man traditions through to the Holy Roman Empire, its rulers and its rit-
uals—as the paraded continuity in office-holding from Romulus to Em-
peror Charles V in his Fastorum Libri V underlines. It was a continuity
acted out in the streets of Rome during Panvinio’s lifetime, notably
in 1536 when Charles V made a triumphal entrance into the city after
his African victories, in a spectacle choreographed by Pope Paul III. For
this event, Paul attempted to reconstruct the exact route of the an-
cient triumph, demolishing so much of the city in the process that it
had Rabelais, famously, leaving town in disgust. Charles himself ap-
peared as a Christian triumphant over the infidel and as a second Scipio
Africanus—a Romulus and St. Peter combined.26
Humanists turned also to investigate many of the questions put on
the agenda by their ancient counterparts: the rules governing the cere-
mony, its origins, etymologies, and so on. Recent work has focused on
these issues, too, though driven by different scholarly priorities. The
legal basis of the triumph and the constitutional position of the gen-
eral himself proved a particular fascination for historians in the nine-
teenth century and beyond, whose aim was to reconstruct (or, as skep-
tics might now see it, devise) the “constitution” of ancient Rome. A
lawyer’s version of the triumph was inevitably the result, as they at-
tempted to see through the mass of often conflicting evidence to the
fundamental legal principles and sources of authority that underpinned
the ceremony.27
The preoccupations of the twentieth century with the operation of
politics in the Roman Republic shifted the focus slightly, but still tended
to keep the spotlight on the rules and regulations of triumphal celebra-
tions. On what grounds were some successful generals refused a celebra-
tion? Whose right was it to grant or refuse a triumph anyway? How did
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
5 6
the rules change over time, particularly as the expansion of Roman over-
seas territory changed the nature of military engagement and the struc-
ture of military command?28
The origins and early history of the ceremony have also remained
firmly on the agenda of modern scholarship on the triumph. The crucial
questions here have been concerned not only with where exactly the cer-
emony originated (though many recent analysts, as we shall see in Chap-
ter 9, have advocated a foreign, or at least Etruscan, origin with even
more enthusiasm than ancient writers). No less central has been the idea
that the details of the ceremony as they have come down to us offer a
rare window onto the religion and culture of the earliest phases of
Rome’s history. The triumph was, after all, an institution stretching back
into the remote past, and Roman ritual practice was notoriously conser-
vative. The chances are that many triumphal conventions, customs, and
characteristic symbols—some of which puzzled later Roman writers—
preserve their archaic form, and that they are explained by (and also help
to explain) the shape and meaning of the triumph in distant prehistory.
This series of inferences is, in fact, a shaky one. In particular, the un-
changing conservatism of Roman ritual is at best a half-truth that has in-
creasingly been challenged, and will be further challenged in the course
of this book.29 Nonetheless, these notions underlie some of the most
powerful modern readings of the triumph. J. G. Frazer, for example, in
his founding text of comparative anthropology, The Golden Bough, saw
in the general—whose costume he believed combined distinctively regal
aspects with features drawn from the god Jupiter himself—a direct de-
scendant of the original “divine kings” of Rome (and so a marvelous
confirmation of his whole theory of primitive divine kingship). H. S.
Versnel, in Triumphus, a book that has become the standard modern ref-
erence point on the ceremony, thinks in terms of a primitive New Year
festival, harking back ultimately to the ancient Near East via Etruria. It
is indicative of the general direction of modern interests that Triumphus,
though subtitled “an inquiry into the origin, development and meaning
of the Roman triumph,” shows little concern with the ceremony as it
was practiced after the fourth century bce.30
The Impact of the Triumph
57
In the increasingly wide range of classical scholarship over the last
fifty years or so, very few triumphal stones have been left entirely un-
turned. Studies have appeared on the role of women at the triumph, on
the development of triumphal ceremonial into Christian antiquity, on
the similarities (and differences) between triumphal processions and fu-
neral processions, on the iconography of triumphal monuments, on tri-
umphal themes in Roman poetry, on the social semiotics of the proces-
sion, on the triumph as a means of controlling Roman elite rivalry or of
“conflict resolution,” as well as on a number of individual ceremonies—
real or imagined.31 And that is to cite only a few.
All the same, given the richness of triumphal culture at Rome and in
surviving Roman literature, it is surprising that so much attention over-
all has been devoted to the origins and earliest phases of the ceremony in
that misty period of Roman prehistory before we have any contempo-
rary literary evidence at all, and only the most controversial of archaeo-
logical traces; and that so little attention, by comparison, has been de-
voted to the triumph in periods of which we know much more and
where we can hope to see, if not “how it actually happened,” then at
least how it was recorded, remembered, imagined, debated, and dis-
cussed. As others have pointed out, there is no reliable modern guide
to the triumph during the Roman Principate, over the three centuries
between the reign of Augustus and the beginning of the Christian em-
pire—and one should probably include the last three centuries bce
as well.32
This book aims to fill some of that enormous gap, opening up and
exploring the triumphal culture of Rome in the late Republic and
Principate. It will bring together material—visual and archaeological as
well as literary—from that period and will bring back to center-stage
texts that have often been marginalized because they do not play to
dominant modern interests: poetic evocations of entirely imaginary tri-
umphs, for example, or unbelievably extravagant and inevitably inaccu-
rate accounts of processions such as Pompey’s. At the same time, it will
take a fresh look at texts that have often been interrogated, narrowly, for
the information they might provide on the prehistory of the ceremony.
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
5 8
I shall suggest, for example, that the ingenious speculations of Plu-
tarch or Aulus Gellius may tell us less about the proto-triumphs of the
eighth century bce than about the triumphal scholarship and culture of
the second century ce, a millennium later; that even Livy’s detailed ac-
counts of the triumphal controversies of the middle Republic are as
much about the configurations of the triumph in the late first century
bce as they are about the rules, regulations, and contests of the late
third. In short, I shall be looking carefully at the surviving ancient writing on the triumph, rather than merely through it to some more distant