THE ROMAN TRIUMPH
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
THE ROMAN TRIUMPH
MARY BEARD
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON, ENGLAND
Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2009.
Set in Adobe Garamond
Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt
Frontispiece: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo,
The Triumph of Marius, 1729.
A re-creation of the triumphal procession of January 1, 104 bce.
Jugurtha, the defeated king of Numidia, stands a proud prisoner in
front of the chariot—threatening to upstage the victorious general
Marius in the background. To left and right are the spoils of victory—
precious vessels and sculpture, including a bust of the goddess
Cybele with distinctive turreted headdress, just as Mantegna
had envisaged in his Triumphs of Caesar (Fig. 28).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beard, Mary, 1955–
The Roman triumph / Mary Beard.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-02613-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-674-03218-7 (pbk.)
1. Triumph.
2. Rites and ceremonies—Rome.
3. Processions—Rome.
4. Rome—Military antiquities.
5. Triumph in art.
6. Triumph in literature.
7. Rites and ceremonies—Rome—Historiography.
I. Title.
DG89.B43 2007
394Ј.50937—dc22
2007002575
Contents
Prologue: The Question of Triumph
1
1
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
7
2
The Impact of the Triumph
42
3
Constructions and Reconstructions
72
4
Captives on Parade
107
5
The Art of Representation
143
6
Playing by the Rules
187
7
Playing God
219
8
The Boundaries of the Ritual
257
9
The Triumph of History
287
Epilogue: Rome, May 2006
331
Plan
335
Abbreviations
336
Notes
338
Bibliography
394
Acknowledgments
418
Illustration Credits
420
Index
424
THE ROMAN TRIUMPH
p r o l o g u e
The Question of Triumph
“Petty sacrilege is punished; sacrilege on a grand scale is the stuff of tri-
umphs.” Those are the words of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, first-century ce
philosopher and tutor of the emperor Nero. He was reflecting in one of
his philosophical letters on the unfair disparity in the meting out of
punishment and reward, and on the apparent profit that might come
from wrong-doing.1 As we might gloss it, following the wry popular
wisdom of our own day, “Petty criminals end up in jail; big ones end
up rich.”
In referring to the “stuff of triumphs,” Seneca meant those famous
parades through the city of Rome that celebrated Rome’s greatest victo-
ries against its enemies (or its biggest massacres, depending on whose
side you were on). To be awarded a triumph was the most outstanding
honor a Roman general could hope for. He would be drawn in a char-
iot—accompanied by the booty he had won, the prisoners he had taken
captive, and his no doubt rowdy and raucous troops in their battle
gear—through the streets of the city to the Temple of Jupiter on the
Capitoline hill, where he would offer a sacrifice to the god. The cere-
mony became a by-word for extravagant display.
Seneca’s quip is uncomfortably subversive. For, by implication, it
questions the morality of some of those glorious victories that were cele-
P r o l o g u e
2
brated in this most lavish of all Roman rituals; and it hints that the
spoils on show might sometimes have been the fruits of sacrilege rather
than the just rewards of imperial conquest. It puts a question mark over
the triumph and triumphal values.
Roman triumphs have provided a model for the celebration of mili-
tary success for centuries. Through the last two millennia, there has
been hardly a monarch, dynast, or autocrat in the West who has not
looked back to Rome for a lesson in how to mark victory in war and to
assert his own personal power. Renaissance princelings launched hun-
dreds of triumphal celebrations. Napoleon carted through the streets
of Paris the sculpture and painting he had seized in Italy, in a pointed
imitation of a Roman triumph. It is a kind of ironic justice that the
Romans’ own masterpieces should find themselves put on parade in a
foreign city—just as the masterpieces looted from the Greek world had
been paraded through Rome two thousand years earlier. As late as 1899
the victories of Admiral George Dewey in the Spanish-American War
were celebrated with a triumphal parade in New York. True, no live cap-
tive or spoils were on show; but a special triumphal arch was built, in
plaster and wood, at Madison Square.2
Scratch the surface of these apparently self-confident ceremonies and
time and again “Senecan” doubts begin to emerge—in sometimes sur-
prising places. Donatello’s wonderfully sensuous bronze statue of David
(now in the Bargello in Florence) was probably commissioned by Cosimo
de’ Medici in 1428 after victory over some rival Italian potentates.3 David
is shown with his foot on the head of Goliath; on the giant’s helmet is a
scene of triumph, and in the triumphal chariot—in an imaginative vari-
ant we shall meet again—stands not a human general but a victorious
Cupid, the god of love. Donatello is directing us to the erotic charge of
his young David. But he is also pointing to the transitory nature of tri-
umphal glory: Goliath who blazoned the emblem of the triumph on his
armor is now himself the victim of his triumphant successor.4
In a completely different medium, a New Yorker cartoon gives similar
anxieties a humorous touch (Fig. 1). We shall shortly see that in ancient
Rome itself “triumphal arches” were not quite so closely linked to trium-
The Question of Triumph
3
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 1:
Boris Drucker, New Yorker cartoon, 1988. The anxious Romans are putting the finishing touches on an imaginary arch—a composite loosely based on the Arch of
Constantine in Rome and the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (Fig. 10).
phal processions as they have been in the modern world, and in the
modern imagination. But, anyway, here the cartoonist pictures a group
of Roman workmen finishing off just such a structure—when the dark
thought strikes them that Rome might not actually be victorious in
whatever war this arch is intended to celebrate. The joke is partly on
the dangers of anticipation, on “counting your chickens before they
are hatched.” But it is also on the fact that a triumph involves both
winners and losers—that those who triumph today may one day be tri-