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79
ready seen, noting the fifty-two enemy leaders led before the general’s
chariot, the wagonloads of coin, weapons, and precious metals, and the
songs chanted by the victorious troops, as well as lingering on its moral
consequences; yet the historian Florus explicitly states this triumph was
requested by Vulso but refused.17
An instructive case is the disputed triumphal career of Lucius
Aemilius Paullus, whose three-day triumph in 167 over King Perseus of
Macedonia was later written up almost as extravagantly as Pompey’s of
61. But how many triumphs did Paullus celebrate? We can identify this
one and an earlier celebration in 181 bce, for victory over the Ligurians
of north Italy. Both of these, and these only, were recorded on the in-
scription beneath the statue of Paullus that stood among the republican
worthies in the Forum of Augustus.18
Yet we find a different story in the inscription accompanying another
statue of Paullus put up by one of his descendants in the mid-50s bce to
embellish the so-called Fornix Fabianus in the Forum—an arch origi-
nally erected in 121 bce to commemorate the victories of Paullus’ grand-
son, Quintus Fabius Maximus Allobrogicus. Here, Paullus is clearly
stated to have “triumphed three times.”19 This second tradition is fol-
lowed by Velleius Paterculus, in his history of Rome written during the
reign of the emperor Tiberius. Before his great triumph over Perseus,
Paullus had, Velleius states, “triumphed both as praetor and as consul.”20
Paullus was praetor in 191, when he campaigned in Spain; but there is
certainly no space for such a triumph in the Fasti, which indeed explic-
itly marks the triumph of 167 as his second.
This is very likely an example of an “invented triumph.” We cannot
be absolutely certain that a triumphal celebration in 191 has not fallen
out of the mainstream of the historical record. But more likely, within
the traditions of family loyalty, exaggeration, and hype (as represented
on what is effectively a dynastic monument of Paullus’ family), two tri-
umphs were massaged into three; at some point, too, an appropriate
campaign, in Spain, was found to fit the fictive triumph. And as Cicero
and Livy feared, the invention got a foothold, even if a precarious one,
in the historical narrative of Paullus’ career. If so, this is a rare instance
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
8 0
where we not only suspect invention but can see its process in action,
largely because of its relatively late date; earlier inventions presumably
became so established in the triumphal record that they are no longer
easily identifiable as such.21
That late date is in itself striking, for the second century bce is well
within the period when the historicity of recorded triumphs in general
seems hardly to be in doubt. It serves as a powerful reminder that the in-
centives to embellish triumphal careers did not stop even at a time when
the historical narrative was more carefully policed. It is also a warning
that no firm chronological line can be drawn between a period of “myth-
ical” and one of “historical” triumphs. Although the record of the late
Republic reflects the historical sequence of triumphs celebrated much
more closely than that of the early Republic, there was never a period
when distortion of all kinds—from wishful thinking to subtle readjust-
ments—was entirely off the agenda.
We cannot now reconstruct the processes of compilation, reading, or
research that lay behind the finished inscribed text of the Fasti Capitolini.
We can only guess at its relationship with the literary records of trium-
phal history embedded in the writing of Livy, Dionysius, and their lost
predecessors. We can often do little to explain or resolve the discrepan-
cies between the various sources of evidence. It is clear nevertheless that
underneath the self-confident parade of triumphs from Romulus to
Balbus lurked more controversy, dispute, and uncertainty than immedi-
ately meets the eye. Of course, part of the point of the inscription was
precisely to create such a public orthodoxy, to mask the conflicts and to
exclude the variants. In that sense it tried to monopolize the history of
the triumph and is about the most spectacular example of triumphal
ideology to survive. One of the tasks of a modern historian must be to
question the version of history offered by the Fasti, and expose the self-
serving myths, the uncertainties, and half-truths within.
RECONSTRUCTING A RITUAL
Nostalgia, anachronism, exaggeration, creative invention, scrupulous ac-
curacy—all these, in different combinations, determined how individual
Constructions and Reconstructions
81
triumphs were written up by ancient authors. Yet the particular appeal
of this ceremony for scholars since the Renaissance has, nevertheless,
been the sense that the richness of the ancient evidence does allow us for
once to reconstruct the programme of a major Roman ritual in its en-
tirety. Ask the question: “What happened at the Lupercalia, or the
Parilia?” and the answer will come down to the one or two picturesque
details: the dash round the city at the Lupercalia; the bonfire-leaping at
the Parilia. We could not hope to give any kind of coherent narrative of
the festivals. Even the inscribed records of the Arval Brethren mostly
give a relatively spare account of the annual ritual of Dea Dia.22
In the case of the triumph, by contrast, thanks to a host of ancient
references to location and context, participants and procedures, it has
been possible to sketch out a richly detailed “order of ceremonies,” from
beginning to end. In fact, at the center of most modern discussions of
the triumph, for all their differences in interpretation and their different
theories on triumphal origins and meaning, lies a generally agreed pic-
ture of “what happened” in the ceremony, at least in its developed form.
It looks something like this:23
The triumphal party assembled early in the morning on the Campus
Martius (outside the sacred boundary of the city, the pomerium), from
where the procession set off on a prescribed route that was to lead through
the so-called “Triumphal Gate”, on past the cheering crowds in the Cir-
cus Maximus, through the Forum to culminate on the Capitoline hill.
The procession was divided into three parts. The first included the
spoils carried on wagons or shoulder-high on portable stretchers (fercula);
the paintings and models of conquered territory and battles fought; the
golden crowns sent by allies or conquered peoples to the victorious gen-
eral; the animals that were to be sacrificed, trumpeters and dancers; plus
the captives in chains, the most important of them directly in front of the
general’s chariot.
The second part was the group around the general himself. He stood in
a special horse-drawn chariot, sometimes expensively decorated with gold
and ivory, with a phallos hanging beneath it (to avert the evil eye); his
face painted red, he was dressed in an elaborate costume, a laurel crown,
an embroidered tunic (tunica palmata) and a luxurious toga (originally of
purple, toga purpurea, later decorated with golden stars, toga picta); and in one hand he held an ivory scepter, in the other a branch of laurel. Behind