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him in the chariot stood a slave, holding a golden crown over his head,
and whispering to him throughout the procession, “Look behind you.
Remember you are a man”. His children went with him, either in the
chariot itself if they were small, or on horseback alongside. Behind the
chariot came his leading officers and Roman citizens he had freed from
slavery, wearing “caps of liberty”.
The final part was made up of the victorious soldiers, wearing laurel
wreaths and chanting the ritual triumphal cry of “io triumpe”, inter-
spersed with those ribald songs about the general himself.
When they reached the foot of the Capitoline, some of the leading cap-
tives might have been taken off for execution; the rest of the procession
made its way up to the Temple of Jupiter. There the animals were sacri-
ficed to the god and other offerings were made by the general, before
feasts were laid on for the senate on the Capitol, and elsewhere in the city
for soldiers and people. At the end of the day, the (presumably exhausted)
general was given a musical escort back home.
Many of the elements of this reconstruction will already be recogniz-
able from the ancient discussions of Pompey’s triumph. Indeed, every
single part of it is attested in Roman literature or the visual arts—in
some cases many times over. It captures an image of the triumph that is
embedded in all modern literature on the subject, this book no less than
others. And it is an image that would no doubt strike a chord with
Romans themselves (unsurprisingly perhaps, as it is directly drawn from
ancient material). In comparison with the usual games of hypothesis,
guesswork, hunch, and “filling the gaps” that lie behind most ancient
historical reconstruction, this must count as uniquely well documented.
At the same time, it is grossly misleading. In a sense, all such general-
izations always are. Any attempt to sum up a thousand years of ritual
practice must involve drastic processes of selection, and the smoothing
out of inconsistencies; it must consistently ungarble the garbled evi-
dence and systematize the messy improvisations and the day-to-day
changes that inevitably characterize ritual as practiced, even in the most
conservative and tightly regulated society.24 It takes only a few moments’
reflection to realize that dozens and dozens of triumphal ceremonies
must have matched up to this standard template in only some respects.
The lavish displays of booty, for example, can only have become an op-
Constructions and Reconstructions
83
tion at a relatively late stage, when Rome was involved in lucrative for-
eign wars. And however much the literary tradition may have magnified
even modest ceremonies, small-scale triumphs with little on show, only
a few accompanying soldiers hardly raising a ribald song, and an unim-
pressive handful of captives no doubt easily outnumbered the block-
buster occasions celebrating the conquests of Pompey, Aemilius Paullus,
or Titus and Vespasian. Lucius Postumius Megellus, for example, who
celebrated a triumph in 294 bce, the very next day after he had put his
case to the senate, would hardly have had time to get a lavish show on
the road (unless it had all been prepared in advance).25
But simplification is precisely what generalizations are for. The price
we pay for highlighting the structure is the loss of difference and the rich
particularity of each occasion. This is no better or worse than modern
generalizations about the procedures at, for example, funerals or church
weddings. The claim that “the bride wears white” remains true at a cer-
tain level, no matter how many women choose to take themselves down
the aisle in pastel peach or flaming red.
The problems, however, run deeper than that. The very familiarity of
this reconstruction of the Roman triumph (from Mantegna’s Triumphs
of Caesar to the film Quo Vadis) and its confident repetition by historians over the last half millennium have tended to disguise the fragil-
ity, or occasionally the implausibility, of some of its most distinctive ele-
ments. What kind of balancing act, for example, would be required of a
general simply to stay upright in a horse-drawn chariot traveling over
the bumpy Roman streets, both hands full with a scepter and laurel
branch, sharing the ride with a couple of children and the obligatory
slave? Scratch the surface of some of the most central “facts” about the
triumph and an uncomfortable surprise may be in store.
The notorious phallos, for example, hanging under the triumphal
chariot (or “slung beneath” it, as more than one distinguished historian
has recently put it, obviously envisaging a sizeable object) turns out to
be much harder to track down than is usually implied. It is not a major
element in any of the ancient discussions of the triumph, and it is never
depicted in any of the numerous visual representations of the triumphal
chariot we have. In fact, in the whole of surviving ancient literature it
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is mentioned precisely once: in Pliny’s encyclopedic Naturalis Historia
(Natural History). 26 It could be, of course, that Pliny has done us the
greatest good turn in preserving this crucial piece of evidence, over
which our other sources of information have drawn a polite veil. Plenty
of respectable theories about Roman culture are based on a single pass-
ing reference in Pliny, after all; and many modern historians would take
pride in their ability to rescue and deploy such apparently curious pieces
of information. Nevertheless, Pliny’s isolated remark remains a long way
from the confident assertion that “a phallos hung beneath the triumphal
chariot.” You would need a very strong commitment to the idea that
Roman ritual never changed and that a single instance was by definition
typical (once a phallos, always a phallos) to bridge that gap.
The same is true for several other elements in the reconstruction: the
golden stars on the triumphal toga (known only from Appian’s descrip-
tion of the triumph of Scipio); the historical development from toga
purpurea to toga picta (no more than a learned deduction noted by
Festus in the second century ce); the red-painted face (more widely at-
tested; but Pliny, who is again our main source of evidence, actually re-
fers to something more disturbingly exotic—a red painted body).27
Conversely, a blind eye is consistently turned to some of the less con-
venient records of triumphal custom. Although we are happy to rely,
when it suits our purposes, on the Byzantine historians who preserved
the gist of the lost sections of Dio, we steer very clear when it does
not. John Tzetzes’ claim, for example, that the triumphing general ran
around the “place” (presumably the Capitoline temple) three times be-
fore dedicating his garland has not entered our tradition of the tri-
umph.28 The “bell and whip” which—according to several Byzantine
historians, almost certainly drawing on Dio—hung on the triumphal
chariot usually lose out to the much more intriguing and satisfyingly
primitive, even if no better attested, phallos, though one modern com-
mentator has dreamed up the economical solution of using “bells and