The Roman Triumph

Playing God

249

down a peg or two, while also bringing other objects or targets into their

frame—contribute to those questions, and to their answers.86

CLIMAX OR ANTICLIMAX?

The high point of any complicated ritual or ceremony depends on your

point of view: although the liturgical climax of a Christian wedding is

the moment when the couple exchange their vows, many spectators will

remember much more vividly the walk down the aisle or the showers of

confetti. In the case of the triumph, artists and writers dwelt on the pro-

cession as it made its way through the streets; they barely recorded in

any form, literary or visual, what happened when it reached its destina-

tion. The result is that we know very little about the final proceedings.

For some participants, these were perhaps the most impressive, moving,

or memorable part of the show. For others—whose position along the

route would have given them no chance to witness what went on at the

finale—these events may have been more of an anticlimax. That is cer-

tainly what the general silence would tentatively suggest.

The procession ended with the ascent of the Capitoline hill up to the

Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Julius Caesar is reputed to have

“climbed the stairs on the Capitol on his knees” in a gesture of humility

that was apparently later copied by the emperor Claudius. Although this

is sometimes imagined as a lengthy progress up the hill itself (with all

the complications of managing the elaborate toga in a kneeling crawl), it

presumably refers only to the steps of the temple itself. Once the general

had arrived at the temple, we assume that he presided over the sacrifice

of the animals that had been led in the parade.87 But was that all? The

notion that he ran around the building three times has proved so unpal-

atable to most modern critics that it has usually been ignored; primitiv-

ism is one thing, farce quite another. Yet the reference to climbing

the steps suggests that on some occasions at least the general went inside

the temple. This was not for the animal sacrifice, which would have

happened in the open air. It is usually assumed that he went to offer

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 5 0

his “laurel” (wreath or branch?) to Jupiter, even to lay it on the lap of

the statue.88

A slightly different procedure is suggested by that second set of in-

scribed triumphal records, the Fasti Barberiniani: each entry concludes

with the words “he dedicated his palm.” Whether this was a synonym or

a substitute for the laurel, or whether we should imagine palm as well as

laurel regularly carried by the general we do not know. But the phrase

does give a glimpse of the different priorities that different sections of

the triumph’s audience or its participants might have had. Whoever

commissioned this record (and there has been some optimistic specula-

tion, partly on the basis of its possible findspot nearby, that it was con-

nected with the Temple of Jupiter itself ), they saw the defining event of

the triumph as this (to us mysterious) “dedication of the palm.”89

The choreography of this final stage of the procession is even more

baffling to us than the rest. How many of the parade’s participants made

the ascent to the Capitoline, how the prisoners and soldiers were de-

ployed while the sacrifice took place, whether there was a popular audi-

ence for this part of the show, and how all the people, the booty, and the

various models and paintings were safely dispersed afterward (the “exit

strategy,” in other words), we have no idea at all. It is easy enough per-

haps to visualize the scene for the majority of relatively modest celebra-

tions, but how the blockbuster shows were organized and controlled at

this point is quite another matter. It is even less clear with those proces-

sions that stretched over two or three days. The implication of some

of the surviving descriptions is that the general himself appeared only

on the last day.90 If so, on the previous days did the procession simply

go up to the Capitoline, unload, and disperse without any particu-

lar ceremony? How was all that precious loot kept safe from thieving

hands? True to type, no ancient writer is interested in the practical infra-

structure.

However anticlimactic the finale of the ceremony might seem to us or

to its original audience, most modern scholars have agreed that for the

general in the Roman Republic (the dynamics of the imperial celebra-

tion was, as we shall see in Chapter 9, rather different) the triumph as a

Playing God

251

whole represented the pinnacle of ambition achieved. It was both a

marker and guarantor of his success within the competitive culture of

the Roman elite; it was the ceremony that an ambitious young Roman

would dream of. That is certainly one side of the ancient story, as we

have already seen. The triumph and its trappings operated both symbol-

ically and practically to elevate the general, to secure his status, and to

transmit it down the generations.

Notable commemorative statues, such as that of Publius Scipio

Africanus in the Temple of Jupiter, depicted their subjects in triumphal

dress—as if that captured the very moment of their highest renown.91

The adjective triumphalis (“triumphal”) could be used to distinguish

those who had triumphed, and even to mark out their children. On a

grossly overblown early imperial family tomb at Tivoli, for example, one

epitaph blazoned the man commemorated as triumphalis filius (“son of a

triumpher” or “triumphal son”), in place of the usual Roman formula

of filiation (“son of Marcus”); his father, whose epitaph was alongside,

had been awarded “triumphal ornaments” under Augustus.92 In the race

for more direct political rewards, there is some evidence of a link be-

tween the celebration of a triumph and future success. Livy occasion-

ally refers to the impact of a celebration on up-coming elections, and

Cicero linked the splendid triumph celebrated by the father of his client

Lucius Licinius Murena to Murena junior’s subsequent election to the

consulship.93

Modern scholars have made some attempts to look beyond individual

cases. Tracking the careers of those men of praetorian rank who secured

triumphs seems to show that this group had particular success in secur-

ing a consulship. Between 227 and 79 the unusually high proportion of

fifteen out of nineteen triumphing praetorians went on to the higher of-

fice; and of the remaining four who did not, some may have died before

they had a chance to stand for election. It is hard of course to isolate the

significant variable here: the victory itself may have been a more impor-

tant factor than its celebration. Nonetheless, statistics such as these have

helped to entrench the modern view that triumph signaled success.94

But as I have repeatedly shown, triumph could signal failure too—

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 5 2

and not only for those generals who, despite what they themselves re-

garded as a triumph-worthy victory, were refused a celebration. Time

and again, ancient writers told the story of triumphs that went wrong

for all kinds of reasons. Humiliating incidents might occur in mid-

procession, as when Pompey’s elephants became jammed in the archway

or when Caesar’s axle broke. Or the spectacular highlights might misfire,

as when Caesar’s paintings of his dying enemies called forth more revul-

sion than admiration among the gawping crowd, or the tragic prisoner

Arsinoe reduced them to tears. A poor show might go down badly.

Scipio Aemilianus’ triumph over Numantia in 132 bce was noticeably

austere. The Roman destruction of the city had been so complete that

not a single captive nor any booty could be put on display: “It was a tri-

umph over a name only,” as Florus put it disapprovingly, reflecting on

the absence of spectacle and also no doubt on the brutality that ac-

counted for it.95 But, on the other side, there was always a fine line be-

tween splendor and morally questionable excess, a line which, in Pliny’s

eyes at least, Pompey ominously crossed with his portrait head made out

of pearls.

Even if nothing of this sort was drastically awry, the general in his

chariot still risked being upstaged by any number of other participants

in the parade. What could he do, standing helpless in the chariot, if he

realized that the eyes of the spectators were being drawn increasingly to

the glamorous prisoners or to the valiant battle-scarred soldier walking

behind him? And what could he do about the negative spin that might

always be put on his finest hour? We cannot be sure how many of the pi-

quant jibes on triumphal celebrations that we find in the written record

went back directly to contemporary reactions and to the street talk that

no doubt accompanied the show itself. But plenty of evidence suggests

that even (or especially) the most splendid triumphs could come to be

seen more as an own-goal than as a glorious reflection of success. How-

ever mythologized it may have been, Camillus’ extravaganza in 396 bce

is usually presented as the catalyst for political opposition to the general.

Significantly, too, the triumph is an important rhetorical theme in

Livy’s story of Scipio Africanus’ fall from favor. After a brief backward

Playing God

253

glance to Scipio’s triumphal celebration over Syphax in 201 bce, Livy re-

counts the debates at Scipio’s trial a decade or so later. For his oppo-

nents, he was a tyrant who had robbed Romans of their liberty and had

(in a phrase that makes a more shocking paradox in Latin than in Eng-

lish translation) “triumphed over the Roman people”; his accusers were

accused in return of “seeking spoils from a triumph over Africanus.”

One implication here is that his triumph cast a dark shadow, rather than

glorious luster, over the succeeding years.96

Extraordinary marks of honor always entail high risk. For the tri-

umphing general himself, the pride, excitement, and sense of richly de-

served glory must regularly have gone hand in hand with fear and appre-

hension for the occasion itself and for the future. More things, after all,

could go wrong than could go right with a triumph.

ACTING UP?

The figure of the general also raises issues of representation and mimesis,

similar to those raised by the prisoners and the spoils. But in his case

they have an extra dimension, which brings us back, in a different way,

to his divine status—raising the question not merely of what he repre-

sents but how he represents, and of his role in the wider hermeneutics of

the parade. If the models and tableaux could be read as both brilliant

artifice and treacherous sham, could the general be seen as both the di-

vine double and ludicrous actor?

I mean “ludicrous actor” quite literally. For one of the most potent

ancient explorations of the figure of the triumphing general is found in

Plautus’ comedy Amphitruo, a piece of theater that is framed by and ex-

poses the mimetic conventions of the triumph and the general’s role

within those. The action of this play leads up to the birth of Hercules,

by way of an intricate tale of adultery, disguise, and mistaken identity.

Amphitruo himself is a Theban general, just returned from a heroically

successful campaign against the “Teleboans.” Geographical precision

would place this people in Acarnania, in western Greece, but the Greek

would literally mean that they are “a far cry” (tele boe) from where we

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 5 4

are. While Amphitruo has been away, Jupiter has taken a fancy to his

wife, Alcmena, and has been making love to her, cunningly disguised

as her husband. The return of the real Amphitruo causes the predict-

able confusion, archly complicated by the god Mercury—also in dis-

guise as Amphitruo’s slave Sosia. The ensuing slapstick and carnival sa-

dism (part of which is lost in a gap in our text) finally ends with a

resolution in which divine unction is poured on the proceedings:

Alcmena bears twins—Hercules, son of Jupiter, and Iphicles, son of the

cuckold Amphitruo (Fig. 33).

The comedies of Plautus are derived and adapted from Greek ante-

cedents (hence Thebes and the Teleboans) and for that reason have of-

ten played a marginal role in modern studies of Roman culture and soci-

ety. Sometimes the precise Greek model used by the Roman playwright

is well known; in this case we know next to nothing about it. What is

clear, though, is the extent to which any earlier version of the plot has

been thoroughly Romanized—so comprehensively, in fact, that much of

the story as we have it would make no sense outside Rome or Rome’s

cultural orbit. A good deal of this Roman flavor is provided by the char-

acter of Amphitruo himself and by the clear hints in the text that we

should see him not just as a returning victor but more specifically as a

triumphing general. We have already noted, for example, that (the real)

Sosia’s account of his master’s military successes almost certainly mimics

the official language of triumphal petitions, and includes characteristic

technical Roman rubric (suo auspicio, suo imperio). 97

These triumphal echoes have prompted critics to try to pinpoint

some particular celebration that Plautus had in mind. Is this supposed

to be a comic glance at the triumph of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior in 187

bce (and so was the play possibly first performed at the games celebrat-

ing his victory in 186)? Or perhaps rather the triumphant return of

Livius Salinator or of Lucius Scipio?98 This desperate search for a specific

historical referent for Amphitruo’s victory has tended to occlude other,

more important aspects of the play. A few critics have lifted their eyes

above the geopolitics of the early second century to discuss Amphitruo as

a play in which the representational games of the stage are themselves on

parade: the divine doubling, mistaken identities, and impersonations of-

Playing God

255

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 33:

The next episode in the story of Amphitruo, in a painting from the House of

the Vettii, Pompeii, 62–79 ce. Jupiter’s wife Hera, jealous of his affair, sends a pair of snakes to attack baby Hercules, but he proves his strength and gives a sign of his future prowess by strangling them. Here Alcmena backs away from the scene, while Amphitruo—

in a costume strikingly reminiscent of Jupiter—looks on thoughtfully. This hints at an alternative version of the story in which Amphitruo himself sends the snakes, to discover which son was really his.

fer reflections on the very nature of theater, and beyond that on human

subjectivity and the very idea of a unitary personality. One recent study

has also focused more directly on triumphal convention, seeing the play

as a whole in the tradition of the “apotropaic” songs sung by the soldiers

in procession.99

But even these approaches have by-passed what seems to me to be the

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 5 6

central (Roman) joke around which the play is structured. If the trium-

phal celebration staged the general as—in some sense at least—a look-

alike god for the day, then Plautus cunningly reverses those mimetic

conventions: his play stages Jupiter as a look-alike general, acting human

for the day (or, more exactly, for the one night on which the play’s action

takes place).100

The question at stake here is one which, in different forms and with

different nuances, runs through much of the triumphal procession and

its images—and which must trump narrower questions of what the gen-

eral represented. How do you tell the difference between representation

and reality? What distinguishes the man who is “being,” “playing,” or

“acting” god?

c h a p t e r

VIII

The Boundaries of the Ritual

MAKING A MEAL OUT OF A VICTORY

In 89 ce the emperor Domitian hosted a particularly imaginative (or

menacing) dinner party for Roman senators and knights. The dining

room was entirely black, with black couches, crockery, and food; even

the naked serving-boys were painted in the same color. Each guest’s

name was inscribed on a slab shaped like a tombstone, while the em-

peror himself held forth on the topic of death to the silent and fearful

company, who were convinced that their last hour had come. In fact,

it was to be nothing of the sort. They were all sent home, and the omi-

nous knock at the door that followed shortly after their return heralded

not arrest and murder but a display of imperial generosity: Domitian

had sent each guest as a present their name-slab (made of silver), the

precious black dishes from which they had been served, and their indi-

vidual serving-boy, now well scrubbed and nicely dressed. Or so at least

Dio (as his Byzantine excerptors have preserved his text) tells the story.1

This has become a notorious and controversial incident in modern at-

tempts to configure the relations between the emperor and the Roman

elite. Some see it as a classic case of imperial sadism, showing that scare

tactics in the form of humiliation and terror were as effective a means of

control as violence itself. Others suspect that Dio, in his eagerness to

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 5 8

cast Domitian as a full-blown tyrant, has missed the point of the dinner,

and missed the joke. For lurking under Dio’s outrage, they detect an ele-

gant parade of imperial wit (and expensive fancy dress), or alternatively a

philosophical fantasy in keeping with the other-worldly themes found

elsewhere in the dining culture of the early Empire.2

What no one has spotted, to my knowledge, is that this occasion was

not merely any banquet hosted by the emperor, but the banquet laid on

to follow the emperor’s triumph over the Germans and Dacians.3 Even

in its mangled state, Dio’s text makes it clear that we are dealing with the

triumphal celebrations of 89, which were followed both by a dinner at

public expense for the people at large “lasting all night” and by this ele-

gant, or somber, occasion for a more select group of the elite.

In fact, various forms of eating and drinking are referred to as an ac-

companiment to triumphs. We have already seen, in Josephus’ account,

that in 71 ce the soldiers were served with “the traditional breakfast” (or

“lunch,” depending on how we choose to translate the Greek ariston)

before the procession itself started out, while Vespasian and Titus had a

bite to eat, privately, elsewhere. In a triumph, no less than on campaign,

the army marched on its stomach. It also needed a drink. An aside in a

play of Plautus—that “the soldiers will be entertained with honeyed

wine,” even if there is no triumph—strongly hints (though we might

have guessed it anyway) that the celebrating troops did not necessarily

remain sober all day.4

More striking are the retrospective fictions that offer a different vision

of how the soldiers were plied with food in some of the earliest Roman

triumphs. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his account of the founding

celebration of Romulus, imagines the ceremony consisting simply of the

homecoming of the victorious troops, met outside the town by their

wives and children and other citizens. As they enter this proto-Rome,

they find that outside the most distinguished houses tables have been

laid with food and wine from which, as they pass in procession, they can

eat their fill. The image is repeated in Dionysius’ account of Publicola’s

triumph in 509, the first year of the newly founded Republic, and in

Livy’s story of the triumph of Cincinnatus in 458 bce. Here, he pictures

The Boundaries of the Ritual

259

tables spread out before all the houses and “the soldiers, feasting as they

went, to the accompaniment of the triumphal chant; and the usual rib-

ald songs followed the chariot like revelers.”5

These are more complex stories than at first they may appear, with an

interlocking set of historical explanations and originary myths at play.

On the one hand, the triumph is being used as an imaginary frame for a

distinctively primitive form of banqueting: what is being conjured here

is the “degree zero” of Roman dining, unencumbered by the rules and

rituals of commensality, something as close to just eating as you can get

within organized society. On the other hand, this practice of eating on

the part of the soldiers—retrojected by Dionysius to the very first tri-

umph of all and to the first triumph of the Republic—is itself being

used, mythically, as a way of recreating and explaining the origins of

the ceremony of triumph. Livy’s language points clearly in that direc-

tion. When he writes that the soldiers were “like revelers,” the Latin

word he uses is comisor (modo comisantium), which echoes, even if it

does not directly derive from, the Greek word kÇmos—the procession of

drunken revelers associated, for example, with marriages, some religious

rituals, or with the celebrations for victorious athletes. Livy is asking his

readers to imagine the early triumph on the model of a Greek kÇmos, a

soldiers’ kÇmos.

Most ancient writers, however, are not particularly concerned with

the soldiers’ fare but focus on the post-triumphal festivities for the other

participants and spectators, both people and elite. The classic case is the

banqueting provided by Julius Caesar after his triumphs in 46 and 45

bce. The general impression of lavishness is backed up by some ostensi-

bly specific detail. Plutarch, for example, claims that in 46 the people

feasted at 22,000 triclinia—which, according to the usual understanding

that a triclinium comprises three couches with three diners each, means

a grand total of 198,000 diners. The elder Pliny fills in some of the culi-

nary information. In discussing different varieties of wine, he notes that

Caesar provided Chian and Falernian for his triumphal guests. Else-

where, in the context of lamprey ponds, he notes that Gaius Lucilius

Hirrus—second-rate politician, erstwhile ally of Pompey, and highly

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 6 0

successful fish breeder—gave Caesar 6,000 lampreys “as a loan” for one

of his triumphal banquets. It was a generous and politically expedient

gesture, no doubt, though, as the largest lamprey hardly exceeds a meter

in length, if divided equally they would have provided a meager helping

for 198,000 diners.6

This mass public dining has captured the scholarly imagination.

Modern historians of ancient food and foodways have seen in such tri-

umphal banquets the “greatest occasions” of public feasting at Rome.

More than that, they have made the feast—rather than the sacrifice on

the Capitol, or the dedication of the laurel or palm—the culminating

moment of the whole triumphal ceremony. The public feast, as one his-

torian recently suggested, was “ritually the capstone of triumphs.”7 Even

poor Aemilius Paullus has been wheeled out to support such claims.

“The organization of a feast and the giving of games is the business of a

man who knows how to win wars,” he is supposed to have once re-

marked—as if to imply that, as soon as the war was won, the general had

to devote himself to organizing a (triumphal) banquet for the people

and laying on games. But it is an over-optimistic translation. The sense

is more correctly: “It takes the same talent to organize a feast, to give

games, and to marshal troops like a general to face the enemy.”8 A sig-

nificantly different observation.

In fact, the idea that mass eating, on the Caesarian model, was the

regular culmination of the triumph is a typical example of the kind

of generalization we have repeatedly seen in modern reconstructions

of the ceremony. It is not that we have no further evidence for it at

all. Athenaeus, for example, in his second-century ce compendium

Deipnosophistae (Sophists at Dinner) refers to skins of “gorgons,” sheep-

like creatures with deadly eyes sent from Africa by Marius to hang “in

the Temple of Hercules where commanders celebrating their triumphs

give a banquet to the citizens.” And elsewhere he quotes the early first-

century bce Stoic philosopher Poseidonius, who wrote of the banquets

held “in the precinct of Hercules, when a man who at that time is cele-

brating a triumph is giving dinner.”9 There are also the observations of

Varro on the agricultural profits to be made from supplying “a triumph

The Boundaries of the Ritual

261

and a banquet.”10 Yet it is hard to pin down precise occasions of any such

mass feasting.

The only case mentioned before Caesar is that of Lucullus’ triumph

in 63 bce, when according to Plutarch a banquet was given both in the

city and in surrounding villages.11 Otherwise, the few examples of large-

scale dining are all of early imperial date: a banquet to celebrate

Tiberius’ ovation in 9 bce (dinner for “some” on the Capitol, for others

“all over the place,” while Livia and Julia entertained the women); the

entertainment following the triumph of Vespasian and Titus (“some”

eating at the imperial table, others in their own homes); and Domitian’s

dinners in 89 ce.12 Nowhere in Livy’s notices of republican triumphs do

we find any reference to any form of post-triumphal entertainment on a

large scale.

Equally hard to pin down are the practical details of such occasions.

Athenaeus does not specify which “precinct of Hercules” he means, but

there was none in Rome that could possibly hold 198,000 diners. The

most likely location for Caesar’s banquet would be the Forum itself; and

precedents do indeed exist for its transformation into an open-air dining

area. Livy, for example, tells a vivid story of a funeral feast taking place

there in 183 bce, when it was so windy that the diners were forced to

erect little tents or windbreaks around their tables.13 But the accounts we

have hint that formal communal banquets may regularly have been of-

fered to the elite alone, the mass of the people having food (or even cash

equivalent) provided for private or local consumption—on the model of

the “take-away” mentioned by Josephus at the triumph of 71 ce, or the

widely dispersed dining (“all over the place”) following Tiberius’ ova-

tion.14 As for the menu, much of the information we have may well re-

fer, again, to the elite rather than the popular version of the feast. Those

6,000 lampreys, or Varro’s aunt’s 5,000 thrushes, would have made a

handsome contribution to the “top-table” party of perhaps senators and

knights.

Unlike the mass dining of the people, there is considerable evidence

for triumphal feasting by the elite (still, to be sure, on a large scale), as

well as for ancient scholarly interest in the particular customs and social

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 6 2

oddities that characterized it. In addition to the occasions we have just

noted (where the “some” dining on the Capitol or at the imperial table

almost certainly indicates the upper echelons of Roman society), Appian

refers to Scipio entertaining his friends “at the temple, as was custom-

ary” at the conclusion of his triumph in 201 bce, just as Dionysius envis-

ages Publicola in 509 “feasting the most distinguished of the citizens” at

the end of his own procession and Dio reports a banquet for senators on

the Capitol at the triumph of Tiberius in 7 bce.15

Livy, too, though silent on popular triumphal dining, mentions this

elite custom in the context of Aemilius Paullus’ triumph in 167. In the

course of the triumphal debate, Paullus’ champion (as Livy scripts his

words) lists the “senate’s feast” as one of the religious elements of the cer-

emony: “What about that feast of the senate that is held neither on pri-

vate property, nor on unconsecrated public land, but on the Capitol?

Does this take place for the pleasure of mortal men or to honor the

gods?”16 In other words, it seems that once the general had arrived at the

Temple of Jupiter and the sacrifices had been performed, he did not nec-

essarily make his weary way home: a banquet for the senate or maybe a

wider group of the elite often followed, in the Capitoline temple itself or

perhaps at a Temple of Hercules.

Puzzling to ancient scholars were the rules of precedence at these din-

ners. Both Valerius Maximus and Plutarch refer to the “customary” ban-

quet. Why, they ask, was it the tradition for the consuls to be invited to

this occasion and then to be sent a message that they should not turn

up? The answer, they each suggest in slightly different formulations, is

to ensure that the triumphant commander is not upstaged: “So that, on

the day on which he triumphs, no one of greater imperium should be

present at the same dinner party.”17 This nicely indicates that more

was at stake in this banquet than the standard Roman practice of sharing

the sacrificial meat between priests, officials, and key participants—the

“religious” function hinted at by Livy.18 More too than the reintegration

of the general into the society of his elite peers after his day on the bor-

derline of divinity. We have already seen how written recreations of the

triumph repeatedly harp on the fragility of triumphal success, on the

The Boundaries of the Ritual

263

competitive calibration of triumphal glory, and on the dangers of humil-

iation that went along with the temporary elevation of the general. Ex-

actly those issues are reflected in this ancient explanation of the strange

“rule” about the invitation and disinvitation of the consuls, with its im-

plied recognition of the threats to the general’s status.

Those issues are reflected, too, in Domitian’s black dinner party.

Though the fact that emperor and triumphing general were here one

and the same inevitably complicates the story, an important underlying

theme remains the jockeying for preeminence between the general and

other participants in (or observers of ) the triumph. The intricate games

of power, humiliation, and control implied by the ceremony are in this

case both won and lost by Domitian: the emperor-general retains the

upper hand, but only at the cost of revealing his own sadistic tyranny

(or, on the other interpretation, at the cost of history forever missing

his joke!).

RITUAL BOUNDARIES

Triumphal feasting, in whatever form, raises larger questions about

where we choose to draw the boundary of this (or any) ritual—how we

decide what is to count as part of the ritual process and what to be taken

as merely ancillary. To put it simply, should we see the banqueting as an

integral element, perhaps even the highlight, of the triumph, or as a

common sequel to it—one of the “post-triumphal” festivities, as I have

already put it. And what difference does our choice make?

Feasting is only one aspect of the wider diffusion of the triumph be-

yond the procession itself. As Pompey’s triumph in 61 vividly illustrated,

the ceremony and its impact extended in a variety of different ways. No-

tably, temples funded by the profits of victory that had been paraded

through the streets and housing the most precious objects of triumphal

booty might serve to memorialize the occasion for centuries. The per-

formance of plays and the various displays at the games (ludi) associated

with military victory might fulfill a similar function. There is no clear

evidence for games formally attached to a triumphal procession (the so-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 6 4

called Ludi Triumphales were a fourth-century commemoration of

Constantine’s victory over his rival Licinius in 324 ce), still less for dra-

matic performances in a strictly triumphal context.19 Yet the games

sometimes vowed by the general in the heat of battle, and celebrated in

the event of victory when he returned home, or those that might be held

at the dedication of “manubial” temples, could be linked in various

more or less direct ways to triumphal celebrations. So, for example, the

“prisoners of war” who featured in the arena at the games to mark the

dedication of Julius Caesar’s Temple of Venus Genetrix were, in all like-

lihood, those who had earlier been paraded in his triumphal proces-

sion.20 And I speculated earlier that the triumphal scenes in the plays

performed at the inauguration of Pompey’s vast building complex, on

the anniversary of his triumph, might have showcased some of the booty

that had already been on display in the triumphal procession itself.

More generally, games of this kind offer a very plausible context for

the production of those Roman historical dramas, fabulae praetextae,

which sometimes focused on particular military victories.21 The

Ambracia of Ennius, for example, took as its theme the defeat of the city

of Ambracia in northwest Greece, for which Ennius’ patron Marcus

Fulvius Nobilior celebrated a triumph in 187 bce. We do not know ex-

actly when it was first performed, but either the lavish ten-day games

held in fulfillment of the vow Nobilior made in battle (and funded out

of the triumphal booty) or the celebrations that would have accompa-

nied the dedication of Nobilior’s Temple of Hercules of the Muses seem

very likely occasions.22 Whether or not Ennius took Ambracia’s story

down as far as the triumph of Nobilior, so reenacting it on stage, we can-

not infer from the few fragments and scattered references to it that have

been preserved. But 150 years later, Horace had some sharp words for the

vulgar visual spectacle of plays which, he claimed, re-presented trium-

phal processions on stage, with captive kings, chariots, and spoils of

ivory and bronze.23

So where does the triumph stop? There is no single right answer to

the question of where to draw its boundaries, and whether or not to in-

clude the feasting or these dramatic replays and anniversary perfor-

The Boundaries of the Ritual

265

mances. The fact is that the Roman triumph, like all rituals, was a po-

rous set of practices and ideas, embedded in the day-to-day political,

social, and cultural world of Rome, with innumerable links and associa-

tions, both personal and institutional, to other ceremonies, customs,

events, and traditions. For modern scholars there is an inevitable trade-

off between a restrictively narrow approach and an impossibly all-em-

bracing one. To limit what we understand as “the ritual” simply to the

procession itself, and so to exclude from view the (maybe no less “ritual-

ized”) preparations or the different forms in which the triumph pro-

longed its impact in further spectacles and celebration would amount to

a very blinkered view of the occasion and its significance. Conversely, to

include every aspect of the memorialization and representation of the

triumph (or even of victory) as part of the ritual itself risks diluting and

decentering the ceremony beyond what is either plausible or useful.

That is not merely a modern dilemma. Romans too were involved in

the process—a contested, loaded, changing, and inevitably provisional

one—of “fixing” the ritual as ritual, defining, policing, and also trans-

gressing the boundaries that marked it off from the everyday nonritual

world, and drawing a line between the triumph and all those other cere-

monies that were not to count as triumph. This is part of what the dy-

namics of “ritualization” are all about. We have already seen one side of

this, and its potential complexity, in the various subcategories of the tri-

umphal ceremony as they are defined by Roman writers. Both the ovatio

and triumph in monte Albano were carefully distanced from the triumph

“proper” by a series of precise distinctions and calibrations: the general

traveling on foot or horseback, for example, not in a chariot; a myrtle,

not a laurel, wreath; a standard senatorial toga, rather than the toga picta;

or simply a changed location.

Such calibrations could matter. Why else would Marcus Licinius

Crassus have chosen to wear a laurel, not a myrtle, wreath at his ovation

for victory over a slave rebellion in 71 bce, if not to make it seem more

like a full triumph?24 Yet in other contexts and circumstances those dis-

tinctions could be overlooked, so as to treat all the variants as bona fide

triumphs. This was strikingly the case in the inscribed triumphal record

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 6 6

in the Forum, where all were listed together. The ovation and ceremony

on the Alban Mount, in other words, both were and were not triumphs.

The rest of this chapter explores the contested margins of the ceremony

of triumph itself, and the ways that various forms of triumphal symbol-

ism extended more generally into other areas of public life. It is con-

cerned with the triumph outside the triumph.

WHEN WAS A TRIUMPH NOT A TRIUMPH?

Roman history and history writing are full of triumphlike occasions.

Outside the roster of official triumphs, the ceremony gave the general a

model of how to celebrate his victory at other times and places, just as it

offered ancient writers a model for describing and representing other

celebrations. Plutarch, for example, notes the magnificent arrival of

Aemilius Paullus back into Italy after his victory over Perseus, “like the

spectacle of triumphal procession, for the Romans to enjoy in advance,”

while Flamininus and his troops are said by Livy to have passed through

Italy in 194 bce “in a virtual triumph.” A more striking phrase—which

is most likely a clever coinage by Livy, but just conceivably an otherwise

unattested piece of technical triumphal vocabulary—describes a “camp-

site triumph” (castrensis triumphus) for a junior officer who had success-

fully rescued the Romans from a bad military blunder on the part of his

commander: “Decius had a campsite triumph, making his way through

the midst of the camp with his troops under arms, and all eyes turned

upon him.”25

Proceedings even more reminiscent of the particularities of the Ro-

man triumph may well lie behind Josephus’ account of Titus’ circuitous

journey back to Italy, after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 ce. Traveling

through Syria, “he exhibited costly spectacles in all the towns through

which he passed, and he used his Jewish captives to act out their own de-

struction.” This sounds very similar to the “floats” in the Jewish tri-

umph itself, each one featuring “an enemy general in the very attitude in

which he was captured”—prompting one recent critic to suggest that

more was at stake here than just an ostentatious victory tour: Titus was

The Boundaries of the Ritual

267

offering to the eastern cities a lesson in a distinctively Roman form of

triumphal celebration, “with its pageantry and ideologically charged im-

ages of conqueror and conquered.”26

None of these celebrations is known to have provoked controversy or

to have been seen as a challenge to the ritual of triumph itself. On other

occasions, however, triumphlike ceremonies did raise questions (as they

still do) about exactly where the ritual boundaries of the ceremony lay,

what counted as a timely adaptation of the traditional rituals, and what

was a potentially dangerous subversion. The advent of autocracy, from

Julius Caesar on, heralded a whole range of extensions of triumphal cer-

emonial that were likely to have been, at the very least, the subject of

delicate negotiation or packaging. Caesar’s hybrid celebration in 44 bce,

referred to in the inscribed Fasti as an ovation ex monte Albano is a case in point. So too is the return of Octavian and Mark Antony to Rome after temporarily patching up their differences in 40 bce. Dio refers to

them coming “into the city, mounted on horses as if at some triumph.”

The Fasti, by contrast, show no such hesitation, including the ceremony

twice, once for Octavian and once for Antony, each time with the addi-

tion of ovans; and in place of the usual information on the defeated en-

emy, it includes the explanation “because he made peace with Mark An-

tony/with Imperator Caesar” (to give Octavian his Roman title). The

justification might run that the restoration of good will between these

two was as militarily significant, and as worthy of an ovation, as any vic-

tory in war.27

But two notorious incidents particularly stand out. The first was, in

Dio’s words, “a sort of triumph” over the Armenian king Artavasdes cele-

brated by Antony in 34 bce—but in the Egyptian capital of Alexandria,

not in Rome. Among the several accounts of this event, Plutarch’s is the

most open, and acerbic, on the triumphal character and implications of

this ceremony. “Antony captured Artavasdes, took him in chains to Al-

exandria, and led him in triumph [ ethriambeusen, a standard Greek term

for the Roman ritual]. In this he gave particular offense to the Romans,

because for the sake of Cleopatra he bestowed on the Egyptians the hon-

orable and solemn ceremonies of his own country.” Others are less direct

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 6 8

but still focus on various elements of the show that echo triumphal rit-

ual and symbolism: Antony driving in a chariot, the royal prisoners pa-

raded through the city, even in some accounts bound (like Zenobia) in

golden chains. In place of the distaste felt for the occasion by Plutarch’s

Romans, Dio projects resistance onto the prisoners themselves, who re-

fused to do obeisance to Cleopatra despite being pressed to—and suffer-

ing for it later.28

The second case, a bizarre triumphal ceremony of Nero in 67 ce, is

recounted even more vividly, in this case by Suetonius and Dio (in a pas-

sage known to us in his Byzantine excerption).29 The occasion in ques-

tion is the return of the emperor from his notorious tour of Greece,

where he had achieved victory—or had it engineered for him—in all the

major Greek games. In Suetonius’ version, Nero enjoyed a ceremonial

progress through Italy, entering the cities he visited on white horses

through a breach in their defenses, which was the traditional way that

Greek victors themselves had reentered their home towns after such suc-

cess. He did the same at Rome, but there he also rode in a chariot, “the

very one that Augustus had once used in his triumphs,” and he wore a

costume that combined triumphal and decidedly Greek elements: a pur-

ple robe with a Greek cloak (chlamys) decorated with golden stars; the

characteristic olive wreath of Olympic victors on his head; the laurel

wreath of the Pythian games as well as of the triumph in his hand. In

front of his chariot, placards were carried, blazoning the names and

places of the athletic and artistic contests he had won and the themes of

his songs and plays. Behind came his claque of cheerleaders, shouting

his praises and proclaiming among other thing that they were “the sol-

diers at his triumph.”

The whole procession made its way from the Circus Maximus, through

the Velabrum and the Forum, but then to the Temple of Apollo on the

Palatine, not to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol—with victims

slain along the route, saffron sprinkled over the streets, and birds, rib-

bons, and sweets showered on the emperor as he passed. Dio’s account is

very similar and was probably drawn from the same source. He adds the

detail that one of Nero’s defeated rivals, Diodorus the lyre player, trav-

The Boundaries of the Ritual

269

eled with him in the chariot, perhaps on the model of the triumphant

general’s son; and he offers a variant on the route which inserts the

Capitol as a stop on the way, before the procession reached the Palatine

(or “Palace,” both being possible translations of the Greek).

Modern scholars have debated at length the significance and intent of

these ceremonies. Plutarch explicitly claims that the Romans were of-

fended at Antony’s performance as a usurpation of the triumph, which

could properly take place only in Rome itself. But is that what Antony

was aiming at? While not disputing the basic “logic of place” that would

underlie the popular disquiet (much of the ritual, ceremony, and myth

of the Roman state was indeed closely tied to the topography of the

city), recent critics have tended to suspect a rather more complicated ex-

planation. Antony, in this view, was probably launching a specifically

Dionysiac celebration, as is suggested in the account of Velleius (“at

Alexandria he had ridden in a chariot like Father Liber [that is, Diony-

sus or Bacchus], kitted out in buskins and holding a thyrsus”). It was

Octavian’s propaganda that chose to represent this as a triumph and so

to hint that if Antony were victorious he would effectively transfer

Rome to Egypt.30

Even more ingenious attempts have been made to extract from the

hostile accounts of Suetonius and Dio the significance of Nero’s much

more explicitly triumphlike ceremony. To be sure, some recent interpre-

tations have closely followed Dio in casting the whole affair as a direct

subversion, or parody, of the traditional ritual and the values that went

with it. This antimilitary triumph is an apt conclusion to Dio’s story of

the whole Greek tour, which starts out with a barbed comparison be-

tween Nero’s retinue and an invading army—“big enough to have con-

quered the Parthians and all other nations” except that the weapons they

carried were “lyres and plectra, masks and stage-shoes.”31 The occasion

was conceived, as one of Nero’s modern biographers has put it, as an

“answer to a Roman triumph”—“his greatest insult,” as another critic

concludes, “to the Roman military tradition.”32

But others have detected different sides to this Neronian extrava-

ganza. It has, for example, been interpreted as part of a more construc-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 7 0

tive merging of the customary rituals of triumph and the homecoming

of Greek victors: Vitruvius, after all, already in the reign of Augustus had

described that Greek ceremony in decidedly triumphal terminology. It

has also been seen as a reformulation of the ritual into an essentially the-

atrical performance (the sprinkling of saffron was a distinctive feature of

the Roman theater). Others have seen it as a sincere attempt to extend

triumphlike ceremonies to honor achievement of a nonmilitary kind, a

further step perhaps down the path heralded by the ovation that cele-

brated the peaceful reconciliation of Octavian and Antony.33

One particularly ambitious recent analysis homes in on the Augustan

features of this parade: Nero’s use of Augustus’ triumphal chariot and

the procession’s final destination at the Temple of Apollo on the Pala-

tine, which was not only built by Augustus but also featured in the

Aeneid as the culmination of Virgil’s imaginary recreation of Octavian’s

triple triumph of 29 bce (which, in real life, would have ended on the

Capitoline). According to this argument, Nero was attempting to act

out that Virgilian scene and so to outdo his predecessor by creating a tri-

umph that was more “Augustan” than Octavian’s own.34

It is, of course, impossible now to recover the original form of An-

tony’s or Nero’s displays, let alone the intention behind them. What is

clear enough, however, is that the triumph, as a cultural category as well

as a ritual, had shifting and potentially controversial boundaries. The

Neronian spectacular, in its literary representations, both was and was

not a triumph. It used some of the same paraphernalia, replayed some of

the same ritual tropes (the companion in the chariot), and celebrated

the emperor’s victory; it would be easy to imagine that it could be talked

of as Nero’s “triumph.” Yet there is no sign whatsoever that it was for-

mally treated on a par with the usual ceremony. It did not celebrate the

military success that had consistently justified a triumph (even if occa-

sionally rather tenuously), and it flagrantly diverged from some of the

standard triumphal practices. The issue is not so much whether Nero’s

victory parade is to be thought of as a “triumph” or as a “parody of a tri-

umph” but—much more generally—at what point a parody becomes

The Boundaries of the Ritual

271

the real thing. For us, in other words, it raises the question of just how

triumph like a ceremony has to be before it counts as a triumph.

In these accounts, as elsewhere, triumphs and their various subver-

sions were being used by writers as a vivid index of political and military

worth. The role of the emperor or, in the case of Antony, the leading dy-

nast is a crucial factor here. As triumphs became exclusively associated

with the single ruler and his closest family, so too they became conve-

nient markers of his qualities, propriety, and legitimacy. In its simplest

terms, “good emperors” held proper triumphs for proper victories, while

“bad emperors” held sham ceremonies for empty victories. For example,

it was put down to Tiberius’ credit—not exactly a “good emperor” but

apparently a no-nonsense traditionalist in many respects—that, when

some fawning sycophant of a senator proposed that he celebrate an ova-

tion on returning to Rome from Campania, he robustly turned the sug-

gestion down. “He was not, he declared, so lacking in glory that, after

subduing the fiercest nations, and after receiving or declining so many

triumphs in his youth, he would now at his age seek an empty honor

conferred merely for a trip in the country.”35 Claudius, by contrast, was

reported to be happy to accept “triumphal insignia ” for a war that had

finished before he had even come to the throne.36

So Roman rhetorical skills came to be expertly deployed in coloring

different celebrations with subtly different triumphal nuances: from the

accounts of Caligula’s mad procession across a bridge over the sea near

Baiae (with the emperor in Alexander the Great’s breastplate, so it was

claimed, and some mock prisoners in tow), to Tacitus’ insinuation of a

triumphal style in Nero’s return to Rome after the murder of his mother

Agrippina (with the people watching from tiers of seats, “as they do at

triumphs,” and offerings on the Capitol by the “victor”).37

A particularly pointed example is the triumphal language used to

highlight the ambivalences of Rome’s so-called “victory” over the Parthians

under Nero and the installation of Tiridates, a Parthian prince, as king

of Armenia. Tiridates was in fact the Parthian nominee for the Arme-

nian throne. But after a disastrous Roman attempt to replace him with

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 7 2

one of their own puppets, followed by some military successes in the re-

gion scored by Cnaeus Domitius Corbulo, a compromise was ham-

mered out: Tiridates would formally accept his crown from the

Romans.38 He deposited his diadem in front of a statue of the emperor

in a legionary camp on the eastern frontier, not to wear it again until he

had received it from Nero’s hands in Rome.

Tacitus clearly casts Tiridates as more or less a captive at this point (an

“object of spectacle,” as he insists). But Dio—at least in the words of his

excerptor—pointedly reverses the roles: for he hints at the awkward bal-

ance of power between Romans and Parthians (who had, after all, got

their own way) by presenting Tiridates’ journey to Rome from the Eu-

phrates as itself “like a triumphal procession.”39 Finally, once he reaches

the capital, a magnificent show is staged, out of all proportion to the

military victory secured: the emperor, we are told, was dressed in trium-

phal costume; celebrations were held in that most triumphal of monu-

ments, the theater of Pompey; and a laurel wreath was deposited in the

Temple of Jupiter.40 Triumph or triumphlike? For most modern observ-

ers, triumphlike. But, strikingly, both Pliny (who lived through it) and

Dio call it, straightforwardly, a “triumph.”41

These stories are a nice indication of the two faces of triumphal

ceremony and discourse. On the one hand, no doubt, it was a mark of

autocratic power that emperors could, and did, extend or subvert the

traditional norms of the triumph. On the other, writers exploited the

vocabulary of triumphal subversion to symbolize the emperor’s miscon-

duct or to calibrate his impropriety. Which face we are seeing on any in-

dividual occasion, or what combination of the two, is almost impossible

to determine.

DRESSING THE PART

One of the most powerful ways of extending the resonance of the tri-

umph outside the brief hours of the ceremony did not involve vast me-

morial building schemes nor the launching of look-alike processions

with their expensive chariots and stand-in prisoners or soldiers. Much

The Boundaries of the Ritual

273

more simply and economically, it involved the wider use of the costume

worn by triumphing generals. By adopting all or part of the characteris-

tic triumphal dress on certain occasions after his triumph, a man might

publicly call to mind past successes and prolong his triumphal glory.

Even for those who had themselves never celebrated a triumph, this

might offer a way of appropriating some of the power, glory, and status

associated with the ceremony.

From at least the mid-second century bce to the final years of the Re-

public, we find a handful of dramatic instances of triumphal dressing

outside the procession itself. These went far beyond the wearing of lau-

rel, which generals who had once triumphed may have been regularly al-

lowed to do on certain public occasions.42 According to one later Roman

biographer, after his procession in 167 bce Aemilius Paullus was given

the right “by the people and by the senate” to wear his triumphal cos-

tume at circus games. Pompey too is said to have been voted that honor,

while Marius—immediately following his first triumph in 104—reput-

edly called the senate into session, still dressed in his triumphal outfit.

Metellus Pius, on the other hand, a Roman commander in Spain in

the 70s bce, used the same technique to anticipate rather than to extend

triumphal honors: the story was that after a victory against the Roman

rebel Sertorius he was hailed imperator by his troops and took to wear-

ing triumphal garb (specifically palmata vestis, “palm-embroidered cos-

tume”) at dinners.43

Strikingly, almost every one of these incidents is recounted with more

or less explicit disapproval.44 In Metellus’ case, the triumphal aspect of

his dress is seen as part and parcel of his disgracefully extravagant behav-

ior in Spain. Pompey is said to have used his right to wear triumphal

dress only once, “and that was once too often.” Marius quickly saw the

unfavorable reaction of the other senators and went out to change.

These were, in other words, exemplary anecdotes, marking out this kind

of formal extension of triumphal glory beyond the procession itself as

unacceptable, at least in a republican context. In fact, if we follow

Polybius’ claim that the cortège of an aristocratic Roman funeral pa-

raded men impersonating the ancestors of the deceased, with costume to

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 7 4

match (if they had celebrated a triumph, “a purple toga embroidered

with gold”), it was only the dead who could safely put on their trium-

phal robes again.45

The single possible exception is found in the “diplomatic presentation

sets” that were offered occasionally to friendly foreign kings in recogni-

tion of their services or loyalty to Rome. These are not, in fact, quite as

“triumphal” as modern scholars tend to make them out to be.46 In only

one of the four reported republican instances do the gifts include any-

thing undeniably reminiscent of the triumph or explicitly likened to it;

that occasion was in 203 bce, when the Numidian leader Massinissa was

said by Livy to have been presented with the distinctive combination of

toga picta and tunica palmata, as well as a gold crown, scepter, and official “curule” chair.47 Yet in the Empire, Tacitus looks back to republi-

can precedent when he refers to the “revival” of an ancient custom in 24

ce, with the presentation to King Ptolemy of “an ivory scepter and toga

picta, the traditional gifts offered by the senate.”

Tacitus’ interest is, of course, more than antiquarianism. Once again,

he is presenting the use and misuse of triumphal symbolism as a means

of measuring the use and misuse of imperial power more generally.

Here, the triumphal trappings given to Ptolemy, who had done nothing

more than remain loyal during Rome’s war in North Africa, are con-

trasted with the emperor’s refusal (reported just a few lines earlier) to

grant triumphal insignia to Publius Cornelius Dolabella, who had ac-

tually secured the Roman victory.48

These insignia or ornamenta were all that was awarded to successful generals in the Principate, once the ceremony of triumph itself had been

monopolized by the imperial family. Tacitus’ hint of an equivalence be-

tween them and the package of honors offered to foreign kings explains

some of the disproportionate modern interest in these diplomatic pres-

ents. For one seductive idea is that they offered a model and an origin

for the triumphal ornaments of the later period.49 In fact, that connec-

tion is very fragile. In part this is because the accounts we have of explic-

itly triumphal gifts to friendly kings may themselves be based on the im-

perial custom; Livy, in other words, may have concocted the award to

The Boundaries of the Ritual

275

Massinissa out of the later practice of bestowing triumphal insignia

(rather than vice versa).50 But even more to the point, it is very uncertain

what the ornaments themselves consisted in, beyond the fact that their

grant was commemorated with a statue in the Forum of Augustus. They

did not even necessarily, or regularly, include the toga picta and tunica palmata. 51

What is clear is that, in glaring contrast to the republican pattern, as-

pects of triumphal dress in the Principate did regularly appear outside

the context of the triumphal procession. The prime example of this is in

the dress of the emperor himself. For not only was the ceremony of tri-

umph monopolized by the imperial family, but its conventions and sym-

bols were deployed as ways of marking, defining, and conceptualizing

the emperor’s power. The imperial title imperator echoed the acclama-

tion that had often in the late Republic preceded the grant of a tri-

umph.52 And significant elements of the emperor’s costume, on certain

ceremonial occasions at least, were identical to those of the triumphing

general (or they were presented as such by Roman writers).53 In other

words, the blazoning of power implied by the more-than-temporary

adoption of triumphal dress that was so unacceptable to the political

culture of republican Rome found its inverse correlate in the Empire.

One-man rule could be expressed as a more or less permanent triumphal

status.

The stages in this transition are now practically irrecoverable. True,

Roman writers note a perplexing series of individual grants awarding

Caesar and Octavian the right to specific elements of triumphal dress on

particular occasions. In his account of 45, for example, Dio records that

“by decree Caesar wore triumphal dress at all festivals and dressed up

with a laurel wreath wherever and whenever” (though, implying that re-

publican anxieties were still a factor, he goes on to explain that Caesar’s

excuse was that it covered up his baldness); and he adds (in his account

of 44) that he was given the right “always to ride around in the city itself

dressed in triumphal garb.” Appian meanwhile notes that he was given

the right to wear triumphal dress when he sacrificed.54 And similar de-

crees are recorded for Octavian (later Augustus). Separate grants re-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 7 6

corded on 40, 36, and 29 gave him the right to wear laurel wreaths or a

crown of victory. In 25 he was awarded both crown and triumphal dress

on the first day of the year—which means that, had he himself been in

Rome when Tiberius triumphed on January 1, 7 bce, there would have

been the bizarre coincidence of both emperor and general in traditional

triumphal costume.55

Yet a host of problems arises in trying to understand what is going on

in any detail. Were the honors granted really so minutely calibrated? Or

have the later historians on whom we must rely introduced some of

these repetitions and complexities? When Dio, for example, refers to the

decision in 44 that Caesar should have the right to ride around the city

in “triumphal dress,” is that significantly separate from the grant he re-

cords in the same year of “the costume used by the kings”? Or has Dio

been confused by differently worded accounts of the same decree?56 It is,

in fact, in that particular distinction between “triumphal” and “regal”

costume that the most intense confusion lies—and where we seem to

find the most flagrant conflicts in ancient accounts. So, for example, in

describing the famous incident at which Antony offered Caesar a crown

during the festival of the Lupercalia, Plutarch has Caesar sitting on a

dais “dressed in triumphal clothes”; Dio has him “in regal costume.”57

Modern scholars have made ingenious attempts to sort out these dif-

ferent strands and to determine what kind of outfit was being worn

when: “Plutarch’s ‘triumphal costume’ seems a mistake,” as one recent

commentator corrects him, “Caesar was wearing . . . ‘regal’, rather than

triumphal, dress.”58 This is to miss the point. At this early period of the

new Roman autocracy, precedents were sought and invented in a variety

of different registers of power: triumphal, regal, divine. No one in the

first century bce (still less in the third century ce when Dio was writing)

had any accurate knowledge about what the early Roman kings had ac-

tually worn. Instead, power brokers, observers, and critics were appeal-

ing to different reconstructions of that in their various analyses of the

autocracy and its symbols, and in their various attempts to find ways of

presenting (and dressing up—literally) one-man rule. And, of course,

soon enough the circular nature of this process would have meant that

The Boundaries of the Ritual

277

the costume of Caesar and his successors helped to legitimate particular

reconstructions of primitive Roman dress. This nexus of first-century

debate no doubt lies behind many of the “confusions” about triumphal

and regal outfits, as well as behind the conflicting attempts to relate the

triumphing general to (or to distinguish him from) the early monarchs.

That said, the key fact is that triumphal dress did become a significant

element in the symbolic armory of the Roman emperor. Suetonius refers

to Caligula “frequently” wearing the garb of a triumphing general, as

does Dio, who contrasts this (favorably, by implication) with his more

explicitly divine attire.59 Republican anxieties were not entirely lost. The

right given Domitian to wear triumphal dress whenever he entered the

senate house is listed by Dio among that emperor’s excesses. And Clau-

dius is praised for not wearing it throughout a whole celebration but

only when he was actually sacrificing; the rest of the occasion (after what

must have been a nifty costume change) he directed in a toga praetexta. 60

But the equivalence between emperor and triumphing general—in title

as much as dress—was firmly established. If the triumphal procession

through the streets of Rome became a rarer event when the ceremony

was restricted to the imperial family itself, the same could not be said for

the image of the triumphing general—or at least his double.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE CONSULSHIP

This symbolic language of triumphal power extended further than the

imperial house. In particular, triumphal dress was associated with what

came to be known as the processus consularis, the “consular procession”—

the ceremony held at the inauguration of new consuls. The best known

literary representations of this are found in works of the fourth century

ce and later: Panegyrics of the poet Claudian, celebrating consulships of

the emperor Honorius in 398 in Milan, and in 404 in Rome; and the

fourth book of Corippus’ In Laudem Iustini Minoris (Panegyric of Justin

II), which hypes that emperor’s entry into the consulship in 566, in the

Christian city of Constantinople, or “New Rome.”61

How far either of these accounts can be taken as a reasonably faith-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 7 8

ful description of the ceremony is a moot point. (One of Corippus’ re-

cent commentators tends to understate the problem when she observes:

“The exercise of the imagination in such descriptive passages is not

ruled out.”)62 But both evoke its triumphal aspects, Corippus especially

strongly: he describes the decorations of “triumphal laurel,” the emperor

being carried along shoulder-high “for his great triumph” (in magnum

triumphum), while also echoing the traditional vocabulary of the occa-

sion (Justin is described as ovans). What is more, some ceremonial im-

ages of consuls from this period depict them wearing what has been

taken to be a version of the toga picta. 63

Of course, these texts are much later in date than most of what we

have been concerned with so far; they have as their subject the emperor

himself as consul, which might explain some of the triumphal imagery;

and in the case of Honorius’ sixth consulship the ceremony was also cel-

ebrating his military victory over the Goths.64 Yet we have evidence of a

procession to the Capitoline at the inauguration of consuls at least as far

back as the first century bce.65 By the end of the first century ce there

are signs that this was—or at least could be—invested with triumphal

character, even for consuls who were not part of the imperial family.

Martial writing in the 90s hints at the connection of (triumphal) laurel

and the beginning of a consul’s office.66

But the most aggressive statement of these links is to be found slightly

later and in visual form on the Monument of Philopappos, still a well-

known landmark in Athens (Fig. 34). This is the tomb of Caius Julius

Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos, descendant of the royal house of

Commagene (in Syria), honorary citizen of Athens and Roman consul

in 109 ce. Part of its sculptural decoration appears to show Philopappos

in triumph, in a scene that is closely modeled on the famous panel from

the Arch of Titus. Philopappos certainly never celebrated a triumph. As-

suming that this is not a dangerous fantasy, depicting its honorand

usurping the triumphal privileges of the imperial house, then it must be

a visual reference to one of the highlights of his career: his consulship at

Rome. Whether it is to be seen as a documentary depiction of his inau-

gural procession or as a bold “literalization” of the symbolic triumphal

The Boundaries of the Ritual

279

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 34:

The façade of the Monument of Philopappos, Athens, 114–116 ce, as restored

in the third volume of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1794). Beneath the central seated portrait of Philopappos is the triumphal scene of his inauguration as consul in 109 ce.

aspects of the inauguration has been much debated. But whichever ap-

proach we take, Philopappos’ monument casts the consular ceremony in

a form almost indistinguishable from a triumph “proper.”67

This representation—and the idea of the processus consularis in gen-

eral—raises sharply again the question of the boundaries between trium-

phal ceremony and its imitators, parodies, and look-alikes. Scholars have

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 8 0

struggled in trying to define the relationship between the consular inau-

guration and the traditional triumphal procession. They have written

vaguely about the “increasing coalescence” between such ceremonies to-

ward the late Empire and the “merging of the associations” of consulship

and triumph. “Any imperial ceremony,” it has been said, “could take on

the overtones of a triumph.”68 This gives the impression of some kind of

ritual melting pot, in which traditional distinctions gradually broke

down and everything seeped together into some undifferentiated late

antique ceremonial. Better, in general, to think of triumphal symbolism

as providing a way of conceptualizing other forms of Roman political

and social power, and being used selectively to that end.

In this case, it is important in particular to be alert to a longstanding

convergence between triumph and consulship that is often overlooked.

For in the late Republic we know of a series of generals who, in a strik-

ing union of different forms of glory, celebrated their triumph on the

very day of their entry into the consulship, or immediately before:

Marius in 104 bce, probably Pompey in 71 (the day before his consul-

ship started in 70), and a decided clutch in the Caesarian and triumviral

periods, including Marcus Aemilius Lepidus in 43 (the eve of his consul-

ship in 42), Lucius Antonius in 41, Lucius Marcius Censorinus in 39,

and possibly Quintus Fabius Maximus in 45.69 What this suggests is that

something more than a merging of different forms of ceremonial is at

stake in the imperial processus consularis. The connection—however it

was originally formed—between the triumph and the consulship went

back into the Republic. It points to the Januslike face of the ceremony,

not only a backward-looking commemoration of past success but an in-

augural moment in the political order. In the next chapter we shall see

the most extreme (mythical) example of this, when the triumph of

Romulus coincided with the first day of the Roman state itself.

THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH

The most notorious instance of the use of triumphal costume and sym-

bolism outside the procession is also one of the most alluring cul de sacs

The Boundaries of the Ritual

281

in modern scholarship on the triumph. In his tenth Satire (adapted by

Samuel Johnson as The Vanity of Human Wishes), Juvenal mocks the

pomposity of the magistrate who presides over the games (ludi)—that

characteristic Roman combination of religious ritual and popular enter-

tainment that involved a variety of spectacles from horse or chariot rac-

ing in the Circus Maximus to theatrical performances (ludi scaenici).

The president is dressed up, writes Juvenal, “in the tunic of Jupiter, car-

rying the purple swathes of his embroidered toga on his shoulders and a

vast crown so huge that no neck could bear the weight.” It would be an

extraordinary ego trip for this Roman bigwig, but for the fact that, as the

satirist gleefully points out, he must share the ride with a sweaty slave

who stands with him in the chariot to take the weight of the crown.70

Again, this is a more complicated passage than it at first seems. There

is no indication which of the several different cycles of games celebrated

in Rome by the late first century ce Juvenal had in mind (if indeed he

intended any such precise reference). And the puzzle is complicated by

the fact that within just six lines he calls the presiding magistrate both

“praetor” and “consul.”71 Nonetheless, the overall implication that the

president of the games was kitted out like a triumphing general (right

down to the presence of that elusive slave) has launched a galaxy of theo-

ries on the links between the games and the triumph—in particular be-

tween the procession that opened the circus games (pompa circensis) and

the triumphal equivalent.72

Most of these theories look back once more to the earliest phases of

the city’s history. Attention has focused on the so-called Roman Games

or Great Games ( ludi Romani or magni/maximi) which are widely be-

lieved to have been the earliest of this form of celebration and to have

provided a model for the later versions. Mommsen, for example, argued

a century and a half ago (in a claim often repeated even in modern

accounts) that these ludi were originally, under the early Etruscan kings

of Rome, an integral part of the ceremony of triumph itself; but they

were progressively separated from it until they became an independent

and regular festival in the Roman calendar in the fourth century bce.

Hence—insofar as the pompa circensis was in effect a “triumphal proces-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 8 2

sion minus the triumph”—the distinctive outfit of the presiding magis-

trate.73 Versnel, by contrast, has tried to explain the shared symbolism of

triumph and ludi by tracing both ceremonies back to a common ances-

tor in an eastern New Year festival, whose distinctive attributes were pre-

served even as its Roman “spin-offs” diverged.74

Much of this is learned and ingenious fantasy. The problem is, in

part, that the early history of the games is even murkier than that of the

triumph, and hot scholarly dispute has raged over almost every single as-

pect. Were the Great Games and the Roman Games always synony-

mous, or was there once a distinction between the two? What was their

original purpose—to celebrate victory or, as a primitive plebeian festival,

to promote agricultural success? And just how far back in time can we

trace the rituals that later writers associate with the games?

This last question is frustratingly complicated by our one extended

literary account of a circus procession: the description by Dionysius

of Halicarnassus, writing under Augustus, of ludi vowed in 499 bce.

Dionysius explicitly claims that he has drawn on an earlier version by

the late third-century bce “father of Roman history” Fabius Pictor—

who may, or may not, have had reliable information on the fifth century.

But he has also certainly been influenced (how substantially influenced

is again hotly disputed) by his own pet theory that Rome was in origin a

Greek city and by his determination to find Greek elements in the most

hoary Roman traditions.75 Leaving that controversial text aside, big ar-

guments have necessarily been built on the tiniest scraps of evidence.

Much of the discussion of Mommsen’s hypothesis has centered on the

placing of a single comma in a passage of Livy.76

The fact is that we have no evidence at all for seeing the costume of

the president of the games as distinctively triumphal before the Em-

pire—and even for that period there is very little. The key text is that

one passage of Juvenal, plus a jibe about the Megalesian Games (con-

nected with the cult of Cybele) in the Satire that follows: “There sits the praetor, like a triumph, the booty (praeda) of the gee-gees.” Losing his

money in betting, in other words, the presiding magistrate has become

the “booty” of the horses: so not only is he dressed as for a triumph, but

The Boundaries of the Ritual

283

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 35:

The panel of a lost sarcophagus (shown here in an engraving by E. Dupérac, d.

1604) depicts the Circus Maximus in Rome and some of its distinctive monuments, including the obelisk, which stood on the center-line, or spina, of the racetrack. To the right, the figure riding in the triumphal-style chariot (though drawn by only two horses) and being crowned from behind is presumably the presiding magistrate of the games.

he has become victim of that classic triumphal paradox that always

threatens to make a victim out of the celebrating general.77 Juvenal

apart, the only unambiguous evidence identifying the two forms of cere-

monial dress is the statement by both Tacitus and Dio that at the games

established in honor of Augustus at his death in 14 ce, the tribunes who

presided were to wear triumphal costume but not to have the use of a

chariot (currus). Dionysius, significantly or not, does not mention the

magistrate’s clothing.78

The visual evidence is not much clearer. One evocative image from

Rome appears to show the president of the games driving through the

Circus Maximus, a slave behind him holding his crown—just as de-

scribed by Juvenal (Fig. 35). But as bad luck would have it, the sculpture

itself has been lost and is recorded only in Renaissance drawings and a

single engraving, none of which allows us to say much about its original

form or date (beyond that it appears to belong somewhere in the mid to

late Empire).79 Otherwise, vaguely triumphal-style figures in imperial art

tend to be claimed (according to the enthusiasm of the archaeologist

concerned) for the circus games, the processus consularis, or the triumph

proper. Or to put it another way, one consequence of the spread of tri-

umphal symbolism outside the triumph is that it is necessarily hard to

pin a definite label onto any individual “triumphal” scene.80 But—suspi-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 8 4

ciously, one might almost think—nothing survives that combines the

iconography of circus and triumph so clearly as the lost piece.

This evidence is, of course, not incompatible with the idea that from

time immemorial the leader of the games (or at least of some particular

cycles of ludi) was dressed in triumphal costume—however we might

choose to explain that. What we can document for the first time in the

first century ce might go back much earlier than that; and those who

hold that Roman religious practice was rigidly conservative and almost

unchanging would presumably argue that it almost certainly did. But a

less primitivizing reconstruction is more plausible. The evidence we

have fits much more easily with the idea that the extension of triumphal

symbolism to the circus president was part and parcel of a wider use of

triumphal dress from the start of the Principate to mark out positions of

honor and power more generally. Proof is impossible either way; but the

circus president’s triumphal garb probably owes more to the emperor

Augustus than to old King Tarquin or (on Versnel’s view) some eastern

god-king.

An obsession with the connection between the triumph and the games

has tended to obscure the links between the triumph and another great

ceremonial procession in Roman culture—known by convenient, if mis-

leading, shorthand as the aristocratic funeral. I am not here referring to

particular overlaps in ritual. Certainly, some elements of triumphal prac-

tice have been found in funeral processions. Dionysius of Halicarnassus

himself observed, in his account of the pompa circensis, that a strand of

ribaldry and satire was shared by all three of the circus, funeral, and tri-

umphal parades: men dressed as satyrs or Sileni, dancing and jesting, in

both circus procession and funeral, the satiric songs of the soldiers in the

triumph.81 Some have tried to argue from this for a common ancestry

for all three pompae: Greek roots, as Dionysius himself would predict-

ably have it, or an Etruscan inheritance, as some of his modern succes-

sors would prefer?82

What makes one ritual seem similar to another is just as complicated

as what makes them different. And the significance of similarities is of-

ten hard to see. Or more precisely, in this case, it has proved difficult to

decide which of the many perceived similarities (the use of torches, the

The Boundaries of the Ritual

285

final banquet) might be important indicators for the history of the ritu-

als.83 At the same time it has proved all too tempting to discover ritual

borrowings where none exist. Recently, for example, it has been con-

fidently asserted that the floats, painting, and spoils displayed in trium-

phal processions were “re-used at funeral processions.” If so, this would

make a compelling visual link between the two occasions. But in fact

there is no clear evidence for this practice at all.84

My concern is not so much with these overlaps between the two pro-

cessions but with their interrelationship at a broader cultural and ideo-

logical level. We have already noted the links between imperial triumph

and apotheosis, monumentalized in the Arch of Titus with its echoes be-

tween the more-than-human status of the triumphing general and the

deification of the emperor on his death. The logic of that connection

had an even bigger impact on early imperial ritual culture. This is strik-

ingly evident not only in the strange story of Trajan’s posthumous tri-

umph (when an effigy of the already deified emperor was said to have

processed in the triumphal chariot) but also in the arrangements made

for the funeral of Augustus.

On that occasion, one proposal was that the cortège should pass

through the porta triumphalis; another, that the statue of Victory from

the senate house should be carried at the head of the procession; an-

other, that placards blazoning the titles of laws Augustus had sponsored

and peoples he had conquered should be paraded, too. Dio, reflecting

the logic even if not the more sober facts, claims that the cortège did in-

deed pass through the triumphal gate, that the emperor was laid out on

his bier in triumphal costume, and that elsewhere in the procession

there was an image of him in a triumphal chariot.85 The triumph here

was providing a language for representing (even if not performing) an

imperial funeral and the apotheosis that the funeral might simulta-

neously entail.86

There was, however, a bleaker side to this—and one that chimes in

with the theme of the ambivalence and fragility of triumphal glory.

True, the funeral may have been an occasion in which triumphal splen-

dor could be called to mind and, in part, recreated long after the day of

the triumph itself had passed, as with the impersonation of the ancestors

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 8 6

of the dead man—dressed, if appropriate, in their triumphal robes. But

at the same time the funeral might point to the final destruction of tri-

umphal glory: Pompey’s triumphal toga was consigned to what passed

for his funeral pyre; and at the culmination of Caesar’s funeral the “mu-

sicians and actors took off the clothes that they taken from the equip-

ment (instrumentum) of his triumphs and put on for the occasion, tore

them to shreds and threw them into the blaze.”87

The triumph was repeatedly linked with death in other ways, too.

Aemilius Paullus famously starred in his triumphal procession amidst

the funerals of his sons. But on the most poignant occasions the two

rituals could be presented as almost interchangeable: if death in battle

robbed the victor of the triumphal ceremony he deserved, then the

funeral might have to substitute. This is a theme eloquently developed

by Seneca in an essay on grief, mourning, and the acceptance of the ne-

cessity of death, Ad Marciam, de consolatione (To Marcia, On Consola-

tion). One of the examples he takes is the death in 9 bce of Drusus, Au-

gustus’ stepson, during successful campaigns in Germany. His body was

brought back home in a procession through Italy; and crowds poured

out from towns along the route to escort it to the city: “a funeral proces-

sion very like a triumph.”88

The cultural resonance of this connection is nicely illustrated by Plu-

tarch, when he projects a similar idea onto the Greek world in his de-

scription of the death of the Achaean general Philopoemen in 182 bce.

After he had been poisoned by the Messenians, his compatriots in Meg-

alopolis launched an expedition to recover his body, cremate it, and

bring it home. It was, Plutarch explains, an impressive and orderly pro-

cession that returned to Megalopolis, “combining a triumphal proces-

sion and a funeral.”89

These connections—with their reminder that, for better or worse,

death always courted glory—give an added point to the story of Domitian’s

strange banquet with which I started this chapter. It was in Roman

terms magnificently appropriate that when the emperor was looking

for a theme for his triumphal dinner party, he should take such a funer-

ary turn.

c h a p t e r

IX

The Triumph of History

IMPERIAL LAURELS

Toward the end of his long account of laurel and its various uses, Pliny

tells the story of an unusual laurel grove at the imperial villa known as

“The Hennery” (Ad Gallinas), just outside Rome. It had been planted

from the sprig of laurel held in the beak of a white hen that had been

dropped by an eagle into the lap of the unsuspecting Livia, just after her

betrothal to Octavian. It was obviously an omen of their future great-

ness. So the soothsayers (haruspices) ordered that the bird and any future brood should be carefully preserved—hence the name of the villa—and

that the laurel should be planted. It successfully took root, and when

Octavian triumphed in 29 bce he wore a wreath and carried in his hand

a branch, both taken from that burgeoning tree. “And all the ruling

Caesars (imperatores Caesares) did likewise.” In fact, the custom grew up

of them planting the branch after the triumphal ceremony and calling

the resulting trees by the name of the emperor or prince concerned. A

veritable Julio-Claudian memorial grove.1

Suetonius reports a rather more sinister version. At the beginning of

his Life of Galba, Nero’s successor, he explains that as the death of each emperor approached, his own particular tree withered. At the end of

Nero’s reign, “the whole grove died from the root up” (as well as all the

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 8 8

hens that were the descendants of that original laurel bringer). This her-

alded the advent of a new dynasty.2

Unsurprisingly perhaps, these stories do not quite add up. How do

we reconcile the thriving grove described by Pliny with Suetonius’ pic-

ture of blight at the end of Rome’s first imperial dynasty? Either Pliny

was writing this part of his great encyclopedia before 68 ce, or—more

likely—reliable information about the state of the trees at “The

Hennery” was limited. Besides, we find a troubling inconsistency even

within Suetonius’ account. If all the imperial laurels died out at the

death of their own particular emperor, what exactly was left to wither

and so make way for Galba?

But the importance of the story does not lie in those practical details.

For it offers a political genealogy—literally, a family tree—of the new-

style imperial triumph. It provides a founding myth for a ceremony that

since the reign of Augustus had been restricted to the ruling house itself.

Dio’s narrative makes this very nearly explicit. His version of the tale is

not told with quite the verve of Pliny or Suetonius (though his interpre-

tation of the original omen as partly a dreadful presage of the future

power of Livia over Augustus is a nice touch). But, unlike them, he lo-

cates the story at a precise moment in the unfolding historical narrative.

Pinpointing it to 37 bce, Dio makes it follow shortly after his account of

the refusal of a triumph by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Octavian’s aide

and at that time consul.

According to Dio, Octavian had not had such military success, and

Agrippa was unwilling to “puff himself up” with the honor in case (so

the implication is) he thereby showed up Octavian in contrast. This is

the first of a series of triumphal refusals by Agrippa, which lead in Dio’s

narrative to the development of triumphal insignia, rather than the full

triumph, as the standard reward for successful generals outside the im-

perial family. The close link here between Agrippa’s declining a triumph

and the depositing of the laurel in the imperial lap points strongly to the

importance of the story as the charter myth of the restricted triumph

and as a marker of historical change.3

The Triumph of History

289

HISTORY AND RITUAL

This chapter is concerned with the ways in which we, as well as the an-

cients themselves, identify, describe, and explain this and other develop-

ments in the ceremony of triumph. I emphasized at the start of this

book that the triumph was one of the few Roman rituals with a “his-

tory.” By that, I meant that—notwithstanding all the uncertainties I

have repeatedly pointed to—we could trace a series of individual tri-

umphs, their dates, their cast of characters, and sometimes their particu-

lar circumstances across a millennium or so of Roman time. To move

from there to “history” in the stronger sense, delineating and accounting

for change in the ritual as it was performed, is a much more difficult is-

sue. Ancients and moderns alike have tended to resort to big assertions.

Some of these are true but self-evident; others are based on little more

than conjecture. Often they are tinged with that nostalgia for the noble

simplicity of early Rome that modern historiography shares with (or

borrows from) its ancient counterpart.

One theme has been the increasing “hellenization” of the original cer-

emony.4 But this apparently technical term does not necessarily deliver

more than the obviously correct observation that Rome’s growing con-

tact with cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean catalyzed new forms

of triumphal display—while at the same time the lucrative process of

conquest provided the wherewithal with which to sponsor ever more

lavish spectacle. Other themes headline various forms of deterioration or

corruption in the ceremony. Modern writers echo Dionysius’ lament

that by his day (the reign of Augustus) triumphs had become a “histri-

onic show,” far removed from “the ancient tradition of frugality,” or

Dio’s view that “cliques and factions” had “changed” the ceremony for

the worse. It is commonly now claimed that, at the very least, a shift of

emphasis can be traced over the ritual’s history from a primitive reli-

gious significance to political power-play and self-advertising spectacular

display.5

This again may be partly true. Certainly the terms in which the tri-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 9 0

umph was discussed and debated must have changed radically over the

centuries. The sometimes cynical quips or philosophical bons mots from

Seneca and his like about its functions and ambiguities are inconceivable

in the early city. But it would be romantic nostalgia to imagine that the

Romans of, say, the fifth or fourth centuries bce, whose words are lost to

us, were unfailingly pious; that they never quarreled about the cere-

mony, never saw it as an opportunity for self advancement; or, for that

matter, that they never wrote the whole thing off as a waste of time. It is

always an easy way out to project innocent simplicity onto periods for

which we have no evidence. But we should remember that the very earli-

est extended meditation on triumphal culture that we do have, Plautus’

Amphitruo of the early second century bce, is already highly sophisti-

cated and ironizing about the ritual and its participants. As for later Ro-

man commentators themselves, if one of their gambits was to proclaim

the increasing politicization of the triumph over time, another (as we

have seen) was to retroject many of the later disputes and in-fighting

back into its earliest phases.

On a smaller scale, the triumphal chronology does reveal some strik-

ing changes in the pattern of celebration. The triumph on the Alban

Mount, for example, is first attested in 231 bce, is celebrated four times

over the next sixty years, and is not heard of again after 172. The pattern

of the twenty-one known ovations, between the first in 503 bce and the

dictatorship of Caesar, is even more complicated: there is a clutch in the

early years of the Republic, then a long gap (none, or perhaps one, cele-

brated between 360 and Marcellus’ ovation in 211), followed by a rash of

seven between 200 and 174, then a lull again until three were celebrated

in the late second and early first centuries bce—each for victories in

slave wars.

Even in the Empire, when the absence of any systematic record, such

as the Forum inscription, means that we are much less certain of dates

and type of celebration (and indeed when a number of triumphal cere-

monies may be entirely lost to us), some patterns are clear. Ovations are

not heard of after 47 ce, when—in a gesture of no doubt self-conscious

archaism on the emperor’s part—Aulus Plautius was given the honor for

The Triumph of History

291

his achievements in Britain by Claudius. The award of triumphal insig-

nia, by contrast, was a relatively regular event in the early Empire. In

fact, it became rather too regular in the eyes of some historians, who

sneered at its award to the undeserving, even on occasion to children.

But it too seems to have fallen into abeyance after the reign of Hadrian,

in the mid-second century.6

Something more than the changing patterns of Roman military suc-

cess must surely underlie these changes in the pattern of celebration. But

exactly what more remains a matter of inference or guesswork. One

scholar, for example, has recently conjectured that the low social status

of the last man to triumph on the Alban Mount, in 172, was one factor

that “doom[ed] the institution in perpetuity.”7 This is a perfectly reason-

able guess on the basis of the evidence we have—yet a single declassé

honorand seems hardly sufficient to kill off an institution unless other

factors were at work, too. Others have suggested that it was the increas-

ing emphasis on triumphal dress as a mark of the emperor’s power that

caused the demise of triumphal insignia for “ordinary” generals.8 Again,

this is a reasonable guess, but no more than that.

As for the peaks and troughs in the history of ovations, it does seem

that the ceremony—whatever its origin—came to be used as a way of

adjusting triumphal honors to different occasions, circumstances, or

types of victory. The seven ovations clustered in the early second century

bce are, as one modern commentator has emphasized, all for “non-con-

sular commanders returning from Spain”; and it has been tempting to

see the ceremony as a way of handling the demands of lower-status gen-

erals, in the context of new and wider spheres of warfare.9 Later, the

ovatio apparently proved useful as a means of rewarding those who had

defeated enemies of lower status, namely, slaves. The development of the

ceremony under Caesar and Octavian (when, as we have seen, it was

used to celebrate such “victories” as the pact made between Antony and

Octavian in 40 bce) would also fit this improvisatory pattern. So far, so

good. But it is hard to see what prompts the improvisation on some oc-

casions and not others, and why the experiments are so short-lived.

But the underlying problem in any attempt to reconstruct the devel-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 9 2

opment of the triumph in traditional historical terms is the complex re-

lationship between the ceremony as performed and the ceremony as

written. Or, to put it more positively, the history of the triumph is a

marvelously instructive example of the dynamic relationship between

ritual practice and “rituals in ink”—a relationship that cannot be re-

duced to a simple story of development and change and that, indeed, of-

ten directly subverts the very idea of a linear narrative.

This is partly a question of the so-called invention of tradition. One

of the ways in which change is legitimated in any culture is by the con-

struction of precedent. New rituals are given authority not by their nov-

elty but by claims that they mark a return to the rituals of old. Some-

times these claims may be true; sometimes they are flagrant fictions,

whether consciously invented or not; more often, no doubt, they lie

somewhere on the spectrum between truth and fiction. But, whichever

precise variant we are dealing with, the key point is that innovations can

be dressed up as tradition and projected back into the past so success-

fully that it is almost impossible—whether for the modern historian or

even for members of the culture concerned—to distinguish the “truly”

ancient rituals from the retrojections. After all, how many people in

twentieth-first-century Britain are aware that most so-called traditional

royal pageantry is a brilliant confection cooked up in the late nineteenth

century, rather than a precious inheritance from “Merrie England” and

the Middle Ages?10 Societies that make repeated use of this means of cul-

tural legitimation are often characterized, like ancient Rome, as “conser-

vative”; but they do not so much resist change as justify sometimes very

radical innovation by the denial that it is innovation at all.11

We have already noted some individual elements of the triumph that

have been understood in this way—for example, the role of Camillus as

an invented precedent for Julius Caesar. The potential impact of such

inventions on our understanding of the triumph’s history as a whole

is vividly encapsulated by the confusion that surrounds the “sub-

triumphal” ritual of the dedication of the spolia opima (“the spoils of

honor”). It is an honor usually assumed to have been granted only to

those Romans who had killed the enemy commander in single com-

The Triumph of History

293

bat—and who then, we are told, carried the spoils taken from the body

to dedicate them on the Capitoline at the Temple of Jupiter “Feretrius”

(Romans debated whether the title came from carrying the spoils (ferre) or smiting (ferire) the enemy).12

According to the orthodox account, this happened only three times

in the whole of Roman history: first when Romulus killed the king

of the Caeninenses; second in the late fifth century bce when Aulus

Cornelius Cossus killed the king of Veii; and in 222 when Marcus Clau-

dius Marcellus combined dedicating the spolia of King Viridomarus

with his triumph proper.13 One deviant tradition—particularly striking

given the chorus of writers who insist on just the trio of celebrations,

and usually dismissed as wrong—has Scipio Aemilianus also dedicating

the spolia opima thanks to a victory in single combat in Spain some fifty

years after Marcellus.14

Taking their cue from the association with Romulus, some modern

scholars see in the spolia opima a primitive proto-triumph, the most an-

cient version of Roman victory parade.15 But the evidence we have is

equally compatible with exactly the opposite position. Indeed, one re-

cent study has claimed that the only historical celebration of the dedica-

tion of these spoils was that by Marcellus in 222 bce—an innovation

that was legitimated by the invention, or (less pejoratively) the imagina-

tive rediscovery, of the two earlier dedications.16 If this is the case, it of-

fers a marvelous example of the inextricable inter-relationship of “his-

tory” and “invented tradition.” For, as Livy notes, the emperor Augustus

himself claimed to have seen the spoils of Cossus in the Temple of Jupi-

ter Feretrius, as well as his linen corselet (which carried an inscription

proving that Cossus was consul at the time of his dedication, not a mere

military tribune). Cossus’ dedication may have been an imaginative

fiction. But even if he had dedicated his spoils in the 430s or 420s, the

linen corselet can have been at best the product of loving restoration

over four centuries, at worst an outright fake.

Nonetheless, invention or not, the object itself, what was inscribed

upon it, and the ritual believed to lie behind it held an established place

in Roman literary tradition and historical investigations—and it mat-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 9 4

tered to Livy and Augustus himself. Modern writers have often inferred

(though there is no explicit evidence for it in any ancient text) that Au-

gustus was particularly interested in the corselet because, by proving

Cossus’ high rank, it offered him ammunition against one of his gener-

als, Marcus Licinius Crassus, whom he wanted to prevent from dedicat-

ing the spolia after killing an enemy king in 29 bce. That may (or may

not) be the background to Dio’s claim that Crassus would have per-

formed the ritual “if he had been supreme commander.”17

The lesson of this one small part of triumphal tradition is not that

there is no “history” here, but that it is not the linear narrative of change

and development we so often try to reconstruct. The “history” of the

spolia opima is embedded in invention and reinvention, and in compet-

ing (and often loaded) ancient narratives, explanations, and reconstruc-

tions. Much the same goes for the triumph itself. But here the stark

chronological disjunction between triumphal practice and its written

traces even more strongly challenges the simplicity of a linear chronol-

ogy and pushes issues of discourse to center stage.

Most of the detailed surviving accounts of the triumph and its cus-

toms were written in the imperial period. The issue is not simply that

these were sometimes composed centuries after the ceremonial they pur-

port to describe, and that the earliest triumphs are always therefore seen

through the filter of later interests and prejudices. This is the case for ev-

ery aspect of early Rome; and it is now a truism that the history of the

early kings of the city was indelibly marked by the concerns and preoc-

cupations of the age of the emperors. The extra issue with the triumph is

that most accounts come from that period when the ritual itself had

been dramatically restricted to relatively rare celebrations by the impe-

rial family. By the first century ce, in other words, the triumph in writ-

ing, in images, and in cultural memory largely replaced the triumph in

the sense of a victory parade through the streets.

This fact throws into particularly high relief the competing chronolo-

gies that to some extent underlie all history. If one chronology of this rit-

ual is the familiar chronology of performance (ordering triumphs, as in

the Forum inscription, by date of celebration), another is the chronol-

The Triumph of History

295

ogy of writing (based on the order in which they were described, not

performed). To put this at its simplest, Ovid’s imagined triumphs of the

early Empire are both later and earlier than the celebration of Aemilius

Paullus in 167 bce as told by Plutarch in the late first or early second

century ce.

The rest of this chapter explores these competing chronologies and

complex histories of the triumph by focusing on the narratives (ancient

and modern) of three key moments in the triumphal story. First, it looks

at the changes in triumphal symbol and practice under Augustus. Then

it turns to the beginning and end of the history of the triumph, with

an eye not only on the various narratives used to open or close the story

of the ritual but also on the bigger question of what we mean by the ori-

gin or end of a ceremony such as this. My aim is to celebrate, rather than

to straighten out or compress, the historical intricacies and the sheer

“thickness” of the triumph’s history.

THE AUGUSTAN REVOLUTION

The reign of the first Roman emperor was a pivotal moment in trium-

phal history, and the bare bones of the story are worth repeating. Trium-

phal symbolism appears to have been given more emphasis at this period

than ever before, setting the style for later imperial image-making. The

Forum of Augustus, in many ways the programmatic monument of the

whole regime, celebrated the triumph at every turn—from the assem-

bled statues of the great men of the Republic, each one, according to

Suetonius, “in triumphal dress,” through the four-horse chariot in the

center of the piazza, to that famous painting featuring Alexander “in his

triumphal chariot” (later cannily retouched on Claudius’ instructions to

depict Augustus himself ).

Coins across the Empire featured miniature images of distinctive

chariots, figures of Victory, and laurels. Commemorative arches in Rome

and elsewhere were topped by bronze sculptures of the emperor in his

triumphal quadriga. And of course, in the Forum itself stood the in-

scribed list of triumphs—perhaps displayed on an arch surmounted by

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 9 6

the triumphant emperor, in what would be a powerful juxtaposition.

The symbols and ritual of the imperial house also exploited the trium-

phal theme. Augustus was almost certainly the first Roman to use imper-

ator, with all its triumphal associations, as a regular part of his title (“Imperator Caesar Augustus”), almost as if it were a first name, while in

addition accumulating—exactly when, how, and for what reason we do

not know—no fewer than twenty-one separate acclamations as imper-

ator on more or less the republican model.

Many of the new public and dynastic rituals of the period also drew

on triumphal customs. Dio, for example, records the occasion in 13 bce

when Augustus returned to the city from Germany, went up to the

Capitol, and, with a clear triumphal resonance, laid the laurel from

around his fasces “on the knees of Jupiter” (this was, so Dio says, before

giving the people free baths and barbers for a day). Five years later, no

doubt with the spolia opima in mind, he deposited his laurel in the Tem-

ple of Jupiter Feretrius. Augustan poets chimed in too. Reflecting (and

reinforcing) the topicality of the triumph, they treated it to praise and

irony, hype and subversion in almost equal measure—while exploiting

its metaphorical power in writing of love and longing, power and poetry

itself. This was the age of the triumph.18

Or so it was, in all senses but one. For, on the other hand, the reign of

Augustus is well known to mark a dramatic limitation in the actual per-

formance of the ritual—as the story of the laurel grove that opened this

chapter illustrated. Not in the early years of the reign: the emperor’s own

extravagant triple triumph of 29 bce (which was certainly the inspira-

tion behind some of the triumphal poetry and visual images) was fol-

lowed through the 20s by a number of more “ordinary” triumphs, six in

all, for victories in Spain, Gaul, Africa, and Thrace. But after the tri-

umph of Cornelius Balbus in 19, for the rest of Roman history there was

no further celebration except by the emperor and his immediate family,

unless we count the isolated ovation for Aulus Plautius.

In practice, triumphs were now dynastic events, seemingly used either

to showcase chosen heirs (as in the triumph of Tiberius in 12 ce) or to

celebrate the beginning of reigns, almost as a coronation ritual. In a

The Triumph of History

297

sense, that was already one function of the triple triumph of 29; and the

triumph over the Jews in 71 marked the start of the reign of Vespasian

and the new Flavian dynasty, while the posthumous triumph of Trajan

opened the reign of his successor, Hadrian, in 118. Those outside the im-

perial family (and sometimes those within it) had to be content with tri-

umphal insignia.

The change is nicely encapsulated in the poetry books of the Augus-

tan poet Tibullus. The focal poem of his first book celebrates the tri-

umph in 27 of his patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus for a vic-

tory over the Aquitanians. In the second book, he predicts a future

triumph for Messalla’s son, Marcus Valerius Messalla Messalinus. This

triumph never took place. Instead, decades later and long after the

death of Tibullus himself, Messalinus was awarded triumphal insignia

for successes in Illyricum and walked in the triumphal procession of

Tiberius in 12.19

Modern scholars offer two types of historical explanation for this

change. First, they commonly argue that the redirection of the triumph

was a crucial part of Augustus’ tactics for politically and militarily emas-

culating the Roman elite. To deprive other senators (and potential ri-

vals) of the traditional marks of glory and the symbolic rewards of vic-

tory was part and parcel of his own monopoly of power, and of his

insistence that military success lay in his hands alone, and that he and

no one else commanded the loyalty of the troops. Or to put it the other

way round, the extraordinary prominence that a triumph gave to the

successful general was too much for the canny emperor to risk sharing

widely.20

A second reason given for the change, by both ancient and modern

writers, concerns the technical qualifications for celebrating a triumph

and the legal status of most military commanders under Augustus. If

triumphs could be held only by those who had commanded troops with

imperium and “under their own auspices,” then many commanders

would not qualify. For under the new structures of provincial command

devised by Augustus, those who governed in the so-called “imperial”

provinces (where most of the legions were stationed and where most se-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

2 9 8

rious fighting took place) were technically “legates” of the emperor him-

self, acting under his auspices. Either this meant that traditional trium-

phal practice ruled out the ceremony for all but the emperor, or this

technicality provided Augustus with a convenient alibi for depriving the

rest of the aristocracy of the opportunity to triumph.21

This characterization of the Augustan triumphal revolution is not

wrong—far from it. But the changes under Augustus, the reasons for

them, and how they were understood in antiquity itself are more com-

plicated (and more interesting) than is usually supposed. Once again the

legal technicalities are not clear cut. True, ancient authors, both ex-

plicitly and implicitly, relate the apparent exclusion of victors outside

the imperial house to the superior legal and constitutional position of

the emperor. Velleius, for example, in explaining why in 9 ce Marcus

Aemilius Lepidus only received triumphal ornaments, states that “if he

had been fighting under his own auspices, he ought to have celebrated a

triumph.” And in his Res Gestae (Achievements), Augustus himself notes

that supplicationes were voted to him “either for successes won by myself

or through my legates acting under my auspices.”22 Yet, even so, these

technicalities do not provide a clear guide to who triumphed and who

did not.

Looking back, for example, to the period between 45 bce and the

final victory of Octavian in the civil wars after Caesar’s assassination,

triumphs were certainly then celebrated by those who were legates and

subordinates of the supreme commanders.23 And after 19 ce those who

scored military victories as proconsuls of senatorial provinces (accord-

ing, more or less, to the old model of provincial command) did not cele-

brate triumphs, even if they had been acclaimed imperator, which would

normally indicate the possibility, at least, of a subsequent triumphal

celebration.24 Germanicus, by contrast, was awarded a triumph even

though he was fighting “under the auspices of Tiberius.”25

The only way to inject consistency into this conflicting evidence is to

turn a blind eye to material that does not fit, or to ingeniously explain it

away. Were legates at this period, for example, entitled to be hailed “im-

perator”? Some scholars have argued that they were—in the face of

The Triumph of History

299

strong contrary implications in Dio; others would regard those acclama-

tions for which we have evidence largely in inscriptions as entirely unof-

ficial, or the action of those who did not understand what the rules re-

ally were. How easy would it be to explain to the soldiers that, however

enthusiastic about their general’s achievements they might have been, he

did not actually “qualify” for an acclamation? The truth is that, far from

being able to decide who was entitled to what honor, we often do not

know what constitutional authority a general possessed. We do not un-

derstand, for example, who fought “under their own auspices” at this

crucial period of change and who did not; and, according to one recent

commentator, neither did Livy (“Livy indeed may not have realized that

promagistrates lacked the auspices”).

Perhaps even more to the point, we do not know how far to trust Dio,

who provides the only detailed narrative of the period. Writing in the

third century ce, by which time it may well have been taken for granted

that only those fully invested with imperium could triumph, he repeat-

edly attempts to use this “rule” as the key to making sense of the evi-

dence of the triumviral and Augustan periods—even though it some-

times ended in entirely implausible reconstructions of events.26

There is no simple way to delineate the legal or constitutional basis of

the changes in triumphal celebrations at the start of the Principate. But

the conclusions reached in Chapter 6 about how improvisatory trium-

phal practice was suggest that, once again, we should not necessarily be

thinking of identifying fixed rules. Much more likely we are dealing

with a rapid period of change, uncertainties in the structures of com-

mand, and a series of ad hoc triumphal decisions, combined with at-

tempts both at the time and later to justify and explain the principles by

which those decisions were reached or might be defended.

But other factors too suggest that we are missing the point if we con-

centrate on the legal restrictions which might lie behind the change in

triumphal practice. If the first emperor had wished to share triumphal

celebrations widely, he would not have been prevented from doing so by

a narrow application of the rules. To imagine an apologetic courtier ex-

plaining to Augustus that the law did not allow him to grant a triumph

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 0 0

to a general who had not, say, fought “under his own auspices” is com-

pletely incompatible with our understanding of the power structures of

the Empire more generally. At most, the appeal to restrictive legislation

can only have been a way of packaging or conceptualizing the change,

not its cause.

Also, the idea that the major development in triumphal practice initi-

ated under Augustus was the exclusion from the ritual of those out-

side the imperial family does not completely capture the nature of the

change. That is certainly one aspect of it. But hardly less striking is the

fact that even the emperor and his family triumphed very rarely. After

the triple triumph of 29, Augustus never triumphed again. The rest of

his reign is characterized not by triumphal celebrations (after Balbus,

there were only two triumphs, in 7 bce and 12 ce, and an ovation in 9

bce—all by Tiberius) but by a series of offers of triumphs to himself or

to members of his family that were refused. For example, Augustus was

offered a triumph in 25 bce, but he refused it, as he probably did again

in 19. In 12 bce after the senate voted a triumph to Tiberius, Augustus

disallowed it, granting only triumphal insignia. In 8 Augustus again

turned down a triumph for himself. In fact, this practice of turning

down triumphs is blazoned in his Res Gestae (Achievements): “The senate

decreed more triumphs to me, all of which I passed over.”27

Dio’s account takes this as a key theme. For if one of his explanations

for the new Augustan culture of the triumph focuses on legal rules, an-

other offers a genealogy of this style of triumphal refusal—centering on

the figure of Agrippa. We already noted that in Dio the founding myth

of the triumphal laurel grove was closely linked to Agrippa’s refusal of a

triumph in 37, when he was consul. In his discussion of the events of the

year 19 bce, Dio does not mention the triumph of Balbus but gives full

coverage instead to another refusal by Agrippa, now Augustus’ son-in-

law and probably his intended heir. On this occasion, the refusal came

after the senate, at the emperor’s own request, had offered him a tri-

umph for victories in Spain. “Other men,” wrote Dio, “went after tri-

umphs and got them, not only for exploits not comparable to Agrippa’s

but merely for arresting robbers . . . For at the beginning at least Augus-

The Triumph of History

301

tus was happy to bestow this kind of reward lavishly, and he also hon-

ored many with public funerals. The result was that these men glowed

with distinction.” But Agrippa, so Dio’s message is, gained more out of

refusal than the others did out of acceptance. For “he was promoted to

supreme power, you might say.”28

Dio, in other words, is identifying here a crucial moment of trium-

phal change, when a signal of power within the state can be seen in the

refusal rather than acceptance of a triumph. Agrippa’s third refusal in 14

bce finally defines the pattern. In a passage that, significantly perhaps,

just precedes his account of the ill-fated opening of Balbus’ theater (the

Tiber was in flood and Balbus could only enter the new building by

boat), Dio explains that Agrippa turned down the triumph offered for

victories in the East—and it was because of this refusal, “at least in my

opinion, that no one else of his peers was permitted to triumph in future

but enjoyed only the distinction of triumphal insignia. ”29

How far we should follow Dio’s hunch in seeing Agrippa’s example as

the catalyst to change is a moot point. The bigger question that Dio’s

narrative raises is how to explain the new culture of triumphal refusal in

general. It is understandable enough that Augustus should be keen to

keep potentially rival aristocrats off the triumphal stage. But why also

have his own family triumph so rarely? I am tempted to imagine that he

was canny enough to realize the ambivalence of the triumph, and wise

enough to see that these ceremonials courted humiliation and danger as

much as glory and success. It was safer to keep triumphal performance

on the streets to a minimum, while monumentalizing the ritual in mar-

ble, bronze, and ink.

But even this explanation does not capture the striking variety of an-

cient accounts of Augustan triumphal culture, which modern views of a

more or less radical restriction of the celebration tend to pass over.

Suetonius is possibly a maverick when he portrays Augustus’ reign as a

bumper period for performance of the ritual, claiming that Augustus

had “regular triumphs” (iusti triumphi) voted for more than thirty gener-

als.30 No commentator has convincingly explained this total—and, even

with the most generous definition of a “regular triumph” I can reach that

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 0 2

number only by starting to count immediately after the murder of

Caesar and including the whole of the triumviral period.

But ancient writers’ treatment of what has become famous in modern

scholarship as the “last traditional triumph,” Balbus’ celebration of 19

bce, is almost as surprising. True, this is where the list on the Forum in-

scription decisively ends, as if it were trying to indicate closure of the re-

publican tradition. But there is no surviving ancient writer who takes

the same line, or even mentions that Balbus was the last from outside

the imperial family to triumph. As we have seen, Dio—interested as he

is in the ritual’s history—is entirely silent on this particular procession.

Others, far from making him the last in any triumphal line, treat him as

a unique innovator; for as a native of Gades in Spain he was, according

to Pliny, the only foreigner to triumph at Rome.31

But this final section of the Forum inscription itself repays fur-

ther attention, particularly seen together with the only other surviving

fragment of triumphal chronology from the city of Rome, the Fasti

Barberiniani (Figs. 36, 37). Close inspection reveals all kinds of interesting details. For example, the description of Octavian at his ovation in 40

bce appears on the Forum inscription as “Imperator Caesar, son of a

god, son of Caius . . . ” This apparently refers to his descent by adoption

from Julius Caesar both in his divine aspect (“son of a god”) and in his

human aspect (“son of Caius”—unless that is meant to point us to

Octavian’s natural father, also called Caius). But, curiously, a closer look

at the stone reveals here, as in the entry for his ovation in 36, that the

phrase “son of Caius” ( C.f ) has been carved over some previous wording

that was erased. We do not know what that previous wording was. But

the general rule was that generals (apart from a handful of the early

kings with murky or mythical ancestry, and the “foreigner” Balbus) ap-

pear in this list with the name of their father and grandfather. Whatever

the exact history here, and however the awkward issue of Octavian’s pa-

ternity was hammered out, the erasure and the second thoughts it im-

plies gives us a hint of the problems of dealing with “normal” patterns in

human descent at the start of the new world of deification and (con-

structed) divine ancestry.

The Triumph of History

303

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 36:

The final section of the inscribed register of triumphing generals from the Ro-

man Forum, listing triumphs between 28 and 19 bce. Each entry normally includes the same standard information: the name of the general, with that of his father and grandfather; the office he held at the time of the victory; the year of the victory (expressed in years since the foundation of the city); the place or people over which the victory was won; the date of the triumph. So the final entry for Balbus reads: Lucius Cornelius Balbus, son of Publius, proconsul, in the year 734, over Africa, on the sixth day before the Kalends of April (that is, March 27). The omission of his grandfather reflects Balbus’ status as a new citizen.

No less revealing is the entry in the Fasti Barberiniani for Octavian’s

triple triumph in 29 bce (which does not survive in the Forum list).

Here the three separate celebrations—the first for victory over Dalmatia

and Illyricum, the second for victory at the battle of Actium, the third

for victory over Egypt—appear as just two: for Dalmatia and Egypt, ap-

parently separated by a day. This has been put down to sloppy stone

carving.32 But a more political explanation is also possible. Actium had

been a victory in a civil war, without even a euphemistic foreign label

such as Julius Caesar had pinned onto his own victories over Roman cit-

izens. It is tempting to imagine that whoever composed or commis-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 0 4

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 37:

The final section of the Fasti Barberiniani (with missing sections completed from an earlier manuscript copy), listing triumphs from 29 to 21. The first four lines list two out of the three triumphs celebrated by Octavian in 29 bce. The contrast with the Forum list (Fig. 36) is striking. The standard formula is different. There is no dating by year, and no mention of the father or grandfather’s name or the office held. Instead we find the formula triumphavit palmam dedit (“triumphed, dedicated his palm”). No less different is the style and consistency of presentation. Here spellings are not uniform (usually, for example, dedit, but once dedeit). And there are numerous other variants which may be significant or merely careless: palmam dedit, for example, is omitted for Octavian’s second triumph, line 4—a mistake, or maybe he did not on that occasion “dedicate his palm.”

sioned this particular triumphal list was attempting to “clean up” trium-

phal history by finessing Actium out of the picture.

But the end of the Barberiniani springs the biggest historical surprise.

For the last triumph to be recorded here is not that of Balbus but of

Lucius Sempronius Atratinus for another African victory in 21 bce. It is

possible, of course, that there was originally another slab (in which

The Triumph of History

305

case—unless we are to imagine his as the only name on the next install-

ment—the list would almost certainly have continued beyond Balbus).

But the way the inscription trails off, in what must count as a shoddy

piece of the stone carver’s art (hence perhaps the idea of a mere error

over the Actian entry), might suggest that the list was here trailing to its

close. At least, the degeneration of the text seems neatly to capture the

end of the traditional celebration, albeit one triumph too soon.33

If the Forum text had been lost and we had only the Fasti

Barberiniani, we would tell a rather different version of the Augustan

changes, or at least of their chronology. But all the different narratives

we have been looking at lead to a more significant point: that no single

history of this ritual ever existed; that ancient writers told the story of

the triumph and explained its development and changes in more—and

more varied—ways than modern orthodoxy would allow.

THE MYTH OF ORIGINS

The origin of the triumph continues to be one of the fetishes of modern

scholarship. This is not just a question of the “primitive turn” in many

historians’ attempts to explain individual elements of ceremony (the rib-

ald songs, for example, or the phallos under the chariot). There is also a

scholarly preoccupation with the history of the very earliest phases of the

triumph more generally, which has produced volumes of learned discus-

sion and ingenious speculation. In this context, it may seem, at first

sight, to be going against the grain—even cavalier—to have postponed

the particular topic of triumphal origins to the end of this book and to

deal with it (as I shall) so briefly. The pages that follow aim to redefine

this search for a beginning and, at the same time, to justify the amount

of attention I have chosen to give it.

So when and where, on the conventional view, did the whole thing

start? Unsurprisingly perhaps, a number of competing theories have

been proposed—and for most of them there is no firm evidence at all.

One common view is that the triumph was not the earliest victory cele-

bration at Rome; that the dedication of the spolia opima, and perhaps

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 0 6

the ovatio too, were “native Roman” pretriumphal celebrations; and that

at some point in Roman history these were overlaid by the triumph

proper. Exactly which point is a matter of further and greater dispute.

One bold recent contribution to the debate, in linking the ceremony of

triumph to the practice of erecting commemorative statues to successful

generals (who, with their red-painted faces, played the part of the statue

itself in the procession), argues that the form of the “classical triumph”

was not established until the late fourth century bce.34 Others have

stressed the direct Greek input into the form of the ceremony (a neat fit

if you imagine that the Latin cry Io triumpe—and so the word triumphus

itself—comes straight from the Greek thriambos).35

It is, however, the idea of Etruscan influence (or Greek and/or Near

Eastern influence mediated through Etruria) that commands the widest

support. This is backed up not only by various statements in ancient

writers who traced specific aspects of the triumph back to the Etruscans

but also by the ritual’s destination at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus

Maximus on the Capitoline, which was, according to tradition, founded

in the sixth century bce by the Tarquins, the Etruscan kings of Rome.

How could you have a triumph before you had a temple for the proces-

sion to aim for?36 In addition, traces have been found in Etruria that

seem to reflect a ceremony similar enough to the Roman triumph to

count as its ancestor. A few Etruscan paintings, stone sculptures, and

terracotta reliefs have been taken to depict Etruscan triumphal para-

phernalia or ceremonies. For example, a precursor of the toga picta has

often been spotted in a well-known painting from the François Tomb at

Vulci: it shows a man (named, in Etruscan, Vel Saties) draped in an elab-

orately decorated purple cloak, reminiscent of a triumphing general

(Fig. 38).37

But, beyond that, a series of sculptures are claimed to offer some

glimpse of the Etruscan triumphal ritual itself. A little known funerary

piece, probably of the early sixth century bce and probably from the

Cerveteri, is supposed to show an Etruscan triumphing general in his

chariot, carrying a scepter and with a crown held over his head from be-

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 38:

Vel Saties from the François Tomb, Vulci. The interpretation of this scene is

very puzzling. The small figure in front of Vel Saties may be his son, or a servant. The bird may be a plaything, or connected with divination. And what is the relationship, if any, between this magnificent purple cloak and the toga picta of the triumphing general? The date is no less uncertain. The tomb was originally constructed in the fifth century bce, but the paintings have been dated variously between the fourth and first centuries bce.

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 0 8

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 39:

Front panel of a sarcophagus from Sperandio necropolis, Perugia, late sixth

century bce. The procession includes animals, armed men, and (on the right) prisoners bound at the neck. A homecoming from war?

hind (as in some Roman triumphal images); and a slightly later sixth-

century sarcophagus from Perugia depicts a triumphal procession of

bound prisoners and booty (Fig. 39). Other archaeological material has

been pressed to deliver even more dramatic conclusions. At the town of

Praeneste, for example, a group of sixth- or fifth-century terracottas (Fig.

40), produced during a period of Etruscan influence, have been taken to

evoke not just a triumphal procession but the ideology of the ceremony

more specifically: the claim is that the design depicts the apotheosis of

the triumphant general who has just left his mortal chariot (on the

right) to join his divine transport, with its winged horses and goddess as

driver (on the left).

These terracottas have in turn been linked to the reconstruction of a

whole “triumphal route” through the city, leading up to the (perhaps

significantly named) Temple of Jupiter Imperator. In Rome itself, mean-

while, material excavated from the earliest phases of occupation on the

Capitoline hill has been attributed to the complex around Romulus’

original Temple of Jupiter Feretrius; and reconstruction drawings have

been produced that depict the very oak tree on which the spoils he won

from the king of the Caeninenses can be seen hanging!38

Some difficulties with these lines of argument should be obvious

straightaway. We have already seen that the surviving evidence for the

dedication of the spolia opima is just as compatible with its being a

relatively late, invented tradition as with its being a primitive relic of

The Triumph of History

309

pretriumphal Rome. (Needless to say the archaeological traces that lie

behind the confident reconstructions are flimsy in the extreme.) The

ovation too might equally well have postdated as predated the triumph

proper. There is no good evidence (beyond hunch and first principles)

for establishing the priority of one over the other.

But what of the specific arguments for the Etruscan ancestry of the

ceremony? The Roman literary evidence is frankly flimsy. We cannot as-

sume that any particular feature of the triumph originated in Etruria

simply because some ancient scholar asserted that it did. They may well

have been just as much at a loss as we are, and Etruria offered a conve-

nient explanation for puzzling features of Roman cultural and religious

practice. Besides, although individual aspects of triumphal custom are

credited with an Etruscan origin, it is only Florus who goes so far as to

hint that the ceremony as a whole was an Etruscan phenomenon.39

The material traces of the supposed Etruscan triumph are no more se-

cure. In fact, not a single one of the “triumphal” depictions I have noted

stands up to much hard-nosed scrutiny. Most collapse almost instantly. A

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 40:

One of a series of architectural terracottas (roof edgings) from Praeneste, with

scenes of chariots and riders (sixth or fifth century bce). The idea that the warrior on the left is mounting a divine chariot, drawn by winged horses, has in turn suggested links with the Roman triumph, and the divine associations of the successful general.

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 1 0

purple cloak (and it is a cloak, not a toga) does not necessarily mean a

triumph, even if Vel Saties is wearing a wreath of some sort.40 But the

sculptural evidence is equally flimsy. The “triumphing general” on the

sixth-century funerary relief from Cerveteri certainly did not leap to

the notice of the author of the only extensive publication of the sculp-

ture—who identified the figure in the chariot (which is, in any case,

sitting down rather than standing up) as a woman, and in place of the

attendant with a crown saw a female servant with a fan!41 The sarcopha-

gus from Perugia clearly depicts four figures, bound at the neck and so

presumably slaves or prisoners, followed by men and women leading,

among other things, some heavily laden pack animals. This may (or may

not) represent a procession of spoils of war. But there is no sign whatso-

ever of any of the key distinguishing features of a triumph, such as the

general in his chariot.42

The reliefs from Praeneste do at least include chariots. But, despite

the determination to find a narrative of triumphal apotheosis, there is

no good reason to assume that the man mounting the left-hand chariot

has just dismounted from the chariot on the right—or, if he has, that his

action alludes to the ideology of the triumph. There is in fact nothing to

rule out some mythological story.43 And as for the “triumphal route,”

this is another case of an imaginative joining of the dots. Two of the

fixed points on the route are provided by the temples to which these

(possibly triumphal, more possibly not) archaic reliefs were once fixed.

The supposed porta triumphalis is identified from nothing more than

the findspot of the second-century ce relief from Praeneste (see Fig. 17)

depicting the triumph of the emperor Trajan. It is a very fragile con-

struction indeed.44

From the second century bce we do have, to be sure, a series of funer-

ary urns, especially from the area around the Etruscan city of Volterra,

showing a scene that seems much closer to the Roman triumph than

any of those earlier examples: a toga-clad figure in the distinctively

shaped (triumphal) chariot, drawn by four horses, and preceded by

lictors (Fig. 41). These urns may have been intended to depict a trium-

phal ceremony; they may have appropriated the symbolism of the tri-

The Triumph of History

311

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 41:

Etruscan funerary urn, from Volterra, second century bce. This scene—with its

toga-clad figure riding in a quadriga, and the bundles of fasces carried in front—is strikingly reminiscent of the Roman triumph. But is this a sign of Roman influence on Etruria, rather than vice versa?

umph for a funerary message; or possibly, to be honest, we may have im-

posed a “triumphal” reading on a more less specific rendering of a man

in a chariot. We cannot be certain. But even if we opt to see a clear refer-

ence to the triumph here, we still have not found powerful evidence for

an early Etruscan triumphal ceremony. In this case the date is the crucial

factor. For these urns are from a period well after the Roman conquest of

Etruria. If their iconography includes a triumph, it is almost certainly

a Roman triumph, and the influence is from Rome to Etruria, not vice

versa. 45

Of course, we should not rule out the possibility of all kinds of mu-

tual interdependence and cultural interaction between “Etruscan” and

“Roman” culture. To suggest that early Rome existed in a vacuum, im-

mune from the influence of its neighbors, would be simply wrong. But

we have no clearly decisive evidence at all for the favorite modern theory

of an Etruscan genealogy of the Roman ceremony. None of the much-

cited material objects can bear the weight of argument regularly placed

on them. Again, as so often is the case in the game of cultural “match-

ing,” the criteria that distinguish significant or telling similarities are elu-Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 1 2

sive: one person’s “man holding a crown” is another’s “woman with a

fan”; one person’s proto-triumphing general sporting an early version of

triumphal regalia is for others just a man in a purple cloak.

Yet these intriguing ambiguities of the evidence are only one side of

the problems that any search for the origins of the triumph must raise. It

is not just that the surviving material fails to deliver a clear answer to the

question of where the triumph came from, and when. In a fundamental

respect, that question is wrongly posed. The simple point is that there

was no such thing in a literal sense as the “first” or “earliest” triumph.

The “origin” of any ceremonial institution or ritual—“invented tradi-

tion” or not—is almost always a form of historical retrojection. It is not

(or only in the rarest of circumstances) a moment “in the present tense”

when we can imagine the primitive community coming together, devis-

ing and performing for the first time a ceremony that they intend to

make customary. It is almost always the product of a retrospective ideo-

logical collusion to identify one moment, or one influence, rather than

another as the start and foundation of traditional practice. As a term of

description and analysis, it acts—and acted—as a tool in the construc-

tion of a cultural genealogy: in the case of the triumph, a culturally

agreed (and culturally debated) ordering device intended to historicize

the messy, divergent, and changing ritual improvisations that from time

immemorial had no doubt ceremonialized the end of fighting.46

The “origin of the triumph” is, in other words, a cultural trope. Its job

is to draw a line between, on the one hand, the kind of occasion when

the lads rolled home in a jolly mood, victorious with their loot and cap-

tives and, on the other, a Roman institution with a history. There is no

objectively correct time or place to locate the triumph’s origin; instead,

we are faced with choices, of potential inclusions and exclusions, each

investing the ritual with a different history, character, authority, and

legitimacy. To put it another way, any decision to identify, say, the

fourth century bce as the birth of the triumph is about more than chro-

nology. Such decisions are always already about what the triumph is

thought to be for, and what is or is not to count in the institution’s

history.

The Triumph of History

313

This inevitably focuses our attention once again on discursive aspects

of the triumphal story, on how the ritual’s origins were defined and de-

bated by the Romans themselves, and with what implications for our

understanding of it. Here too we find a much wider range of “origin ac-

counts” than the cherry-picking practiced by modern scholars usually

admits. Ancient claims about the Etruscan origins of the toga picta, the

golden crown, or the eagle-topped scepter are enthusiastically repeated;

so too, as we have noted, is Varro’s tentative derivation of the word

triumphus ultimately from a Greek epithet of the god Dionysus. A blind

eye, however, has fairly consistently been turned to those ancient theo-

ries that sit less comfortably with modern ideas. The claim by one late

commentary that Pliny and the Augustan historian Pompeius Trogus

(whose work is largely lost to us) both believed that the triumph was in-

vented by the Africans hardly makes it to even the most learned foot-

notes. Likewise swept under the carpet for the most part is the deriva-

tion of triumphus suggested by Suetonius (at least as Isidore in the

seventh century reports him), which puts the accent on the tri partite

honor that a grant of a triumph represents—being dependent on the de-

cision of the army, senate, and Roman people.47

The issue, of course, is not whether these theories are correct (what-

ever being “correct” would mean in this context). It is rather how such

curious speculations and false etymologies reflect different ways of con-

ceptualizing the triumph, bringing different aspects of it into our view.

Suetonius’ etymology appears to assert the centrality of the institution

within the Roman polity and its delicate balance of power. More often,

though, ancient theorizing broaches a cluster of issues that underlie so

much of Roman cultural debate more generally: What was Roman

about this characteristically Roman institution? Do the roots of Roman

cultural practice lie outside the city? How far is traditional Roman cul-

ture always by definition “foreign”? These themes are familiar from the

conflicting stories told of the origins of the Roman state as a whole,

where the idea of a native Italic identity (in the shape of the Romulus

myth) is held in tension with the competing version (in the shape of the

Aeneas myth) that derives the Roman state from distant Troy. They are

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 1 4

familiar too from the more self-consciously intellectualizing version of

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the aim of whose Antiquitates Romanae (Ro-

man Antiquities) was to prove that Rome had been in origin a Greek city.

In the range of often fantastic explanations of the triumph, its cus-

toms, and its terminology, we find the “Romanness” of that ceremony

also keenly scrutinized and debated. On the one hand are attempts to

locate its origins externally, even (to follow the wild card of Pliny and

Pompeius Trogus) outside the nexus of Greek and Etruscan myth and

culture and inside Africa. On the other hand are the claims that the tri-

umph is inextricably bound up with Rome itself.

These claims are seen most vividly in the Forum inscription. We have

already explored the implications of the last triumph recorded here. The

first triumph recorded is no less loaded. That honor is ascribed to

Romulus on the “Kalends of March” (March 1) in the first year of the

city. This date is much more resonant than it might appear at first sight.

For it was a common assumption among ancient scholars that the Ro-

man year had originally begun not in January but in March.48 The first

of March in year 1 would have counted as the first day in the existence of

Rome. Leaving aside the chronological paradoxes that this raises (How

does it relate to the famous birthday of the city celebrated on April 21?

How was Romulus’ victory secured before Roman time had begun?), it

amounts to a very strong assertion indeed that the triumph was cotermi-

nous with Rome itself. The inscription presents a complete series of cel-

ebrations from 753 to 19 bce, with a beginning and an end defined by

the physical limits of its marble frame, as if there was no need to look for

triumphal history beyond or before that. The message is clear: Rome

was a triumphal city from its very birth; there was no Rome without the

triumph, no triumph without Rome.49

Strikingly similar debates are replayed in discussions of the origins of

the ovatio, which Romans also argued over, albeit with less intensity.

The issue was not, as in modern scholarship, its possible priority to the

triumph proper but the cultural and ethnic identity revealed by the title

of the ceremony. Two main views were canvassed. On the one hand were

those who saw the name as straightforwardly Greek, derived from the

The Triumph of History

315

Greek word euasmos—which refers to the shout of eua! characteristic of Greek rituals and apparently also of the ovatio. This was predictably the

line taken by Dionysius, but he claimed that many “native histories” also

supported that derivation.50 Plutarch certainly gives the impression that

he felt himself in the minority in rejecting that explanation (partly be-

cause “they use that cry in triumphs too”) and in seeing the origin of the

word in the type of sacrifice offered at the ovatio. “For at the major tri-

umph it was the custom for generals to sacrifice an ox, but at this cere-

mony they used to sacrifice a sheep. The Roman name for sheep is oba

(Latin ovis). And so they call the lesser triumph oba (ovatio). ”51

Desperately unconvincing it may be, but it is also found in Servius’

fourth-century commentary on the Aeneid: “The man who earns an

ovatio . . . sacrifices sheep (oves). Hence the name ovatio. ”52 This surely takes us back to the pastoral world of early Italy and its religious rules,

rather than to the rituals of Greece. Indeed, Plutarch makes a point of

saying that religious procedure at Sparta was the reverse: a lesser victor

sacrificed an ox.

The shout of eua introduces yet another, boldly mythical, version of

triumphal origins that I have already had cause to note on various occa-

sions. For, as Plutarch states, it was especially associated with the Greek

god Dionysus. And Dionysus—or his Latin counterpart, Liber—is also

credited with the invention of the triumph. This turns out to be a story

that illustrates not only the multicultural complexities of such myths of

origin but also how active a part in ritual practice itself these stories can

play. As we shall see, the story of Dionysus does not simply explain the

origins of the ritual of triumph, it also reconfigures and reshapes its per-

formance.

When Pliny claims that Liber invented the triumph, he is evoking

a story that we have come to know (thanks in part to its place of

honor in Renaissance painting) as “The Triumph of Bacchus.”53 This

was the story of the victorious military campaigns of the god Bacchus

(or Dionysus) against the Indians and his triumphal progress back to

Greece amidst a band of satyrs, maenads, and assorted drunks. We find

hints of a story of Dionysus’ journey from the Far East as early as the

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 1 6

opening of Euripides’ Bacchae. 54 But whatever the earliest versions of the myth, it was clearly drastically resignified following the eastern campaigns of Alexander the Great. At that point the tale of Bacchus’ exploits

in India was vastly elaborated and taken as the model for Alexander in

his role as the new Dionysus. There is, as many modern students of

myth have seen, a series of double bluffs here. For the truth is that the

god’s exploits were modeled on Alexander’s, not the other way round;

and that it is an entirely second-order reworking of the story to suggest

that Alexander saw himself in terms of the god (rather that the god

being presented as Alexander).55 But whatever the processes were by

which it developed, there are numerous traces in the Hellenistic Greek

world of this newly elaborated “Return of Bacchus” from India. These

include one of the main floats in the third-century procession of Ptol-

emy Philadelpus in Alexandria, which supposedly carried a tableau of

Dionysus’ return—including, so Callixeinos would have us believe, an

eighteen-foot statue of the god, followed by his Bacchic troops and In-

dian prisoners.

How exactly, and when, this myth was appropriated by Roman theo-

rists as the origin of their own ceremony of triumph we do not know.

The theory is almost certainly bound up with Varro’s etymology of the

word triumphus from the Dionysiac thriambos; but whether that etymology launched, legitimated, or followed the identification of Dionysus

as the “first to triumph” is lost to us. What is clear, however, is that at

least by the first century bce the “Return of Dionysus” from the East (as

Callixeinos puts it) had been translated into the “Triumph of Dionysus/

Bacchus” and repackaged in explicitly Roman triumphal terms. Even

if the conventional title for the myth, at any period, is now “The Tri-

umph of Bacchus,” the god’s return could not have been thought of as a

“triumph” in a technical sense until the Romans had seen in it the

founding moment of their own triumphal ceremony (which, inciden-

tally perhaps, had the added advantage of translating Alexander the

Great too into Roman cultural and religious vocabulary).56

But the chain of connections does not stop there. First, within Ro-

man representations, the story of Bacchus’ triumph became increasingly

The Triumph of History

317

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 42:

The Triumph of Bacchus on a Roman sarcophagus, mid-second century ce. For

all its elements of Bacchic extravagance (the exotic animals, the cupids), this divine procession bears a decided resemblance to a triumph—in, for example, the pathetic group of prisoners to the right.

assimilated into a triumph in the most specifically Roman sense of the

word. It is a not-uncommon theme on imperial sarcophagi, for example;

and it can be presented in a strikingly official triumphal guise. A sar-

cophagus from Rome illustrates this point nicely (Fig. 42). True, there

are some decidedly Bacchic elements here: the elephants pulling the

chariot, with cupids as their drivers; the lions and tigers carrying partici-

pants in the procession; the thyrsus in the “general’s” hands. But the

chariot is close enough to a triumphal shape; the crew of prisoners is

reminiscent of a Roman triumphal procession; and there may even be

that elusive slave pictured standing behind the god (reminding him that

he was only a man?). Other sarcophagi of this type depict carts showing

off booty, with chained prisoners crouching beside, as on official Roman

representations of the procession.57

But just as the Triumph of Bacchus came to be seen in increasingly

Roman terms, so the reverse was also true: the Roman triumphal cere-

mony itself could be seen afresh in Bacchic terms. The classic case of

this is the first triumph of Pompey, at which the commander attempted

to have his chariot drawn by elephants rather than horses. We cannot

now reconstruct Pompey’s motivations in launching this extravagant—

and ultimately failed—gesture. Very likely he was reformulating the

ceremony in the light of the return of Dionysus. But whether that was

Pompey’s intention or not, Roman observers and commentators saw

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 1 8

it in that way. Pliny, for example, specifically relates the story of

Pompey’s elephants to the “Triumph of Liber.”58 In other words, the

story of triumphal origins becomes acted out (or, at least, is seen to be

acted out) in a significantly new form of triumph. It takes a determining

as well as an explanatory role.

Irrecoverable—nonexistent, perhaps—as the historical origin of the

triumph must be, the myth of its origin is nevertheless a dynamic con-

stituent of that nexus of Roman actions and representations that make

up “the ritual.”59

THE END OF THE TRIUMPH?

In the sixth century ce the historian Procopius described the victory cel-

ebrations of the general Belisarius, who had scored a notable success

over the Vandals in Africa and returned to celebrate a “triumph” in 534.

Procopius underlines the significance of the event: “He was deemed

worthy to receive the honors which in earlier times had been granted

to those generals of the Romans who had won the greatest and most

noteworthy victories. A period of around six hundred years had gone

by since anyone had achieved these honors, except for Titus and Trajan,

and the other emperors who had won campaigns against the bar-

barians.”

We find all kinds of traditional triumphal features in Procopius’ ac-

count of this ceremony. Belisarius, he explains, had brought back for

display the Vandal king Gelimer, who behaved with the dignity associ-

ated with the most noble captives and who rose above the occasion far

enough to have muttered repeatedly the words “Vanity of vanities, all is

vanity” at the climax of the parade. (He was later granted land by the

emperor and lived out his days with his family.) There was an array of

prisoners, too, chosen for their striking appearance—“tall and physically

beautiful.” Most impressive of all, though, were the spoils, including the

holy treasure from the Temple of Jerusalem which had first been looted

by Vespasian and Titus, then in this version of the story taken off to

Africa by the Vandals in the mid-fifth century ce, and finally recaptured

The Triumph of History

319

by Belisarius. What had been paraded through in the triumph of

Vespasian and Titus in 71 ce was here put on display again in a triumph

450 years later.60

This celebration has often captured the imagination. According to

Procopius it was commemorated in a mosaic in the imperial pal-

ace, which brilliantly evoked the joyful spirit of the occasion. More re-

cently it has been dramatically restaged in, for example, Donizetti’s op-

era Belisario and makes a marvelous set piece in Robert Graves’ novel

Count Belisarius. For Graves, as for a number of scholars, Belisarius was

“the last to be awarded a triumph.”61 This was, in other words, the “last

Roman triumph.”

If so, it was significantly different from the triumphs we have been

exploring. This ceremony was taking place not in Rome but in Constan-

tinople, a city with its own well-established traditions of victory cele-

bration and commemoration.62 It involved a procession on foot, not

in a chariot, and to the Hippodrome, not to the Capitoline. And in

the Christian city, no sacrifices were offered to Jupiter. Instead, both

Gelimer and Belisarius prostrated themselves in front of the emperor

Justinian; and the rhetoric is so far from being pagan that the moralizing

slogan muttered by the king was actually a quotation from Ecclesiastes.

Besides, however Procopius construes this as a triumph of Belisarius

(and so a return to pre-Augustan practice), the principal honorand is

more often seen as the emperor himself. According to Procopius’ own

account, this was the message behind the design of the palace mosaic,

with Justinian and the empress Theodora at center-stage, honored by

both captives and general. Other accounts also focus on Justinian, some-

times not counting the celebration as a “triumph” at all, still less a tri-

umph of Belisarius.63

Procopius’ own version, in fact, highlights some ambivalences about

just how traditional (or “traditional” in what sense) this ceremony could

be made out to be. True, he launches his account by stressing the return

to ancient practice after six hundred years. But that length of time itself,

as well as his careful explanation of “what the Romans call a ‘triumph,’”

raises the question of how far we should take this as a self-conscious re-

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 2 0

vival of an ancient institution rather than a seamless part of ancestral

custom. He is also quite straightforward about the fact that what took

place was “not in the ancient manner” at all—for several of the reasons

just noted (Belisarius was on foot, following a different route in a differ-

ent city).

But even more revealing of the chronological and narrative complexi-

ties, Procopius goes on to remark that “a little later the triumph was also

celebrated by Belisarius in the ancient manner. ” By this he means not

that he celebrated a regular triumph, but that he entered into his consul-

ship in January 535 with what had become, by that date, the traditional

“triumphal” ceremonial. Confusingly for us, and for Procopius’ original

readers also no doubt, two different versions of the “ancient manner”

were in competition here: on the one hand, the “ancient manner” of the

Roman victory procession (to which the triumphal ceremonial in the

Hippodrome had not quite matched up); on the other, the “ancient

manner” of the consular inauguration in triumphal style (by the sixth

century ce a venerably old-fashioned institution).

In short, Procopius’ account shows how complicated the traditions of

the triumph and its different chronologies had become after more than a

millennium of triumphal history. It also hints at some of the dilemmas

that we face in trying to fix an endpoint for the ceremony’s history. Un-

like some rituals (such as animal sacrifice, for example), we know of no

legislation that outlawed its performance. And ceremonies harked back

to ancient triumphal symbolism or claimed specifically to imitate or re-

vive it through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, right into the twenti-

eth century. The question has been where to draw the dividing line be-

tween the Roman ceremony and later imitations or revivals—between

the life and the afterlife of the triumph. This raises issues of intellectual

policing similar to those that surrounded the question of triumphal ori-

gins. Unsurprisingly, the “Triumph of Belisarius” is only one of a hand-

ful of candidates for the accolade of “last Roman triumph.” Others are

much more closely connected—in place, religion, and ritual practice—

to the ceremony that has been the subject of this book than the Chris-

tian spectacle in 534. But all the different choices expose different views

The Triumph of History

321

about what counts as the irreducible core of the ceremony, about what

allows a ritual to qualify as a “Roman triumph.”

The period from the middle of the second century ce through the

third is, for the modern observer at least, a very low point in the his-

tory of the triumph. Between the triumph of Marcus Aurelius over the

Parthians in 166 and the victory celebrations of the co-emperors

Diocletian and Maximian in 303, we can document fewer than ten tri-

umphs—and most of these are not the subject of any lavish description,

reliable or not.64 An exception is the triumph celebrated by the emperor

Aurelian in 274 over enemies in the East and West (including that ersatz

Cleopatra, Queen Zenobia) and extravagantly evoked in that puz-

zling—and often flagrantly fantastical—collection of late Roman impe-

rial biographies known as the Historia Augusta (Augustan History). The

description of this triumph lives up to the reputation of the work as a

whole. It features a glittering array of captured royal chariots, in one of

which Aurelian himself rode, drawn by stags that were to be sacrificed

on the Capitol. Other exotic animals, from elephants to elks, are said to

have joined in the procession; as well as a glamorous troupe of foreign

captives, including a little posse of Amazons and Zenobia herself (bound

with those golden chains so heavy that they had to be carried for her).65

Most discussions of this account have been concerned with proving

its inaccuracy or working out what the writer must have misunderstood

in order to have come up with this rubbish.66 Certainly, to imagine that

it was an accurate reflection of what was on show in the procession

would be naive. But the fantasy of the Historia Augusta is here more an

exaggeration of traditional triumphal concerns than sheer invention.

The stress on the exotic, on royal prisoners in particular, and on the po-

tential rivalry between triumphing general and the star victim all echo

major themes in triumphal culture that we have already identified. Simi-

lar echoes are found in other descriptions of third-century triumphs. On

one occasion, the Historia Augusta offers a notable variation on that fa-

vorite triumphal theme of representation and reality. In his speech to the

senate after his triumph of 233, the emperor Severus Alexander is imag-

ined listing the various spoils of the battlefield that he either did, or did

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 2 2

not, parade in his procession. This includes 1,800 scythed chariots cap-

tured from the enemy: “Of these we could have put on display two hun-

dred chariots, their animals killed; but because that could be faked, we

passed up the opportunity of doing so.”67 Strangely inverted as the quip

may be, it closely chimes in with all those anxieties about fake triumphs

for fake victories.

In some other respects, however, even in the relatively sparse notices

of triumphs in this period, we can glimpse the characteristic style of later

“triumphal” celebrations of the fourth century and beyond. We find, for

example, a greater emphasis on shows and games connected with the

procession—as if they were now a much more integral part of the trium-

phal celebration than they appear to have been in earlier periods. Like-

wise the surviving descriptions increasingly blur the boundaries between

triumphal victory celebration and other forms of dynastic or imperial

display. In 202, for example, celebrations took place in Rome in honor

of the emperor Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla. Septimius had

secured victories in the East (as are commemorated on his famous arch

in the Forum). But did he celebrate a triumph? Our various accounts

appear to be agreed that he did not, but each with a different nuance.

The Historia Augusta states that the senate offered both the emperor

and Caracalla a triumph. Septimius himself declined on the grounds

(echoing Vespasian’s earlier complaint) that “he could not stand up in

the chariot because of his arthritis.” He did, however, give permission

for his son to triumph. Both Dio and Herodian suggest a different con-

figuration of ceremonial, without either of them mentioning a triumph.

Dio, who was a contemporary and even eyewitness, refers to a dazzling

concatenation of festivities. These included the celebration of the em-

peror’s tenth anniversary on the throne; the wedding of Caracalla (Dio,

a guest, claims that the menu was partly in “royal” and partly in “bar-

baric” style, with not only cooked meat on the menu but also “uncooked

and even live animals,” or so the Byzantine paraphrase has it); and mag-

nificent shows in the amphitheater in honor of Septimius’ return to the

city, his anniversary, and his victories. Herodian, another contemporary,

The Triumph of History

323

refers instead to the emperor’s reception on his return to Rome “as a vic-

tor,” and to sacrifices, spectacles, handouts, and games.68

This combination of ceremonial fits with the picture we have of

triumphal celebrations in late antiquity. We explored in the last chap-

ter the extension of triumphal symbolism and the way in which, by the

second century ce at least, the inauguration of consuls was represented

in triumphal terms (for Procopius, “the ancient manner”); and we have

noted in this chapter the connection between triumphs and imperial

accession and other dynastic events from as far back as the reign of Au-

gustus. These trends are usually taken to have become yet more pro-

nounced with time, as triumphal symbols came to serve as the markers

of imperial monarchy itself across the Empire as a whole and the tri-

umph became less directly connected with specific individual victories

and more associated with the emperor’s military power in general and

his dynastic anniversaries. It was at this period that the word trium-

phator entered common use—as part of the emperor’s title blazoned on

inscriptions and coins. Various imperial rituals too came to be expressed

in a triumphal idiom, and not necessarily only in Rome (a city that later

Roman emperors visited only rarely).

This is most clearly the case with the ceremony of the emperor’s

adventus, his formal “arrival” in Rome, Constantinople, or other cities of the Empire. This involved a ceremonial greeting of the emperor, his procession through the streets traveling in a chariot or carriage, and often

also the celebration of his victories.69 One vivid case is the famous entry

of Constantius II into Rome in 357 ce, his first visit to the city. In what

has become a locus classicus of the supposedly hieratic ceremonial of late antiquity, he sat in his carriage absolutely still, looking neither to left or

to right, “as if he were a statue.” Several years earlier he had defeated

Magnentius, his rival to the throne, and Ammianus Marcellinus de-

scribes his arrival in Rome as “an attempt to hold a triumph over Roman

blood.”70

Showing scruples about celebrations of victories in civil war that

would have been more at home in the first century bce (for by now

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 2 4

many triumphal ceremonies were unashamedly rooted in conflicts be-

tween Roman and Roman), Ammianus continues, disapprovingly and

still in a decidedly triumphal vein: “For he did not conquer under his

own command any foreign people who were making war, nor did he

know of any such people who had been vanquished by the valor of his

generals. He did not add anything to the Empire either; nor in times

of crisis was he ever seen to be the leader or amongst the leaders. But

he was keen to show off to a people living in complete peace—who nei-

ther hoped nor wished to see this or anything of the sort—a vastly over-

blown procession, banners stiff with threads of gold, and an array of

retainers.”71

Accounts of this type lie behind the claim that by the end of the

fourth century the triumph was “in effect transformed into adventus. ”72

This is not the only way of understanding the realignment of ritual

practice, or necessarily the best. One could equally well argue that ad-

ventus had been transformed into triumph, or better (as I suggested in

the context of consular inauguration) that the symbolic language of the

triumph provided an apt way of representing this ceremonial form of

imperial entrance. Nor is it clear that the overlap between adventus and

triumph is as distinctive of this later period as is sometimes assumed. For

in some sense the triumph always had been, in essence, the arrival of the

successful general and his re-entry into the city—and it was certainly

cast in those terms by writers of the Augustan period, looking back to

the ritual’s early history.73 Nonetheless, the “seepage” of triumphal forms

into other rituals does seem to be a particular marker of the ceremonial

from the fourth, or even the third, century on. One could almost say

that the adjective tends to replace the noun: we now deal as much with

ceremonies that are “triumphal” or “like a triumph” as with triumphs

themselves.

That said, a group of notable triumphs or triumphal occasions be-

tween the fourth and sixth centuries have been taken as turning points

in the history of the ritual, or possible candidates for being “the last Ro-

man triumph.” Modern fingers have often pointed at the triumph of

Diocletian and Maximian in 303, which joined together celebrations of

The Triumph of History

325

the twentieth anniversary of Diocletian’s reign with those for victories

won by the co-rulers in both East and West, some of them many years

earlier. (One surviving speech in praise of Maximian turns this delay to

the emperor’s advantage: “You put off triumphal processions themselves

by further conquering.”) The evidence for this occasion is murkier than

many of the confident statements about it would encourage one to

think. Not only are there some troubling—though probably not com-

pelling—doubts about whether this is anything more than a figment of

unreliable historical imagination. But the repeated view that the proces-

sion incorporated paintings or models of the defeated, in the traditional

way, is no more than a rationalization of the awkward conflict of differ-

ent assertions in different literary accounts: that the relatives of the

Persian king Narses were on display in the procession, that they had

been restored to him according to the peace treaty after the war with the

Persians, and that the whole family was put on display in the temples

of Rome. Nonetheless, the description offered by Eutropius, a fourth-

century pagan historian, has been felt to be reassuringly familiar and “in

the ancient manner”: he refers to the “wonderful procession of floats

(fercula)” and to the victims being led “before the chariot (ante

currum). ”74

A clear break is often detected between this and the triumphal entry

of Constantine after his defeat of his rival Maxentius at the battle of the

Milvian Bridge in 312. There is no question here of anything so refined

as a model of the defeated being on display. In contrast to those occa-

sions in the earlier history of the triumph when the crowd was reported

to be upset by the mere sight of paintings of the dying, Maxentius’

severed head itself was paraded for mockery before the people (a not

uncommon element in these later ceremonies). One writer of a speech

in praise of Constantine, moreover, plays with the idea that this was

the most illustrious triumph ever, precisely because it used and sub-

verted triumphal traditions: no chained enemy generals were hauled

ante currum, but the Roman nobility marched there “free at last”; “bar-

barians were not thrown into prison, but ex-consuls were thrown out”;

and so on.

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 2 6

But the key idea for most modern commentators has been an omis-

sion of a different kind. It is widely assumed that this was the first occa-

sion when the emperor broke with tradition and, under the influence

of Christianity, chose not to end the procession with honor paid to the

pagan gods. Or so we infer from the fact that no ancient account men-

tions Constantine performing sacrifice on the Capitoline (there is no

firmer or more positive evidence than that).75 Almost a hundred years

later in 404, the triumph-cum-consular-inauguration of the emperor

Honorius may represent another turning point. Written up in aggres-

sively traditional idiom by Claudian—with images of white horses

(though only two, not four), praise for triumphs over foreign rather than

Roman enemies, and a reference to the once significant boundary of the

pomerium—this is the last triumph we know to have been celebrated by

an emperor in Rome.76

The significance of any of these turning points depends on how we

interpret the triumph more generally. There is no right answer to the

teasing question of when the traditional Roman triumph grinds to a

halt. For those who see the culminating sacrifice on the Capitoline as

an essential part of the institution, the triumph of Diocletian and

Maximian will be the end of the road. A Christian triumph will be a

contradiction in terms, or at best a new ceremony imitating the old.

Those, by contrast, who emphasize physical location as an integral part

of the ritual—and so regard a triumph outside the topography of the

city of Rome, or the Alban Mount, as an impossible hybrid—might take

the history of the ceremony as far of 404 but no further. In those terms,

a triumph in Constantinople could be only a copy. The case for extend-

ing our reach as far as Justinian and Belisarius in the sixth century would

depend on taking literally Procopius’ claims to place it (notwithstanding

all its radically new elements) in the tradition of triumphs stretching

back even before the advent of the Roman Empire. In the end, it proba-

bly does not matter very much where we choose to stop, so long as we

realize that different choices offer different views not only of the history

but also of the character of the institution.

Here too, however, there are also big issues of discursive as well as

The Triumph of History

327

more strictly ritual practice. As we have seen repeatedly, ceremonies such

as the triumph are defined not only by the actions of the participants,

the costume, the choreography, and the paraphernalia. No less impor-

tant are the terms in which they are described, represented, and under-

stood by their ancient observers. In part, it was the description or repre-

sentation of a ritual as a triumph that made it one. Greek and Roman

writers, no less than we ourselves, made rhetorical choices about which

ceremonies to cast in triumphal terms and which not. Some writers,

from the fourth to the sixth century, and especially those who saw them-

selves in the lineage of the “pagan” classics, were heavily invested in por-

traying a range of ceremonies in traditionally triumphal terms, even at

the cost of some tension between image and practice.

It has often been noticed, for example, that the triumphant emperor

was still said to have traveled in the traditional currus, even when there is clear evidence that the regular vehicle was now a cart or carriage in

which (as we saw in the case of Constantius) he sat down. In another

speech in praise of Constantine, the mockery of the head of Maxentius,

and of the man who had the misfortune to be carrying it in the proces-

sion, is seen in terms of the ribaldry (ioci triumphales) of the traditional triumphal ceremony. And there are many examples of the parade of illustrious Roman triumphal forbears: Belisarius’ ceremony is, for exam-

ples, seen alongside the triumphs of Titus and Trajan, as well as the

heroes of the Republic; the poet Priscian likens the triumphal ceremony

of the emperor Anastasius in 498 to the triumph of Aemilius Paullus.77

The ideological choices that underlie these triumphal portrayals are clear

if we compare other accounts of the same events. In discussing what is

elsewhere treated as the (pagan) “triumph” of Constantine, Eusebius and

Lactantius, both committed to seeing Constantine in the lineage of spe-

cifically Christian history, take a different approach. Lactantius merely

refers to great rejoicing at the emperor’s victory; Eusebius conscripts the

incident into the story of the triumph of Christianity.

Yet we should hesitate before we conclude that the ancient triumph

lasted as long as anyone was prepared to describe ceremonies in trium-

phal terms. This was, after all, contested territory. And at a certain point

Th e

R o m a n Tr i u m p h

3 2 8

the gap between the triumphal rhetoric and the ritual action must have

become so wide as to be implausible. The “ritual in ink,” in other words,

had lost touch with ritual practice. It must have seemed either a brilliant

literary game, a frankly desperate gambit in defense of old Roman tradi-

tions, or hopeless blindness to see Aemilius Paullus as a meaningful an-

cestor for the emperors of the fifth century ce. When that “certain

point” was is almost impossible to determine, but the parameters for the

end of the “traditional Roman triumph” are clear enough, albeit wide.

If one boundary is the triumphal ceremony in Constantinople in 534,

whose ambivalences were so nicely exposed by Procopius, the earlier

limit must be set several centuries before. Subversive suggestion though

it is, a case could even be made for seeing the celebration of Vespasian

and Titus in 71, with Josephus’ insistent rhetoric of precedent and proce-

dure (while the whole thing ended up at a temple that was in fact in ru-

ins), as the first triumph that was more of a “revival” than living tradi-

tion, more afterlife than life.

POSTSCRIPT: ABYSSINIA 1916

The contemporary world continues to debate the ways in which vic-

tory should be celebrated. In the United Kingdom, the Church has

several times over the past few decades spoken out explicitly against

“triumphalism”—in response to a government that wishes to honor (as

well as to magnify) the country’s military success. Parades through the

streets are less controversial when they involve winning football teams

than when they feature winning armies. Even when such processions are

sanctioned, they are usually a display of the well-choreographed surviv-

ing soldiers and the victorious military hardware. They do not now in-

clude those distinctive elements of the Roman triumph, spoils and pris-

oners. Admiral Dewey may have had a triumphal arch on Madison

Avenue, but no exotic captives were on display. If the idea of the tri-

umph is still very much with us, the details of its practice are not.

The last great triumphal display of looted works of art in Europe

must have been the procession of the masterpieces of Italy paraded

The Triumph of History

329

through the streets of Paris after Napoleon’s conquests. Modern western

warfare does not aim for spoils in the same way. Oil does not make a

particularly picturesque show. And although cultural treasures are often

stolen and still constitute a significant profit (or loss) of warfare, this is

more often under cover than in full view. A classic example is the prehis-

toric gold from Troy discovered by Heinrich Schliemann, taken from

Berlin by the Soviets in 1945, and not officially rediscovered, in a Mos-

cow museum, until the 1980s. The closest the Soviets came to parading

their booty was in the 1945 Victory Parade in Moscow, when German

flags and military standards were thrown at the foot of Lenin’s tomb.