The rabbit out of the hat is a short poem by Martial celebrating a new
Temple of Fortuna Redux (“Fortune the Home-Bringer”) erected by his
patron the emperor Domitian after his return (hence “Home-Bringer”)
from wars in Germany, and a new arch to go with it nearby. The poem
opens with the temple built on what was “till now an open space”; and
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then Martial turns to the arch “standing exultant over subjugated na-
tions . . . with twin chariots numbering many an elephant”; it is, as the
poet insists, “a gate (porta) worthy of the emperor’s triumphs” and a
fitting “entrance way to the city of Mars.” Where exactly was this tem-
ple? The temptation to see it as a reconstruction of an old Temple of
Fortuna that stood near the Porta Carmentalis has proved almost irre-
sistible (despite the fact that Martial strongly suggests that his temple
was entirely new and built on open ground, not a reconstruction). Be-
cause if that were the case, the adjacent arch could be seen as a rebuild of
the porta triumphalis, this time as a free-standing structure.56
Why stretch the argument to such tenuous lengths? Because if the
theory is correct, the pay-off is rich. For the poem describes this arch in
some detail, as topped by a pair of chariots pulled by elephants, plus a
golden figure of the emperor. This can be matched up not only to an
image on a Domitianic coin but also to an elephant-topped arch in vari-
ous scenes in later Roman commemorative sculpture. In other words,
the porta triumphalis which risked being a hazy phenomenon, docu-
mented allusively by a couple of ancient writers and of entirely uncer-
tain form, has not merely been located but been given concrete form be-
fore our very eyes.57
We may judge these arguments and identifications a brilliant series of
deductions, a perilous house of cards, or a tissue of (at best) half truths
and (at worst) outright misrepresentations and misreadings. But im-
pressed or not, we will find it hard to reconcile this reconstruction of the
triumphal gate and its location with the single surviving piece of ancient
literary evidence that provides an explicit context for the gate in the to-
pography of the city. For, if we return to Josephus, we find that he gives
clear directions to it in the itinerary taken by Vespasian and Titus at the
start of their procession. After addressing the assembled company in
the Porticus of Octavia, Vespasian “went back to the gate which took
its name from the fact that triumphs always pass through it.” It is dif-
ficult to see how anyone could describe movement from the Porticus to
the Porta Carmentalis as “going back,” when the start of the journey had
been further north near the Temple of Isis.58 The text would seem to in-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
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dicate that the gate was, as several earlier scholars suggested, “back”
toward the beginning of the route that Vespasian and Titus had taken
from the Isiac temple. Turning the Porta Carmentalis into the porta
triumphalis demands sidelining this particular detail of Josephus’
account.59
Whatever we decide about the gate, we must still face the question of
just how accurate a template in general the road map provided by
Josephus is. In particular, how correct is the common assumption that
Josephus’ route reflects the traditional pattern of behavior if not of all
triumphing generals (what happened before the definition of the early
city wall and its gates must be anyone’s guess) then at least of those from
the mid-Republic on? Filippo Coarelli takes a strong line in his own in-
fluential attempt to plot the route, claiming that Vespasian and Titus
were “preoccupied with following exactly the forms of the most ancient
ritual.”60 Josephus certainly, as Coarelli points out, glosses the porta
triumphalis as the gate through which triumphal processions “always”
pass; and he writes of Vespasian uttering the “customary” prayers.
Leaving aside the question of how on earth Josephus knew what was
customary (so far as we know the last triumph had been some twenty-
five years earlier and Josephus had been in Judaea anyway), it takes only
a moment’s reflection to see that this was not a traditional triumph, fol-
lowing the most ancient rules, at all.
Not only was the culminating location of the ceremony, the Temple
of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, still a pile of rubble after its complete de-
struction during the recent civil war (the final sacrifices must have been
carried out amidst the devastation).61 But also, unless we are to imagine
that both Vespasian and Titus had carefully avoided the center of the
city—the Palatine and Forum—since their arrival back in Rome from
the East (and all the evidence, Josephus included, is that they had not),
then, like other triumphing emperors, they had certainly flouted the re-
publican tradition that the general should remain outside the pomerium
until the ceremony.62 As anthropologists have long since shown, per-
forming a ritual “just as our ancestors have always done” is never exactly
that. It is always a mixture of scrupulous attention to precedent, conve-
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101
nient amnesia, and the “invention of tradition.” The triumph of 71
can have been no different; though it is now impossible for us, given
the evidence we have (and it may well have been just as tricky for
Josephus), to disentangle the various constituent strands of innovation
and conservatism.
SIGNIFICANT DEVIATIONS
Similar issues undermine most attempts to map the rest of the trium-
phal route (and indeed to reconstruct the ceremony as a whole). From
the point the procession goes through the triumphal gate and on through
“the theaters” (and which theaters, of course, depends on where you put
the gate), there is no narrative such as Josephus provides, and no clear
markers on the ground. Some commemorative arches were probably
planned with proximity to the procession in mind, some equally cer-
tainly were not (and it is not always easy to decide which falls into which
category). The title via triumphalis, which used to be attributed to the
modern Via S. Gregorio, running between the Colosseum and the great
fountain known as the Septizodium (see Plan), is an entirely modern
coinage. In antiquity itself via triumphalis was actually the name given
to a road outside the city, on the right bank of the Tiber, leading to
south Etruria (and its connection with the ceremony of triumph, if
any, is a matter of guesswork).63 Essentially, the method that has been
adopted in tracing the route is one of connecting the dots, that is, plot-
ting all the scattered topographical references to points on any trium-
phal procession, at any period and in any author, and then drawing a
line between them, on the assumption that the triumph took a single or-
thodox route throughout Roman history, notwithstanding the changing
face of the city’s monuments and other new buildings.
One dot goes in the Forum Boarium, where the statue of Hercules
stood; according to Pliny, it was dressed up in triumphal costume on the
days of the procession. Another dot pinpoints the Circus Maximus, for
Plutarch writes of the people watching the triumph of Aemilius Paullus