whips” to decorate the phallos.29
In the final section of this chapter, I shall look in finer detail at just
two features of our standard image of the triumphal procession: the slave
Constructions and Reconstructions
85
who stood in the chariot behind the general, and the prescribed route
taken by the procession through the city to the Temple of Jupiter. My
questions are simple. How are these elements of the triumph reassem-
bled by modern historians? What gets lost in the process? What assump-
tions underlie it? The fact is that the same wealth of ancient evidence
which has encouraged the detailed reconstruction of the procession also
provides the material with which that standard reconstruction can be
challenged.
REMEMBER YOU ARE A MAN
The slave standing in the triumphal chariot behind the general, holding
a golden crown over his head and whispering “Look behind you. Re-
member you are a man” has become one of the emblematic trademarks
of the triumph. So emblematic a figure has he become, in fact, that his
role featured in the voice-over of the closing sequence of the 1970 movie
Patton—where his words, summing up the story’s moral lesson, were
more simply rendered as “All glory is fleeting.” But he has also been inte-
gral to one of the most influential modern theories of the ceremony:
that the triumphing general himself was seen as, in some way, divine (or,
more precisely, that he represented the god Jupiter). For what was the
point of warning someone that he was (only) a man, unless he was on
the verge at least of thinking of himself, or being seen, as a god?
The words of warning that I have quoted are drawn from the late-
second-century ce Christian writer Tertullian, whose reflections on the
custom are reassuringly compatible with modern explanations: “He is
reminded that he is a man even when he is triumphing, in that most ex-
alted chariot. For at his back he is given the warning: ‘Look behind you.
Remember you are a man.’ And so he rejoices all the more that he is in
such a blaze of glory that a reminder of his mortality is necessary.”
Tertullian, however, makes no mention of a slave. Nor does Jerome,
writing at the end of the fourth century ce: he repeats the phrase “Re-
member you are a man” (almost certainly borrowing it directly from this
passage of Tertullian), but he does at least refer to a “companion” of the
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
8 6
general, who traveled behind him in the chariot and muttered the key
words each time the crowds roared their acclamation.30
A handful of other ancient writers offer a similar, but not identical,
account; some of them offer very different explanations of the words
spoken; and a few hint more allusively at the slave’s role. According
to Arrian, the hard-line philosopher Epictetus saw in the reminder of
mortality (delivered by whom he does not say) a lesson in the transience
of human possessions and affections. And this pointedly philosophical
angle is possibly shared by Philostratus, who writes of the emperor
Trajan parading his pet philosopher before the city of Rome in his tri-
umphal chariot. In what could be a parody of the practice of the tri-
umph and a humorous reversal of the warning, the emperor “turns
round to him and says ‘I do not know what you are saying but I love you
as I love myself.’”31
Dio seems to have referred explicitly to the “public slave” in the char-
iot and to his repeated “Look behind you.” No mention here, though,
of “Remember you are a man,” and Dio’s interpretation of the warn-
ing strikes a rather different note. For him, if his later excerptors and
summarizers have transmitted his sense correctly, it means “Look at
what comes next in your life and do not be carried away with your pres-
ent good fortune and puffed up with pride.” Juvenal, by contrast, ex-
ploited the scene for a satiric sideswipe at the Roman elite. In describing
the procession that opened the circus games (which overlapped closely
with the triumphal procession), he hints that the mere presence of the
sweaty slave in the same chariot was enough to take the bigwig down a
peg or two.
Pliny, meanwhile, in discussing the iron ring traditionally worn by
the triumphing general, alluded to the presence of a slave but assigned
him the job of holding “the golden Tuscan crown” over the general’s
head. Elsewhere, without reference to the exact words or to who might
have spoken them, he refers to the phrase, like the phallos, as a “defense
against envy”—or, in the primitive gloss that some modern translators
choose to put on it, “protection against the evil-eye.” His sense here is
hard to fathom, partly because the text itself is now corrupt and exactly
Constructions and Reconstructions
87
what Pliny originally wrote is difficult to reconstruct. But he seems to
have suggested, in extravagant terms, that the words were intended to
“win over Fortune, the executioner of glory” (Fortuna gloriae carnifex).
Confusing enough for us—and it certainly confused Isidore, Bishop of
Seville, who drew heavily on Pliny in the compilation of his own multi-
volume encyclopedia in the seventh century ce. In a memorable piece of
creative misunderstanding, Isidore has “an executioner” (carnifex) in-
stead of the slave in the chariot—a particularly gruesome warning of the
“humble mortal status” of the general.32
The implications of all this are clear enough. First, the standard claim
that “a slave stood behind the general in his chariot and repeated the
words ‘Look behind you. Remember you are a man’” is the result of
stitching together different strands of evidence. No ancient writer pre-
sents that whole picture. Jerome is perhaps the closest, with half the
full phrase and a “companion” in the chariot. Otherwise, Tertullian’s
quotation, broadly confirmed by Epictetus and, on a generous reading,
Philostratus and Pliny, must be combined with the testimony of Dio,
Juvenal, and Pliny again on the presence of the slave (even though Dio
offers a rather different form of the words spoken, and Juvenal says
nothing about them at all—and is, in any case, describing the circus
procession, not the triumph!).
Second, each of these different strands of evidence comes from a dif-
ferent date and context. None is earlier than the middle of the first cen-
tury ce. Only Dio (albeit writing in the third century ce and filtered
through much later Byzantine paraphrases) is offering a description of
triumphal practice. The rest are conscripting the symbols of triumph
into second-order theorizing or moralizing; even Pliny’s reference to the
use of an iron ring in the triumph is prompted by his lamentations over
the decadence and corruption of gold (“A terrible crime against human-
ity was committed by the man who first put gold on his fingers”).
Several are driven by a distinctive ideological agenda. For Juvenal, the
slave is invoked as a weapon against aristocratic pride; for Jerome, the
general’s “companion” provides an analogy for Christian reminders of
human frailty. But Tertullian provides the most glaringly partisan exam-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
8 8
ple. For he quotes the words in the context of a Christian attack on the
idea that the Roman emperor was a god. The triumphing general he