umphed over.
This book will write those doubts and quizzical reflections back into
the history of the Roman triumph. Most modern accounts of the cere-
P r o l o g u e
4
mony stress the militaristic jingoism of the occasion, its sometimes brut-
ish celebration of conquest and imperialism. It is cast as a ritual which,
throughout the history of Rome, asserted and reasserted the power of
the Roman war machine and the humiliation of the conquered. Cleopa-
tra of Egypt is famously supposed to have killed herself rather than be
triumphed over. That is certainly one side of it. But I shall argue that
the very ceremony which glorified military victory and the values under-
pinning that victory also provided a context within which those values
could be discussed and challenged. It has too often been convenient to
dismiss Roman culture as unreflectively committed to warfare and im-
perial domination, and to regard members of the Roman political elite
individually as obsessed with achieving military glory. Of course, Rome
was “a warrior state.”5 The Romans were not a crowd of proto-pacifists.
But, as a general rule, it is warrior states that produce the most sophisti-
cated critique of the militaristic values they uphold. I hope to show that
this was the case with Rome; and that within Roman culture the tri-
umph was the context and the prompt for some of the most critical
thinking on the dangerous ambivalence of success and military glory.
On the usual calculation, the triumph was celebrated more than three
hundred times in the thousand-or-so-year history of the ancient city
of Rome. It made an impact far beyond the commemoration of vic-
tory, and on aspects of Roman life as diverse as the apotheosis of emper-
ors and the passion of erotic pursuit (“conquest,” that is, in the bed-
room, not on the battlefield). It has been the subject of study and hot
debate by scholars and cultural commentators from antiquity until the
present day.
This book is driven in part by curiosity—about the ritual itself and its
insistent presence in Roman literature, scholarship, and art, and about
the controversies and debates, ancient and modern, that it has raised.
Through an exploration of the triumph, I aim at the same time to com-
municate something of my own enthusiasm for the sophistication, nu-
ance, and complexity of Roman culture (notwithstanding my distaste
for much of what those sophisticated men—and I mean men—got
The Question of Triumph
5
up to). I also try to grapple with some of the biggest questions in the
understanding of ancient ritual in general and of the triumph in particu-
lar that, despite centuries of inspiring work, still get fudged or passed
by. In fact, the approach that I follow in the rest of the book is intended
to challenge many of the ways Roman ritual culture is studied, and
the spurious certainties and prejudices that dog it. This is a manifesto
of sorts.
Also at the heart of what I have written is a conviction that, at its best,
the study of ancient history is as much about how we know as what
we know. It involves an engagement with all the processes of selection,
constructive blindness, revolutionary reinterpretation, and willful mis-
interpretation that together produce the “facts” about the triumph out
of the messy, confusing, and contradictory evidence that survives. With
this in mind, I have taken care, where it is most relevant, to indicate if,
say, a key piece of evidence actually derives from a possibly tendentious
medieval summary of an ancient text or if it depends on accepting some
nineteenth-century “emendation” (put simply, clever “alteration”) of the
words transmitted to us in the manuscripts. Factors like this are usually
side-stepped, except in the most scholarly and technical academic arti-
cles—and sometimes even there. This book is intended not only for
those who are already expert in ancient Roman culture but also for those
who wish to discover it. I shall be making clear why some of the best-
loved “facts” about the triumph are nothing of the sort. But more im-
portant, I hope to convey to nonspecialists the intellectual pleasure—
and the sheer fun—of making sense of the ancient world from the com-
plex layers of different kinds of evidence that we have. This is a book
which, as mathematicians would say, shows its working.
The first chapter plunges into the middle of things. It takes a single
triumphal ceremony—the triumph of Pompey the Great in 61 bce—
and explores its celebration and commemoration in depth. It offers a
glimpse of the intriguing richness of the evidence for this ritual, from
the miniature images on Roman coins to the disapproving accounts of
austere Roman moralists; and it shows how far the impact of a single tri-
P r o l o g u e
6
umphal ceremony can extend. Chapters 2 and 3 stand back to reflect on
the general role of the triumph in Roman culture and to wonder just
how reliable (or reliable in what sense) is the evidence that remains. They show that we know both more and less about the triumph than we
might suppose. At the heart of the book, Chapters 4 through 8 home in
on particularly revealing aspects of triumphal culture—the victims, the
spoils, the successful general, the rules and regulations that determined
who was allowed to triumph, and the variety of triumphlike celebrations
that emerged in Rome and elsewhere.
The final chapter reflects on the history of the triumph. It goes with-
out saying that over a thousand years the character of the ceremony
must have changed drastically, as well as reactions to it. We should not
imagine that anything like Seneca’s clever quip could plausibly have
fallen from the lips of the men and women who observed any such ritual
in the fifth or fourth centuries bce. How those early Romans would
have responded and how their ceremony itself was conducted is now
practically irrecoverable. As I shall argue, most later Roman accounts of
primitive triumphal history—from clever reconstruction to elaborate
fantasies—tell us more about the period in which they were written than
the one they purport to describe. It fits appropriately with the approach
of the book as a whole that the “origins” of the ceremony are, intention-
ally, left till last. Please do not start there.
c h a p t e r
I
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
BIRTHDAY PARADE
September 29, 61 bce, was the forty-fifth birthday of Pompey the Great.
It was also—and this can hardly have been mere coincidence—the sec-
ond and final day of his mammoth triumphal procession through the
streets of Rome. It was a ceremony that put on show at the heart of the
metropolis the wonders of the East and the profits of empire: from
cartloads of bullion and colossal golden statues to precious specimens of
exotic plants and other curious bric-à-brac of conquest. Not to mention
the eye-catching captives dressed up in their national costumes, the plac-
ards proclaiming the conqueror’s achievements (ships captured, cities
founded, kings defeated . . .), paintings recreating crucial moments of
the campaigns, and a bizarre portrait head of Pompey himself, made (so
it was said) entirely of pearls.1
Over the previous six years, Pompey had dealt decisively with two of
the greatest dangers to Rome’s security, and boasted a range of conquests