the war against Hannibal. He probably had in mind the precedent of
Ennius, the “Father of Roman Poetry.” Although only a few hundred
The Impact of the Triumph
43
lines survive of Ennius’ great epic on Roman history, the Annales, its
final book very likely featured the triumph of his patron, Marcus Fulvius
Nobilior, in 187 bce.2 Completely imaginary celebrations added to the
picture, as writers retrojected the triumph back into the world of Greek
history and myth, to honor the likes of Alexander the Great and the god
Bacchus. In a particularly striking piece of Romanization, at the end of
his epic on the legends of the Greek city of Thebes (the Thebaid), Statius
invents a Roman-style triumph for the Athenian king Theseus after his
victory over that classic symbol of female barbarity, the Amazons. The
king rides through the streets, to the cheers of the crowd, in a chariot
decked with laurel and pulled by four white horses; in front stream the
captives, the spoils, and the weapons taken from enemy, carried shoul-
der-high. But there is a twist. In this story, the enemy leader is under no
threat of execution as the procession reaches its end; Hippolyte, the Am-
azon queen, is Theseus’, her conqueror’s, bride.3
Monuments depicting or commemorating triumphs came to domi-
nate the cityscape of Rome; some of them still do. The Arch of Titus,
erected in the early 80s ce, is a highlight of the modern tourist trail, be-
ing one of the few monuments in the Roman Forum to remain standing
to its full height (albeit with the help of a radical rebuild in the early
nineteenth century). In its passageway are two sculptured panels with
the most evocative images of the triumph to have survived from antiq-
uity. On one side, Titus in his chariot celebrates his triumph over the
Jews, held jointly with his father Vespasian, after the sack of Jerusalem in
70 (Fig. 8). On the other side, the booty from the Temple, including
the distinctive menorah, is carried shoulder-high in procession through
Rome (Fig. 9).4 The triumphal imagery of other buildings we may re-
construct from fainter traces, combined with ancient descriptions.
The Forum of Augustus, for example—the showpiece monument of
Rome’s first emperor and a match for Pompey’s theater-complex in gran-
deur, if not in size—seems to have been packed with allusions to tri-
umph. It too was built from the profits of successful campaigns (ex
manubiis). In the center of its great piazza stood a four-horse triumphal
chariot or quadriga, possibly carrying a statue of Augustus himself along
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
4 4
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 8:
The triumphal procession in 71 ce of the future emperor Titus, from the pas-
sageway of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. A typically Roman combination of
documentary realism and idealizing fantasy: Titus stands in his chariot, crowned by a winged Victory; in front, another female figure (perhaps the goddess Roma, or “Virtue”) leads the horses. The fasces, Roman rods of office, fill the background.
with a figure of Victoria, the personification of victory (or so an elegant
bronze female foot found on the site has been taken to suggest). Statues
of heroes of the Republic lined the colonnades, each one (according to
Suetonius) “in triumphal guise.” And, in a classic instance of a Greek
subject being reinterpreted in Roman triumphal terms, two famous old
masters by the fourth-century bce painter Apelles showing “War as a
captive”—or, according to another writer, “Madness”—“hands bound
behind his back, and Alexander triumphing on a chariot.” As if to drive
the point home, the emperor Claudius later had the face of Alexander
cut out and Augustus’ substituted.5
Outside Rome too there were plenty of visual reminders of triumphs.
One of the most spectacular must have been the vast monument over-
The Impact of the Triumph
45
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 9:
The procession of triumphal spoils from the passageway of the Arch of Titus
(facing Fig. 8). The sacred treasures of the Jews, taken by the Romans at the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, are paraded through the streets: in the center the menorah, to the right the Table of Shewbread. The placards identify the objects or record the details of the victory.
looking the site of the battle of Actium, on the northwest coast of
Greece, which commemorated the defeat there in 31 bce of Antony and
Cleopatra and the founding moment of Augustus’ domination of the
Roman world. Here, recent excavations have brought to light thousands
of fragments of marble sculpture, which make up an elaborately detailed
sculptural narrative of the triumph that followed in 29. If one of the
functions of the triumphal procession was, as Polybius had it, to bring
the successes of battle before the eyes of the people in Rome, at Actium
that process was reversed: the triumph was replayed in marble on the site
of the battle.6
A more familiar sight on the Roman landscape were the so-called “tri-
umphal arches” which by the first century ce had become a characteris-
tic marker of Roman presence and power across the Empire, from Brit-
ain to Syria. Most of these had a less direct connection with triumphal
celebrations than their modern title implies (the term arcus triumphalis
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
4 6
is not known in Latin until the third century ce). They were built to
commemorate particular events, to honor individual members of the
imperial family, or, earlier, to vaunt the prestige of republican aristocrats.
We know, for example, of a series of three arches decreed in honor of the
imperial prince Germanicus after his death in 19 ce. The important fact
is not that such arches regularly commemorated triumphs (though some
did), but—in a sense, the other way round—that they used the imagery
of triumphal celebrations as part of their own rhetoric of power.
Triumphal chariots once perched on the tops of many arches, while
the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (modern Benevento) in south Italy,
built in 114 ce to mark the construction of the road between Brindisi
and Rome, incorporates a miniature frieze showing a triumphal proces-
sion that winds its way around all four sides of the monument (Fig. 10).7
But the triumph was commemorated not only in these great piles of
masonry; the ceremony invaded domestic space too. We know of one
anonymous grandee, the proprietor of a villa outside Pompeii that was
destroyed in the eruption of 79 ce, who must regularly have faced up
to the triumph at his dinner table. For the design of one of the exquisite
silver cups from the famous dinner service discovered at Boscoreale
features a triumphing general—almost certainly the future emperor
Tiberius—with his retinue, standing proud in his triumphal chariot
(Fig. 11).8
The impact of the triumph was not confined to the realm of imperial-
ist geopolitics or military history; it extended far beyond the general, his
friends and rivals among the Roman elite, the victorious soldiers and the
noble, or pathetic, captives dragged along in the procession. To be sure,
these figures enjoy the spotlight in most ancient accounts of the cere-
mony. But, as with all such public ceremonials at any period of history,