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some twenty-seven of the Capuan senate to join him in drinking poison.
“I shall not be bound and dragged through the city of Rome as a specta-
cle in a triumph” are the words that Livy put in his mouth.16 There are
hints too that similar sentiments were sometimes ascribed to Zenobia,
the queen of Palmyra, whose territorial expansion in the East (at Rome’s
expense) was quashed by the emperor Aurelian in 272 ce. Various stories
were told of what happened to Zenobia after her defeat. According to
some writers she was paraded in Aurelian’s triumph; but the historian
Zosimus records the tradition that she died on the way back to Rome,
either from illness or self-imposed starvation. Again, we are meant to in-
fer, this might have been suicide to preempt the humiliation of the tri-
umphal procession.17
An obvious explanation for this series of look-alike incidents is that
they are all reappropriations of the original story of Cleopatra. Zenobia,
in the literary tradition at least, was often seen as a warrior queen closely
on the model of Cleopatra. One ancient biography alleges that she
claimed descent from the Egyptian queen herself, even using some of
the banqueting vessels that had once belonged to Cleopatra, while
dressed—as if to add another anti-Roman queen to her repertoire—
in the cloak of Dido.18 It is hardly surprising that some versions of the
story cast her death too in Cleopatran colors. Appian and Livy were also
writing after Cleopatra’s defeat, even if their subjects, Mithradates and
Virrius, predated her by decades or centuries. It would be a nice exam-
ple of the complexity of triumphal chronology, of the mismatch be-
tween the chronology of the celebrations themselves and that of their
literary representations, to imagine the ancient writers retrojecting a
(true) Cleopatran story back onto earlier captives facing the prospect of
a triumphal parade.
In fact, however, the story of Cleopatra is not the first to suggest
death as an option preferable to a parade through the streets of Rome.
We can trace the idea of defiant suicide back to the late Republic in an
anecdote about Aemilius Paullus and his triumph over the Macedonian
King Perseus in 167 bce. The king is said to have begged not to be pa-
raded in the triumphal procession; Paullus to have taunted him in reply
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117
with the “Cleopatran solution.” The matter had been, the victor ob-
served, in Perseus’ power; if he had wished to avoid that disgrace, he
could always have killed himself. We have no reason to suppose that this
is a more genuine exchange than any of the words ascribed to triumphal
victims. But that is not the point. For while this particular anecdote is
recounted twice by Plutarch in the early second century ce, it also used
by Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes (Tusculan Disputations) as an
example of how one might escape from suffering—almost fifteen years
before the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium.19
We are dealing then with something more significant in the long his-
tory of Roman triumphal culture than an elusive glimpse of a genuine
captive’s perspective on his or her own predicament. Whatever those
feelings were, the repeated stress on the suicide of the noble prisoner is
part of that ambivalent power struggle between victor and victim that
lies embedded at the center of the triumph and its representations. On
the one hand, so the narrative logic runs, Cleopatra—or Mithradates, or
whoever— did snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by the (reported)
act of suicide. Their death deprived their conqueror of the clearest proof
of his victory. As one recent account has it, “Cleopatra’s suicide . . . de-
nied to the triumph of 29 bc her physical presence as an assured token of
. . . submission”; the female prisoner thwarted the ambitions of the
general, trumped his military might, by removing her body from his
control.20
On the other hand, these stories also celebrated the inexorable power
of Roman conquest and triumph. As Paullus pointedly reminded Perseus,
there was no escape but death; this was a zero-sum game in which for
the victim the price of reclaiming victory was self-annihilation. This was
a logic that lurked also behind those triumphal processions in which the
living prisoners were on show. They offered not only proof of their own
submission; in the high stakes of triumphal competition they also dem-
onstrated the capacity of Roman power to serve up its victims to the
public gaze. The bottom line of the “Cleopatran solution” is that Ro-
man power correlated with its ability to parade those proudly defeated
monarchs in the center of Rome itself; their only escape, death.
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FACTS AND FIGURES
As the complexities of these apparently simple stories must hint, many
of the basic “facts” and practical details about triumphal prisoners are
hard, if not impossible, to pin down. Even for triumphs in relatively
well-documented periods, the question of how many captives were on
display on any occasion is difficult to answer with any confidence. An-
cient figures—especially, but not only, when they concern battle casual-
ties or other tokens of Roman military success—are notoriously unreli-
able.21 But very few of the ancient literary accounts hazard a number at
all, except (suspiciously) for a handful of early triumphs, where we read
of round numbers in the thousands.
The maximum is the 8,000 claimed by Eutropius (writing more than
half a millennium after the event) for the prisoners paraded in 356 bce in
a triumph over the Etruscans. This is followed by Dionysius’ total of
5,500 for a procession at the start of the fifth century bce and Livy’s re-
cord of 4,000 captives at the triumph of Marcus Valerius Corvus over
the town of Satricum in 346 bce, who were subsequently sold.22 Ac-
counts of later triumphs, if they quantify the prisoners at all, tend to re-
fer only to “lots of them” (as in Appian’s account of a “host” of captives
and pirates in Pompey’s parade in 61). Occasionally they note the com-
plete absence of captives on display. So it was in 167 bce, for example, at
the triumph of Cnaeus Octavius, who had scored a naval victory in the
war against King Perseus. “Minus captives, minus spoils,” as Livy re-
marks: Octavius had been upstaged by the triumph of Aemilius Paullus
which took place the day before, with its impressive complement of
booty and prisoners.23
The usual assumption—based, as so often, on common sense, backed
up by passing references in ancient authors where they happen to fit—is
that, by the time the Romans were fighting at any distance from home,
only a selection of those captured in war were normally brought back
to decorate a triumph. The majority would have been disposed of, most
commonly sold off as slaves, near the war zone and would have figured
in the triumph only in the form of the cash their sale raised.24 The
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119
general would have had to strike a balance between creating a powerful
impression on the day and the expense, inconvenience, and practical
difficulties of transporting, feeding, guarding, and managing a large
number of unwilling captives. In fact, we have no idea how any of those
arrangements were handled. Where, for example, were the mass of pris-