(Love Poems), Ovid exploits the conventions of the triumph to explore
the predicament, or success, of the lover. This way of rethinking the cer-
emony was to have an enormously successful afterlife in Renaissance
allegories of the triumph, notably in Petrarch’s series of six moralizing
poetic Trionfi (Triumphs), the Triumph of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame,
Time, and Eternity (Fig. 12).17 But Petrarch looked back directly to
Ovid, and to one poem in particular where the love-sick poet pictures
himself as a wounded captive in the triumphal procession of a victorious
Cupid:
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
5 2
With your train of prisoners behind you, besotted youths
and maidens,
Such pomp, such magnificence, your very own
Triumph: and I’ll be there too, fresh-wounded, your latest
Prisoner . . . 18
It is a joke that simultaneously pokes fun at the militaristic ethos of
the ceremony and re-appropriates its conventions to reflect on erotic
conflict.
Ovid’s clever playfulness hints at yet another role for the triumph in
Roman intellectual culture. It was not only “good to think with”; it was
also good to think about. Roman academics and antiquarians regularly
directed their energies to wrestling with the history and meaning of the
ceremony, and to explaining its (even to them) peculiar customs and
symbols. They puzzled, and disagreed, over its origins and the etymol-
ogy of the word triumphus itself. It was not merely the imagination of
poets and story-mongers that gave the triumph an Eastern pedigree. If
some scholars held the ceremony to be the invention of Rome’s founder
Romulus, for others it was the brainchild of the god Bacchus. In fact,
the Bacchic origin meshed conveniently with the derivation of the word
triumphus itself from one of Bacchus’ Greek epithets (thriambos). But that did not convince those who preferred to see it as a perfectly Roman
term. Suetonius apparently explained it as bona fide Latin: tri-umphus reflecting the three sections of Roman society—army, senate, and peo-
ple—involved in granting the honor.19
The significance of the triumphal laurel was also a particularly hot
topic of debate. Masurius Sabinus, a first-century ce antiquarian, saw it
as a fumigator or purifier (and so saw the origin of the triumph itself as a
ritual of purification after the bloodstains of war). Pliny preferred to
stress its links with the god Apollo and its symbolic connections with
peace (while also noting that it was a plant that was never struck by
lightning).20
Where they could not explain, they could at least try to bring sense
and order. Repeated attempts were made to reconstruct or establish the
The Impact of the Triumph
53
rules of the triumph. Who was allowed to celebrate one, after what kind
of victory, and against what kind of enemy? Was a triumph allowable,
for example, after the defeat of such “inferior” enemies as pirates or
slaves?21 Even the victims in the triumph became the targets of an aca-
demic obsession with classification. In one particularly far-fetched (or
fine-tuned) attempt at systematization, Porphyrio, an ancient commen-
tator on the poetry of Horace, claimed to be able to distinguish the dif-
ferent types of wagon assigned to transport different ranks of royal cap-
tives in the procession: esseda for “conquered kings”; pilenta for the
“conquered queens”; petorrita for the “king’s relations.”22 The triumph
brought out the best and the worst in Roman scholarship.
THE MODERN TRIUMPH
These Roman writers would, no doubt, be gratified to learn of the im-
pact of the triumph on later historians. From the scholarly world of Byz-
antium, through the rediscovery of classical antiquity in the Renaissance
and its reassessment in the Enlightenment, right up to the present day,
this distinctive piece of Roman ceremonial has stirred historical and an-
tiquarian curiosity, prompting a huge variety of reconstructions, anal-
ysis, and explanation. What Andrea Mantegna recaptured in his cycle of
paintings of the Triumphs of Caesar—originally for the Gonzaga family
of Mantua, now in Hampton Court Palace, London (see Figs. 27, 28,
and 29)—others discussed in essays, treatises, and poetry. Petrarch again,
for example, headlined the triumph in the ninth book of his Latin epic
Africa, linking the triumphal procession of Scipio Africanus to the po-
etic triumph of Ennius.23
Some early historical work is particularly notable, and still useful.
Italian humanists eagerly gathered together the widely scattered refer-
ences to the triumph in ancient writers. So efficient and accurate were
they that Onofrio Panvinio’s study of the triumph in his Fastorum Libri
V first published in the 1550s—an analytical list of Roman office holders
from Romulus to Charles V in the sixteenth century—remains even to-
day one of the most comprehensive collections of evidence for the cere-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
5 4
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 13:
A Renaissance view of the Roman triumph. Panvinio’s version of the ceremony
is here brought to life in a series of contemporary engravings, which pick out highlights of famous processions as he—following the main ancient accounts—described them. In this section: elephants, the chariots and regalia of the defeated kings, and the royal captives themselves.
mony (Fig. 13).24 Just over two hundred years later, Edward Gibbon’s es-
say “Sur les triomphes des Romains,” written in 1764 as a prelude to his
classic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is a strikingly intelligent account of the triumph, its few pages still one of the best introductions of all to the significance of the ceremony. In an unnervingly
modern vein, Gibbon reflects on—among other things—Roman con-
structions of glory and military virtue, and the relationship between the
audience and the spectacular display.25
Inevitably, very different interests have attracted scholars to the tri-
umph over the centuries. In the Renaissance, triumphal ceremonies that
claimed links with ancient Rome lay at the heart of politics and civic
spectacle. “Invented tradition” or not, this gave a particular edge and ur-
gency to the humanists’ studies of the triumph. Flavio Biondo, for ex-
ample, in his Roma Triumphans of 1459, saw the Christian church as the
direct inheritor of the Roman triumphal tradition, albeit with the ex-
plicitly pagan elements redefined. Just as the city of Rome had hosted
the long series of ancient triumphs, now it was the center of the trium-
phant Church, with all its Christian ceremonial and its military con-
The Impact of the Triumph
55
quests over the religious enemy in the shape of the Turks. For Biondo, it
was almost too good to be true (and, in fact, we now know it was not
true) that the site of St. Peter’s could be identified with that very tract of
land where the ancient Romans had assembled to start their triumphal
processions.
Panvinio, by contrast, traced the line of succession from ancient Ro-