culation on the part of the designers and carvers to ensure this perfect
fit. Nor was Balbus’ merely the most recent celebration to have taken
place when the decision was made to inscribe the whole triumphal chro-
nology. As the design shows, this triumph was intended to represent the
end of the series, or at least a rupture in the pattern of celebrations that
had held good for centuries.
So far I have referred to the sequence of triumphs as an unbroken se-
ries, from the mythical foundation under Romulus to whatever celebra-
tion is deemed to count as the last (the triumph of Diocletian and
Maximian in 303 ce is one favorite modern candidate, but there are
plenty of rivals stretching into Byzantium—as we will see in Chapter 9).
And so, in a sense, it is. At the same time, a notable change occurred un-
der the emperor Augustus, both in the generals to whom the honor was
awarded and in the frequency at which it was celebrated. After Balbus in
19 bce, no one triumphed in ancient Rome apart from the emperor
himself or, occasionally, members of his closest family. The only partial
exception is the ovation, or “lesser triumph,” awarded in 47 ce to Aulus
Plautius, the general responsible for the initial conquest of Britain—as
much a parade, no doubt, of the traditionalism of the ruling emperor
Claudius as of Plautius’ success.55
This restriction partly explains why the number of triumphs decreases
dramatically at this point. In the course of his gloating over the triumph
of the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus over the Jews in 71 ce (“a
most glorious victory over those who had offended God the Father and
Christ the Son”), the Christian historian Orosius, writing in the fifth
century ce, calculated that it was the three hundred and twentieth tri-
umphal celebration in eight centuries of Roman history. Of those 320,
only 13 took place in the hundred years after 29 bce; and of those, only
5 were staged in the ninety years following Balbus’ triumph. And during
some periods of the Empire no triumph is known for decades: in the
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
7 0
twenty-six years between the triumph of Claudius over Britain in 44
and the Jewish triumph, for example, or in the more than forty years
that separated the posthumous triumph of Trajan in 117–118 from that
of Marcus Aurelius over the Parthians in 166. It is not, however, quite
so rare as some modern miscalculations claim: only thirteen between
31 bce and 235 ce, as one particularly glaring piece of faulty arithme-
tic has it.56
For successful generals outside and sometimes inside the imperial
family, triumphal ornamenta or insignia replaced the celebration of a triumph proper and were awarded until the second century ce. It is clear
enough what these “ornaments” did not include: namely, the traditional
public procession to the Capitol, accompanied by the spoils, captives,
and victorious troops. Much less clear is what exactly they did include.
We assume, rather vaguely, that they amounted to the “paraphernalia of
a triumph,” in the sense of the distinctive triumphal toga and tunic, plus
the crown or wreath and scepter. But in fact the only direct piece of evi-
dence (a confusing description of Claudius’ triumph over Britain) may
well indicate that men granted this honor wore only the usual toga
praetexta of a magistrate.57 It is also a matter of guesswork how, and with what ceremony, they were bestowed—though they seem to have been
accompanied by the grant of a statue of the honorand in that most tri-
umphal of monuments, the Forum of Augustus.58 Second best or not,
this series of honors must have served to keep the triumph on the politi-
cal and cultural agenda, while at the same time perhaps investing the full
ceremony itself with rarity value and yet more celebrity status.
The reasons for the restriction of the triumph to the innermost impe-
rial circle are, in broad terms, obvious enough: it was not in the interests
of the new autocracy to share with the rest of the elite the fame and
prominence that a full triumphal ceremony might bring, particularly
military prominence. Modern historians have laid great emphasis on
this, writing of the “elimination” of “a major element in senatorial pub-
lic display” and of the projection of the emperor “as the sole source of
Roman military success,” while building up the triumph of Cornelius
Balbus as the swansong of the traditional ceremony.59
The Impact of the Triumph
71
In fact, the picture is more complicated. To be sure, the Fasti Capitolini
chime in with this modern orthodoxy, by ending so decisively with the
triumph of Balbus at the bottom of the final pilaster. As we shall see in
Chapter 9, ancient observers are far less emphatic or univocal than their
modern counterparts. Suetonius, for example, offers a dramatically di-
vergent view, painting the reign of Augustus as a bumper period for the
triumph.60 Several other writers do point to a change in triumphal prac-
tice around this date, but they focus on different pivotal moments and
theorize the change in a variety of different ways.61
However we resolve these details, the change in triumphal practice
has significant implications for how we read ancient descriptions of the
ceremony and ancient investigations of the rules, origins, and meaning
of the ritual. For the majority of these—including such rich accounts as
Plutarch’s description of Pompey’s triumph or Valerius Maximus’ discus-
sion of various aspects of “triumphal law”—were written not only much
later than the events which are their subject but in a period when the full
triumph in the traditional republican sense was no longer a regular sight
in the Roman streets but an element in the ceremonial of imperial mon-
archy. Some of the authors who wrote in such detail about triumphs
may never have witnessed one; almost none could have participated in
the kind of controversies that surrounded some triumphal celebrations
in the Republic.62
This disjunction between the flourishing of the “culture of the tri-
umph” (the ritual in ink) and the relative rarity of the ceremony in prac-
tice is one of the creative paradoxes that drives this book.
c h a p t e r
III
Constructions and Reconstructions
AN ACCURATE RECORD
The study of ancient history is necessarily stereoscopic. We have one eye
on how the ancients themselves understood their own culture and their
past. But at the same time, with the other eye, we are constructing our
own story; we are subjecting theirs to critical scrutiny and enjoying the
privilege of those who come later to “know better” about the past than
our predecessors. In Chapter 2 I stressed the importance of taking seri-
ously Romans’ own accounts of triumphs and their own attempts to
make sense of the history and meaning of the institution. Yet taking the
Roman view seriously is not the same as suspending all critical judg-
ment; it is not the same as imagining it to be “correct.”
The way that the ceremony was described, debated, and theorized by
the ancients themselves is an important subject of study in its own right.
But that approach must always be in dialogue with shrewd historical
skepticism and a cool suspicion about just how much the Roman writers
themselves knew about the ceremony and its history. The inscribed Fasti