the practice at the games was more or less the same as at

the triumph, this might confirm the view that the general’s crown and

toga were taken directly from (the statue of ) Jupiter—that, in other

words, the general literally dressed up in the god’s clothes.34

It does nothing of the sort. Even supposing that Tertullian knew what

he was talking about, he was almost certainly not intending to suggest

that the costume was lifted from Jupiter’s statue; his Latin much more

plausibly means that the crowns were “famous because of their connec-

tion with Jupiter.” In any case, the idea that the general donned Jupiter’s

kit causes far more practical difficulties than it solves. Never mind the

one-size-fits-all model of triumphal outfitting, or the problems that

would have been caused by two generals (such as Titus and Vespasian in

71) triumphing simultaneously. Even harder to accept is the unlikely

idea, which direct borrowing from the statue necessarily implies, that all

the various cult images of Jupiter that replaced one another over the

long and eventful history of the Capitoline temple were constructed on

a human scale.35

There is also the problem of the wider use of triumphal dress. If the

general’s costume was properly returned to the god’s statue at the end of

the parade, then what did Marius wear to give offense in the senate?

What was it that was worn by those who impersonated their triumphal

ancestors in funeral parades? What were the triumphal togas that Lucan

imagined were consumed on Pompey’s funeral pyre?36 Perhaps these

were all “copies” of the original garments (as some have been forced to

argue); but that itself would dilute the idea of a single set of triumphal

clothes and insignia belonging to Jupiter’s statue, or even lodged in his

temple. Precise questions of how the general’s costume was commis-

sioned, chosen, made, stored, handed down, or reused are now impossi-

ble to answer. But there is certainly no good reason to think of it as liter-

ally borrowed from Jupiter—nor any evidence that Livy’s phrase ornatus

Iovis or “clothes of Jupiter” (though widely used as a technical term in

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modern studies of the triumph) was ever regularly used for triumphal

costume in Latin.37

The same is true of other features that are taken to link the general’s

appearance to the gods. One particularly seductive false lead is the gen-

eral’s red-painted face. Our main information on this custom comes, as

so often, from the elder Pliny, apparently backed up by a handful of late

antique writers—who might all, in fact, be directly or indirectly depen-

dent on Pliny himself. The passage in question is at the start of his dis-

cussion of the uses of red lead or cinnabar, and he offers an unusually

guarded, self-confessedly third-hand account, explicitly derived from re-

ports in an earlier first-century antiquarian writer, Verrius Flaccus:

Verrius gives a list of authorities—and trust them we must—who state

that on festival days it used to be the custom for the face of the statue of

Jupiter to be coated with cinnabar, so too the bodies of those in triumph.

They also state that Camillus triumphed in this way, and that it was ac-

cording to the same observance that even in their day it was added to the

unguents at a triumphal banquet and that one of the first responsibilities

of the censors was to place the contract for coloring Jupiter with cinnabar.

The origin of this custom, I must say, baffles me.38

Pliny does not vouch for this practice himself, nor claim that it took

place in his day, or even in Verrius’. But this has not stopped (indeed, it

has encouraged) generations of modern critics from basing extravagant

theories on it—partly in the belief, no doubt, that Pliny’s sources are

taking us back to the raw primitive heart of triumphal practice, or some-

where near it.

For many, the key lies in the equivalence that may be hinted in Pliny’s

text between the cult image of Jupiter and the general. At its strongest,

this has been taken to indicate that the general did not so much imper-

sonate a god as impersonate a statue (so launching theories that link the

origin of the triumph with the origin of commemorative statuary).39 For

others, the color itself has prompted a variety of (sub-)anthropological

speculations: that, for example, the face-painting was an apotropaic de-

vice to frighten off the spirits of the conquered dead; or that it was an

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imitation of blood—and indeed that “it was not red paint at all origi-

nally, but blood” intended to transfer the mana (“life force” or “power”

in Austronesian terms) of the enemy to the victorious general.40

In fact, the tenuous evidence we have hardly supports the idea that

the triumphing general’s face, or body for that matter, was regularly

colored red, or that there was a well-established association between

the general and the statue of Jupiter (or the statue of anyone else). In

fact, the cult image on the Capitoline can hardly have been made of

terracotta after 83 bce, when the archaic temple was completely de-

stroyed, and so would not then have required the treatment with cinna-

bar that Pliny describes. At the very most, from the early first century,

the general would have been imitating a previous version of the cult

statue that no longer existed.41

Of course, we always run the risk of normalizing the Romans, of

too readily erasing behavior that seems, in our terms, impossibly weird

or archaic. Painted faces may perhaps have been a standard feature of

early triumphs, and we cannot definitively rule out the practice at any

point. Nonetheless, my guess is that there is no particular need to see red

on the face of any of the late republican or early imperial generals.

Aemilius Paullus, Pompey, and Octavian did not necessarily ride in tri-

umph smeared with cinnabar.

The problem we are confronting here is not just the fragility of the

evidence, or its over-enthusiastic interpretation, though that is part of it.

It is equally a question, as the various interpretations of the red face viv-

idly illustrate, of the fixation of modern scholars with explaining the in-

dividual elements in the ceremony by reference to the customs and sym-

bols of primitive Rome. Few historians of the triumph have been able to

resist the attraction of the obscure origins of the ceremony—whether

that means detecting in the general a hangover of the god-kings of

“Frazer-land,” a descendant of the rulers of the early Etruscan city, or

even an embodiment of primitive conceptualizations of the divine. The

rarely stated truth is that we have no reliable evidence at all for what

early triumphing generals wore and not much more for the costume of

the Etruscan kings of the city.

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The Romans themselves were equally ill-informed. True, “Etruscan

origins” were one of the most convenient recourses they had when ex-

plaining puzzling features of their own culture. But we certainly should

not assume that they were correct. What is more, at least from the

period of Julius Caesar on (as we shall explore in the next chapter), they

were busy confusing such issues even further by seeking precedents

and models for the increasingly dynastic attire of their political leaders

not just in triumphal costume but also in their imaginative reconstruc-

tion of early regal outfits. The confident statements of Dionysius of

Halicarnassus and others about Etruscan symbols of monarchy may pos-

sibly be a product of some archaeological knowledge; but they are much

more likely to be the outcome of this politically loaded combination of

antiquarian fantasy and invented tradition.42

For the most part, long as its history is, the triumph does not give us a

clear window onto the primitive customs of Rome—nor, conversely, can

its features simply be explained by retreating to the religious and politi-

cal culture of the early city.

MAN OR GOD?

By contrast, what we do know is that there were strong links between

the triumphing general and those contested ideas of deity and deificat-

ion that were so high on the cultural and political agenda of the late Re-

public and early Empire. These connections are often passed over, if not

lost, in the preoccupation with the ritual’s prehistory, but they offer us a

much surer point of entry to the intriguing evidence we have.

The power of late republican dynasts and of the early imperial family

was often represented in divine terms. Human success and its accompa-

nying glory could push a mortal toward and even across the permeable

boundary which, for the Romans, separated men from gods. This was

seen in many different ways—from metaphors of power that implicitly

identified the individual with the gods to, eventually, the institutional

structure of cult and worship that delivered more or less explicit divine

honors to both dead and living emperors. So far as we can tell, Roman

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thinkers and writers took the idea of deification (that is, of a human be-

ing literally becoming a god) with no greater equanimity than we do

ourselves. The nature of the “divine human” was constantly debated,

recalibrated, negotiated, and ridiculed. Emperors drew back from claim-

ing the role and privileges of gods as enthusiastically as they basked in

divine worship. The dividing line between mortality and immortality

could be as carefully respected as it was triumphantly crossed. Nonethe-

less, divine power and status were a measure against which to judge its

human equivalents, and a potential goal and ambition for the super-

successful.43

These debates offer the best context for understanding the special sta-

tus of the triumphing general. Whatever Livy’s phrase ornatus Iovis tells

us of the regular costume adopted in the ceremony (less than we might

hope, as I have already suggested), it certainly shows that Livy could

imagine the general in divine terms. But the nuances and implications

of that connection with the gods come out more clearly if we look at an-

other element in his retinue—the horses who pulled the triumphal char-

iot. Again, the appearance of these animals on the Aurelian panel hardly

gives the modern viewer any hint of the controversy that has surrounded

them, or any hint of what they might imply about the status of the gen-

eral whom they transport. But ancient literary discussions occasionally

lay great emphasis on the different types of beast that might appear in

this role and their significance.44

All kinds of variants are in fact recorded (the most extravagantly ba-

roque being the mention of stags that supposedly drew the chariot of the

emperor Aurelian and then did double duty as sacrificial victims when

they reached the Capitol).45 Modern interest has concentrated, however,

on the four white horses which, according to Dio, were decreed to

Caesar for his triumphal celebrations of 46 bce.46 The fact that chariots

drawn by white horses were regularly associated with Jupiter or Sol (the

divine Sun) has strongly suggested that Caesar was attempting to claim

some such divine status for himself.

Dio does not offer an explanation, nor does he record any reactions to

Caesar’s team. But there is a striking parallel in accounts of the triumph

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of Camillus over the Gauls in 396 bce, where Livy claims that the gen-

eral aroused considerable popular indignation: “He himself was the

most conspicuous object in the procession riding through the city on a

chariot harnessed with white horses—an act that seemed not only too

autocratic, but also inappropriate for any mortal man. For they took it

as sacrilege that the horses put the dictator on a level with Jupiter and

Sol, and it was really for this single reason that his triumph was more fa-

mous than it was popular.” This sentiment is echoed by Plutarch, who

asserts (with constructive amnesia, apparently, of Caesar’s triumph) that

“he harnessed a team of four white horses, mounted the chariot and

drove through the city, a thing which no commander has ever done be-

fore or since.” This story may or may not contain a germ of a “genuine”

tradition about Camillus. Who knows? But it is usually assumed that

Livy’s version was elaborated, if not invented, to provide a precedent for

Caesar’s actions.47

Picking up the cue from Livy and Plutarch, modern writers have

tended confidently to assume that “the horses used [in the triumph]

were usually dark” and that white animals were therefore a daring inno-

vation. Yet it is not quite so straightforward. For, we have no ancient

evidence at all to suggest that a dark color was ever the norm.48 The only

color ever explicitly ascribed to the triumphal horses is white. Pro-

pertius, for example, retrojected “four white horses” onto the triumph of

Romulus, and Ovid did the same for the triumph of Aulus Postumius

Tubertus in 431 bce. Tibullus too seems to have envisaged his patron

Messalla’s triumphal chariot in 27 bce being drawn by “dazzling white

horses” (though “sleek” would also be a possible translation), while the

younger Pliny implies that white horses were part of the ceremony’s

standard repertoire.49 At the same time, these animals clearly did have

powerful divine associations—dramatically evidenced when, according to

Suetonius, the father of the future emperor Augustus dreamt of his son

carried in a triumphal chariot drawn by twelve white horses, wielding

the thunderbolt of Jupiter.50 It is clear too that, as in the stories of

Camillus, they could offer a pointed hint of the unacceptable face of (ex-

cessive) triumphal glory.

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These contradictory indications fit together in a more interesting way

than is often recognized. Whatever happened in the early days of trium-

phal history (and we shall, of course, never know what kind of animals

pulled Camillus’ chariot, let alone how or why he selected them), from

the end of the first century bce Roman imagination envisaged the gen-

eral’s chariot pulled by white horses. Writers interpreted this both as an

embedded part of triumphal tradition stretching back as far as the cere-

mony itself and as a radical innovation reeking of divine power. By the

first century bce at least the triumph was an institution in which break-

ing the normal rules of human moderation (and mortal status) could be

cast simultaneously as dangerous and traditional.

A similar argument may apply to the association of elephants with the

general’s chariot.51 We have already reflected on the moral of Pompey’s

reported failure to squeeze his elephants through one of the gates along

his route; it was a piquant warning of the dangers of divine self-aggran-

dizement. Yet a triumphal chariot pulled by elephants is attested as the

theme of the statuary perched on the top of more than one imperial

commemorative arch in Rome. The Arch of Titus, for example, appears

to have supported one such group (to judge from the bronze elephants

apparently found nearby, and restored, in the sixth century ce); the Arch

of Domitian celebrated by Martial was capped by another two (“twin

chariots numbering many an elephant,” as Martial put it); and elephant

chariots almost certainly adorned some arches erected in the reign of

Augustus (see Fig. 18).52

Maybe Roman culture became increasingly tolerant of the blatant use

of such extravagant honors; so that what was unacceptable for Pompey

was a perfectly acceptable element of display in public monuments less

than a century later. But, awkwardly for that view, it is imperial authors,

writing more than a century after Pompey’s triumph, who transmit to us

the carping tales of his ignominy.53 Much more likely, we are glimpsing

again the ambivalence of triumphal glory, which—in the imagination at

least—always threatened to undermine the general through the very

honors that celebrated him. To contemplate a triumphal chariot drawn

by elephants was simultaneously an idea legitimated by the public state

monuments of the city of Rome and a step too far.

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 32:

Sculptured panel from vault of the Arch of Titus, early 80s ce, showing the

emperor transported to heaven on the back of an eagle. Walking through the arch and looking up, the viewer saw this image of the underbelly of the bird and of Titus, its passenger, peering down to earth. A hint of the association of the triumph with death and deification.

The most astonishing link between the triumph and deification has

nothing to do with the costume of the general. It is a rarely noticed

sculpture in the vault of the passageway of the Arch of Titus, visible to

a spectator who stops between the famous scenes of the triumph over

the Jews (see Figs. 8 and 9) and looks up. There you can still just make

out from the ground a very strange image (Fig. 32). The eagle of Jupiter

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is seen as from below, tummy facing us; and peeping over the bird’s

“shoulders,” looking down to earth, is the distinctive face of its passen-

ger. That passenger is Titus himself, whom we must imagine being lifted

to heaven after death by the eagle, soaring to join the ranks of the gods.

It is, in other words, an image of the process of deification itself. There

have been all kinds of interpretations of this: one ingenious (if incorrect)

idea was that Titus’ cremated remains were in fact laid to rest in the

arch’s attic, directly above. But most striking of all is the proximity of

this image of deification and the triumphal panels themselves; it cannot

help but underline the structural connection between the ceremony of

triumph and the divine status of the general.54

The key fact here is the powerful connection in the late Republic and

early Empire between triumphal and divine glory. In various forms and

media, the extraordinary public honor granted to the general in a tri-

umph—like other honors at this period—was represented, contested,

and debated in divine terms. It may have been, in the case of the tri-

umph, that this exploited and reinterpreted an association between gen-

eral and Jupiter that stretched back centuries. Yet it is crucial to remem-

ber (as we shall see at the end of this chapter) that the earliest evidence

to suggest an identification between general and god is an early second-

century bce play of Plautus; and that even those few antiquarian details

that survive about his traditional costume and various accoutrements are

mediated through—and necessarily to some extent reinterpreted by—

the concerns of the late Republic and early Empire. Whatever his primi-

tive origins may have been, the divine general we can still glimpse is es-

sentially a late republican creation.

THE WIDER PICTURE

The general was not on his own among the prisoners and the booty—

however splendid his isolation in so many triumphal images. Even in a

procession that featured a most impressive array of the conquered en-

emy, the home team always far outnumbered their adversaries. The

triumph was overwhelmingly a Roman show, of Romans to Romans.

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We have already glimpsed some of the porters, attendants, musicians,

guards, and other officials who carried the spoils, led the animals, played

the trumpets, or conducted the prisoners.55 Around and behind the tri-

umphal chariot (at least as the choreography of the procession is conven-

tionally imagined) were many more, perhaps thousands. In the group

most closely linked to the general, ancient writers mention lictors (car-

rying the fasces), military officers, magistrates, even “the whole senate,”

as well as Roman citizens freed from slavery by whatever successful cam-

paign was being celebrated. On one occasion we read of an adult woman

(not merely the young daughters of the general) taking a prominent

place in this company: according to Suetonius, at the triumph of the

emperor Claudius over Britain in 44 ce, his wife Messalina followed his

chariot, riding in a carpentum (a covered carriage).56

As usual, modern scholars have tended to systematize and to impose

a regular pattern onto this group. But there is even less sign here of

any rigid template, either of personnel or order, than elsewhere in the

procession. A group of Roman citizens rescued from slavery might

have been the star feature, in Plutarch’s view, of the triumph of Titus

Quinctius Flamininus in 194 bce; but a commander could only rarely

have produced such specimens. (Even Flamininus had at first decided

not to upset the property rights of their owners, until the Greeks offered

to ransom them for a good price.)57

There are also awkward contradictions in our evidence. Those, for ex-

ample, who would infer from some accounts that by the late Republic

the city’s magistrates or the senate as a group were a standard element in

the general’s immediate entourage need to explain how this fits with an

incident reported for one of Julius Caesar’s triumphs: when he was rid-

ing past the tribunes’ benches, one of them—Pontius Aquila—did not

get to his feet; Caesar took it as an insult and is supposed to have

shouted “Take the Republic back from me then, Aquila, you tribune!”58

Tribunes could not have been both sitting on their benches in the Fo-

rum and accompanying the procession. Either they were not included in

that regular group of magistrates who went with the general or, more

likely, they sometimes accompanied the general, sometimes watched the

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proceedings from their official seats—and sometimes (to be realistic)

some of them would have had nothing to do with the show at all. An ap-

propriate entourage for the triumphant commander was most likely as-

sembled on each occasion, as the particular combination of circum-

stances and tradition demanded.

As the story of the tribune hints, many of these accounts share a con-

cern with the complexities and antagonism of calibrating honor and rel-

ative superiority, and with the ambiguities of status and glory between

the general and those most closely accompanying him. Sometimes the

message is clear, as when Dio emphasizes the crowd’s displeasure at the

number of lictors attending Caesar in his triumph of 46, and (presum-

ably) at the implications of that for Caesar’s position in the state. In

Dio’s reconstruction at least, Caesar overstepped the mark by parading

too many of these human symbols of authority. “On account of their

numbers the lictors made an offensive crowd, since never before had

they seen so many altogether.” It was, he suggests, a triumphal faux pas

that ranked with Caesar’s display of poor Arsinoe, which prompted such

lamentation among the Roman spectators.59

But sometimes the signals are, for us, much harder to read. Dio again

highlights an innovation in the triumph of Octavian (Augustus) in 29

bce: although, he writes, magistrates usually walked in front of the tri-

umphal chariot, while those senators who had participated in the victory

walked behind, Octavian “allowed his fellow consul and the other mag-

istrates to follow him.” Modern commentators, predictably enough, see

this as a reflection of Octavian’s dominance: “The deference to Octavian

is patent.” In fact, in saying that he allowed them to follow, Dio more

obviously implies the reverse—that it was an honor to walk behind,

rather than in front of, the chariot. Whether Dio understood what he

was talking about is a moot point. But if he was correct about traditional

practice, the space ante currum would sometimes have held an interest-

ing, if not uncomfortable, melée of consuls and barbarian queens. Nev-

ertheless, we are probably catching a glimpse here of the loaded etiquette

of “who walked where” and of the significance that an avid scrutineer, if

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not the more casual observer, might detect (or invent) in the different

placements around the triumphal chariot.60

Other stories focus on the rivalry, implicit or explicit, between the

general and different members of his group. One famous occasion

was the celebration in 207 bce of Marcus Livius Salinator and Caius

Claudius Nero, who were both granted a triumph for victory over

Hasdrubal. They shared the same procession, but only Salinator rode in

the chariot (the battle had been fought in his province, Livy explains,

and he had held the auspices on the crucial day); Nero accompanied

him on horseback. In fact, the victory was well known to have been

much more Nero’s doing, and the reaction of the spectators was to over-

turn the hierarchy implied in the difference between horse and chariot:

“The real triumphal procession was the one conducted on a single

horse,” and the modesty of Nero in settling for that added to his glory;

as Valerius Maximus put it, “In the case of Salinator, victory alone was

being celebrated; in Nero’s case, moderation too.”61

A variation on this theme is found in the story of Lucius Siccius

Dentatus in the fifth century bce. A hugely successful and much deco-

rated soldier of almost mythic (not to say parodic) renown, “he fought

in 120 battles, blazoning 45 scars on his front and none on his back,” and

he walked behind the triumphal chariot in no fewer than nine triumphs.

With his dazzling array of military awards, from the eight gold crowns

to the 160 armlets, “enough for a legion,” “he turned the eyes of the

whole state onto himself ”—and presumably away from those nine gen-

erals “who triumphed thanks to him.”62 It was not only glamorous cap-

tives who might upstage the commander in the Roman imagination.

There was the lurking question of who was really responsible for the

victory being celebrated. The man in the chariot, or one of those who

were merely walking or riding in the procession? And at the same time

the other moral qualities on display might always challenge the military

heroics that appear to underpin the ceremony. Moderation might trump

victory.

It is a reasonable guess that the majority of participants in the trium-

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phal procession were the rank-and-file soldiery who followed the gen-

eral’s chariot. These men are invisible in the many visual representations

of the triumph, which focus on the general or—if more widely—on the

captives, spoils, and occasionally animal victims destined for slaughter

on the Capitol. It is, in fact, a striking testimony to the selective gaze of

Roman visual culture that there is no surviving ancient image of the cel-

ebration that depicts the mass of soldiers. Literary representations, how-

ever, do sometimes bring them strongly into the frame. The triumph

could be presented as a celebration that belonged to the troops as much

as to the general. In the dispute over Aemilius Paullus’ celebration in

167 bce, for example, Livy puts into the mouth of an elderly war hero

a speech that stresses the centrality of the soldiers themselves: “In fact

the triumph is the business of the soldiers . . . If ever the troops are

not brought back from the field of campaigning to the triumph,

they complain. Yet even when they are absent, they believe that they

are part of the triumph, since the victory was won by their hands. If

someone were to ask you, soldiers, for what purpose you were brought

back to Italy and were not demobbed as soon as your mission was

done . . . what would you say, except that you wished to be seen tri-

umphing?”63

This is a tendentious piece of rhetoric, intended to encourage the

troops to vote for the triumph of their general. But the idea of the

triumph as a prize and a spectacle (note the emphasis on “be seen tri-

umphing”) in which the soldiers had as much stake as their commander

is found elsewhere, too. A revealing case is an incident, reported by

Appian, when the threat to deprive them of their role in a triumph is

successfully used as a weapon against mutinous soldiers. In 47 bce,

when Julius Caesar’s troops complained that they had not been paid

their promised donatives (in effect, cash bonuses) and demanded to be

discharged, Caesar is said to have responded shrewdly: he agreed to their

discharge and said, “I shall give you everything I have promised when I

triumph with other troops.” In Appian’s reconstruction, it was in part

the thought that “others would triumph instead of themselves” that

brought them to beg Caesar to take them back into the army.64

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This anecdote points also to the importance of the donative associ-

ated with the triumph. From the late third century, when Livy’s account

regularly includes a record of the total amount added to the treasury by

the triumphing general, it also includes a note of the bonuses given to

the troops and how this was scaled by rank (it was usual practice with

handouts in the ancient world that the higher status you held the more

cash you received). The figures given here and elsewhere vary plausibly,

with an underlying inflationary tendency up to the massive handouts of

Pompey in 61 and later Caesar.65 But their reliability is as uncertain as

any, and the apparently standard rule that centurions received twice as

much as rank-and-file foot soldiers—and elite equestrian officers three

times as much—is partly a product of scholarly emendations (right or

wrong) of the numerals in ancient texts, to bring them into line with

these “standard” proportions.66

Whatever the exact amounts, the interests of the soldiers in this ele-

ment of triumphal tradition are easy to understand. From the general’s

point of view, it must have been a useful bait to bring his soldiers back to

Rome for the procession. On some, if not many occasions the troops

would have returned to their homes during that period of waiting before

a triumph was granted or celebrated; beyond the symbolic value of the

triumph itself, the cash would have been a powerful incentive to turn up

on the day.67 How old the tradition was, how the cash was distributed to

the men, or at what precise point in the proceedings we do not know. It

is one of the penumbra of rituals associated with the triumph that are al-

most completely lost to us.

Donatives could, however, backfire. The enthusiasm of the soldiers

certainly played its part in ensuring that a triumph was granted. For ex-

ample, the hailing of the general as imperator on the battlefield after his victory might be (as in Cicero’s case) an important first step in his campaign for triumphal honors. But conversely, disgruntled troops could al-

ways attempt to wreck their commander’s aspirations or at least spoil his

show. Pompey’s first triumph was almost ruined by the soldiers who

threatened to mutiny or help themselves to the booty on display, if they

were not given a bigger bonus.

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Even more notorious was the reaction of the troops to the senatorial

approval given to Aemilius Paullus’ triumph in 167 bce. For the soldiers,

angered by his meanness with the donative and smarting under his rigid

“old-fashioned discipline,” were stirred up by one of their junior officers

and a personal enemy of Paullus to try to hijack the assembly specially

convened to assign him imperium on the day of his triumph and so pre-

vent his procession: “Avenge yourselves on that domineering and stingy

commander by voting down the proposal about his triumph.” Only the

intervention of the elderly war hero with his emphasis on the impor-

tance of the triumph for the soldiers (and accompanied by a public dis-

play of war wounds) saved the day for Paullus.68 The rights and wrongs

of this conflict are impossible to determine—especially given the ten-

dency of officer-class historians (ancient as well as modern) to present

the demands of the rank and file as impertinent greed, and stinginess on

the part of the general as admirable prudence. But it makes clear how

the soldiers themselves could be seen as a force to be reckoned with in

the planning and voting of a triumph—even if we know of no case

where the ambitions of a general were in fact blocked by his men.

On the day itself the soldiers brought up the rear of the procession,

marching, according to some accounts, in proper military order (one

cannot help but suspect that the reality was often less disciplined). Un-

like the general, they wore military dress and displayed their various mil-

itary decorations—armlets, crowns of various shapes and sizes, presenta-

tion spears, and the ancient equivalents of campaign medals (albeit not

usually in the quantity paraded by Siccius Dentatus). This was the only

time that regular soldiers under arms legitimately entered Rome and an

extraordinary, almost aggressive reversal of the usual norm that the city

itself was a demilitarized zone.69

SOLDIERS’ KIT

Three features of the soldiers’ dress or behavior have played a particular

role in modern accounts of the triumph. The first is their characteristic

chant, as they went through the streets: “Io triumpe.” The second is the

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laurel wreaths, which they—like other participants—are said to have

worn. Third is their singing directed at the general, part in praise, part

in ribaldry. Each one of these has usually been explained by reference to

the deepest prehistory and primitive meaning of the ceremony; and each

in turn has been conscripted as evidence into some particular theory of

triumphal origins. But once again, there are major stumbling blocks

with this approach—and other more telling interpretations.

In the case of “Io triumpe,” many critics have eagerly fallen on Varro’s

tentative explanation in his treatise De Lingua Latina (On the Latin lan-

guage): the whole ceremony, he claims, owes its name to the chant (not

vice versa), which “could be derived from the word thriambos and the

Greek title of Liber [or Bacchus/Dionysus].” Not only does Varro ap-

pear to suggest a Bacchic origin for the ceremony. But, according to one

significant variant of this argument, his etymology of the Latin triumpe

from the Greek thriambos is only linguistically possible if we imagine an

intermediate Etruscan phase—a predictably attractive idea to those who

would like to see the ceremony as an import to Rome from Etruria.

Others have linked the soldiers’ chant with the refrain triumpe triumpe

triumpe triumpe in a surviving (and deeply obscure) archaic hymn, and

concluded that the word was an appeal for divine epiphany—and so a

convenient support for the idea that the triumphing general in some

way represented a god.70

All this is guesswork. We have no idea if Varro is right. We have no

clue even about the grammatical form of io triumpe (a vocative, an im-

perative, a primitive exclamation, or an Etruscan nominative have all

been suggested). And the latest linguist to look at the question, without

starting from a parti pris on the history of the triumph, has concluded

that the history of the word may have included an Etruscan phase but

did not necessarily do so.71

What gets passed over is the significance of the phrase for those who

shouted it out, listened to it, or committed it to writing in the historical

period. For some, it may have evoked the archaic religious world. Some

may have shared Varro’s speculation on the Dionysiac roots of the chant.

But the overwhelming impression must have been that the participants

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in the procession were repeatedly hailing the very ceremony they were

enacting (“Triumph, Triumph, Triumph”)—or, as Livy puts it, that the

soldiers “called on triumph by name.”72 There is no need to translate this

as “calling on the spirit of Triumph,” as if Livy had some kind of tutelary deity of the ceremony in mind.73 It is easier to see this as a powerful example of a characteristic kind of ritual solipsism—whereby the ritual

turns itself into the object of ritual, the triumph celebrates the triumph.

Ancient writers themselves were more interested in the wearing of

laurel than in the triumphal chant. Some Roman etymologists could not

resist the obvious temptation to explain its use in the ceremony by deriv-

ing the word laurus (laurel) from laus (praise).74 Pliny, however, in a long discussion of various species of the plant, trails a whole series of different

lines of approach. Modern scholars who have their eye on explaining the

origins of the triumph as a purification of the troops from the blood

guilt of war have often homed in on the suggestion he reports (from the

pen of the first-century ce Masurius Sabinus, and echoed in Festus’

dictionary) that would connect its role in the ceremony with its

purificatory properties.75 What they do not usually emphasize is that this

idea is explicitly rejected by Pliny, who prefers three different explana-

tions of the connection of laurel with the triumph: that it was a plant

dear to Apollo at Delphi; that “laurel-bearing ground” at Delphi had

been kissed by Lucius Junius Brutus (later first consul of the Republic),

in response to a famous oracle offering power (imperium) at Rome to

him who first kissed his “mother”; or that it was the only cultivated

plant never struck by lightning.

Our evidence, beyond this, for the early significance of laurel and for

how it might have related to the primitive function of the triumph is

very slight. It is possible—who knows?—that in stressing the role of

purification Masurius and Festus (or their sources) had picked up a

theme in the ceremony that did stretch back to the distant Roman

past.76 Certainly the problems of pollution seem more plausible to us

now than Pliny’s daft theories about Delphi and lightning. But in pass-

ing these over, we are in danger again of turning a blind eye to the his-

tory of the triumph in favor of its imagined prehistory. No one would

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think for moment that Pliny was “right” on why laurel was originally

used in a triumphal procession. But his explanations are important in

gesturing toward the different ways in which the plant (and the cere-

mony as a whole) was understood in the multicultural world of the first

century bce and later. Delphic laurel underpins such ideas as the “tri-

umph of poetry” (as we have seen already in Horace and Propertius) and

the “triumph of love” (in the myth of Apollo and Daphne—turned, as

she was, into laurel). In a sense, Pliny is offering not so much an expla-

nation of why laurel was used in the first place as a legitimating aetiology

for the widest interpretation of “triumphal culture.”77

A third characteristic of the soldiers in the procession that has re-

cently captured the most scholarly attention is their songs. These are

regularly referred to by Livy as carmina incondita, which might mean

anything from “spontaneous” to “artless” or “rude.”78 The best known,

and some of the very few directly quoted by ancient writers, are those

sung at the triumph of Caesar in 46 bce—including some predictable

potshots at the commander’s sexual exploits:

Romans, watch your wives, see the bald adulterer’s back home.

You fucked away in Gaul the gold you borrowed here in Rome79

Caesar screwed the lands of Gaul, Nicomedes screwed our Caesar,

Look Caesar now is triumphing, the one who screwed the Gauls

No Nicomedes triumphs though, the one who screwed our Caesar80

But there were also some more narrowly political darts. Dio reports

some clear references to Caesar’s desire to become king and the illegali-

ties that entailed. In an unusually acute piece of analysis (born, one

imagines, of a lifetime’s experience of autocratic rule), Dio claims that

Caesar was rather flattered by most of this, as the troops’ boldness to

speak their mind ultimately reflected well on himself. Most autocrats,

after all, like to be seen to be able to take a joke—up to a point. That

point, for Caesar, was (again, according to Dio) the insinuations about

his affair with Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, in which the Latin of

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the verse clearly paints him as the passive partner (“screwed” subegit is

literally “subjugated” or “subdued”). According to Dio, Caesar “tried to

defend himself and denied the affair on oath, and so brought more ridi-

cule on himself.”81

The other references to this tradition suggest that the singing, whether

ribald or eulogistic, often homed in on—and so marked out—the “real”

star of the show, which was not always the general himself. At the tri-

umph of Salinator and Nero in 207, the fact that more of the songs were

directed at Nero was one of the things, according to Livy, which indi-

cated that the greater honor was Nero’s (despite Salinator’s riding in the

triumphal chariot).82 In 295 bce one of the chief subjects of the verses

was in fact dead. Although Quintus Fabius Maximus was triumphing af-

ter the Roman victory at the battle of Sentinum, the success was thought

to be largely due to the self-sacrifice of his fellow consul Publius Decius

Mus—and this “glorious death” no less than the achievements of Fabius

was celebrated in the “rough and ready verses of the soldiers.” It was as if

the soldiers’ songs gave a presence in the triumph to the man truly re-

sponsible for the Roman victory despite (and because of ) his death.83

The standard modern view sees these verses as “apotropaic,” their ap-

parently insulting tone designed to protect the general and his moment

of overweening glory from the dangers of “the evil eye.”84 It cannot be as

simple as that. For a start, despite our own fascination with more ribald

variety of these verses, they were not all of that type; some are explicitly

said to have eulogistic.85 Nor, as we have seen, were they always directed

at the general. Besides, once again—as the very terms “apotropaic” and

“evil eye” indicate—the modern frame of analysis points us back to a

primitivizing form of explanation, with its seductive but often mislead-

ing gravitational pull toward the archaic. Yet we have repeatedly seen

how the triumph raises questions about the perilous status of the honor

it bestows. What risks are entailed in triumphal glory? What limits are

there to that glory? Where does the “real” honor of the ceremony lie?

There is no need to retreat to the obscure world of primitive Rome to

see that the soldiers’ songs—lauding the general, as well as taking him

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down a peg or two, while also bringing other objects or targets into their

frame—contribute to those questions, and to their answers.86