has in mind is the emperor; and, using that standard Christian tactic
of twisting pagan practice to convict itself, he trumpets the words “Re-
member you are a man” as a clinching argument for the emperor’s
mortality. Where Tertullian picked up this piece of triumphal custom
we do not know. There is no clear evidence that he ever went to Rome,
still less that he witnessed a triumph.33 But he would certainly have been
horrified to think that his comments were used to support any argument
that the general represented the pagan Jupiter.
The picture becomes even more puzzling if we include the visual evi-
dence for the triumphal procession. On the diminutive triumph that
decorates the silver cup from Boscoreale, we see a plausible figure of a
slave standing behind Tiberius in his chariot, holding a crown or wreath
over his head (see Fig. 11). He appears again on a fragment of a sub-
stantial relief sculpture from Praeneste (Palestrina), apparently show-
ing a triumph of the emperor Trajan (Fig. 17).34 But with the exception
of a solitary clay plaque and possibly a lost sarcophagus of the late Em-
pire (known from Renaissance drawings) that depicted the “triumphal”
opening of the circus games (see Fig. 35), there is no trace of the slave on
any other visual representation of the ceremony.35
It is not that he is simply omitted (though that is sometimes the case).
More often his place is taken by the entirely imaginary figure of a
winged Victory.36 It is she, for example, who stands in the chariot and
crowns Titus on his Arch (see Fig. 8), Trajan on the Beneventum frieze
(see Fig. 10), and Marcus Aurelius on the triumphal panel now in the
Capitoline Museum (see Fig. 31). Augustus had this treatment too, more
than once, to judge from that solitary female foot found in the Forum of
Augustus and a coin that depicts an arch topped by a triumphal chariot,
and Victory on board with (presumably) the emperor (Fig. 18).37 On
other coins she is shown swooping in from the skies to crown the gen-
eral (or zooming off again).38 But again there is no sign of the slave, nor
does he appear on what is often taken to be the very earliest coin repre-
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 17:
Part of a relief panel from Praeneste (Palestrina) showing the emperor Trajan
(98–117 ce) in triumph; the right-hand section is lost. The emperor—recognizable by his distinctive features and hairstyle—is accompanied in the chariot by a slave who holds a large, jeweled crown over his head.
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R o m a n Tr i u m p h
9 0
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 18:
Gold coin ( aureus) minted 17–16 bce to celebrate Augustus’ road repairs—commemorating, in particular, the arches erected in honor of his restoration of the Via Flaminia. On top of the arch is a statue of Augustus, riding in a chariot pulled by a pair of elephants and crowned by a winged figure of Victory.
sentation of a historical triumph, commemorating Marius’ triumph in
101 bce (Fig. 19).39
This is an extraordinary discrepancy between the texts and (most) im-
ages. We are not simply dealing with different conventions of represen-
tation in different media, textual and visual. That is no doubt part of it.
But the problem is that the “message” of the different representations of
the triumphal scene is so entirely contradictory. If the figure of the slave
and his words of warning acted in some sense to humble the general at
his triumph or to draw the sting of what might be seen as his excessive
glory, putting the figure of Victory in his place signaled precisely the re-
verse: it showed the crowning of the general by the divine agent of the
gods, a shameless display of power, honor, and prestige.
This contradiction has proved impossible to solve. The few modern
attempts to make sense of it are frankly unconvincing. The idea, for ex-
ample, that the replacement of the slave by a Victory reflects a historical
development of the ceremony, from a primitive religious ritual (where
such ideas as the “evil eye” were taken seriously) to a naked display of
power and success, flies directly in the face of the pattern of the evi-
dence. In strictly chronological terms, Victory is attested long before the
Constructions and Reconstructions
91
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 19:
Reverse design of a silver denarius minted in 101 bce, commemorating Marius’
triumph of that year. The general in his chariot is accompanied by a horse and rider, probably Marius’ son.
slave; but, in any case, the contrast is much more one of medium and
context than of date.40
Nor is it clear what lies behind those rare occasions when the slave is
depicted in visual images.41 In fact, a closer look at the relief from
Praeneste uncovers some absurd paradoxes. If, as has been argued, the
triumph in question on that sculpture is Trajan’s posthumous celebra-
tion of 117–118 ce, then (on a literal reading) we are being asked to imag-
ine the slave uttering his warnings of mortality to the dummy of an em-
peror who is already dead—and about to become, pace Tertullian, a
god.42 We do better, I suspect, to celebrate rather than explain (away) the
contradictions, and to see them rather as a reflection of different ancient
“ways of seeing” the triumph and different conceptions of the position
of the general and the nature of military glory.
These issues bring us face to face with the fragility of the “facts of the
triumph.” The slave, with his warning for the general, certainly has
some part in the history of the ritual. But there is nothing to prove that
he was the original, permanent, and unchanging fixture in the ceremony
as performed that he is often assumed to be. Besides, different versions
of his words were clearly current, and they were interpreted in different
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ways. Even supposing he were a constant presence in the procession, his
role could be emphasized, effaced, or substituted according to different
priorities of representation and interpretation. If the slave holds a warn-
ing for us, it is of the risks we run in attempting to turn all these various versions of the triumph in art and literature—the moralizing turns, the
Christian polemic, the glorifying images, the anthropological specula-
tion—back into ritual practice.
PLOTTING THE ROUTE
The triumphal route, from its starting point somewhere outside the
sacred boundary (pomerium) of the city to its culmination on the
Capitoline hill, offers a different but no less revealing angle on the pro-
cesses of historical reconstruction that underlie most modern accounts
of the ceremony. Over the centuries of triumphal scholarship this aspect
has generated considerably more controversy than the figure of the slave.
Admittedly, only a few historians have ever contested the basic princi-
ple that there was a prescribed route for the procession. There is a broad consensus too that a better understanding of the path it took might
well lead to a better understanding of the triumph as a whole. The
meaning of a procession, as several studies in the Greek world have
shown, regularly “feeds off ” the buildings and landscapes by which it
passes. The overall shape of the route too might offer an indication of