Roman people triumphed over him as if over a real king.”35 Unsurpris-
ingly, this stereotype makes its mark on entirely mythic celebrations too.
The Christian writer Lactantius refers to some poem (now lost) on the
triumph of Cupid, on the model perhaps of Ovid’s treatment of that
theme—except that here it is Jupiter, the king of the gods, who is the
chief victim, led in chains in front of the triumphal chariot.36
If not royal, then the best triumphal prisoners were at least exotic and
recognizably foreign. Pompey’s captives in his procession of 61 bce—pi-
rates as well as the Eastern princes and generals—were said to be kitted
out in their native costume. Even better still, literary invention or not,
was the parade of the conquered in the triumph over Zenobia in 274 ce.
As often, the semi-fictional excesses of late Roman biography expose
some important truths at the heart of Roman culture. Here, in the biog-
rapher’s account of Aurelian’s procession, we read first of a marvelous
roster of foreign prisoners: “Blemmyes, Axiomitae, Arabs from Arabia
Felix, Indians, Bactrians, Hiberians, Saracens, Persians, all bearing gifts;
Goths, Alani, Roxolani, Sarmatians, Franks, Suebians, Vandals, Ger-
mans . . . the Palmyrenes, who had survived, the leading men of the city,
and Egyptians too, because of their rebellion.” But something even
better follows.
Statius’ epic fantasy of the mythical Theseus returning to his triumph
with an Amazon victim (and bride) in tow was said to have been played
out on the streets of Rome in the third century ce: “Ten women were
led in the procession, who had been captured fighting in male dress
among the Goths after many others had fallen—these, so a placard
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123
stated, belonged to the race of Amazons.”37 Hardly less exotic is the
glimpse of the victory celebrations after the battle of Actium, the culmi-
nation of the galaxy of Roman history imagined by Virgil on the famous
shield of Aeneas. How far this description draws directly upon the de-
tails of Octavian’s triumphal ceremony conducted in 29 bce, how far it
is a loaded or glamorous fiction, is a matter of dispute. But fiction or
not, it invests heavily in the wide-ranging and exotic origins of the cap-
tives on show, “as disparate in their style of dress and weaponry, as in
their native tongues.” The list includes “the tribe of Nomads and the Af-
ricans in their flowing robes, the Leleges and Carians and arrow-bearing
Gelonians . . . the Morini, most remote of human kind . . . and the wild
Dahae.”38
The obvious point is that the triumph and its captives amounted to a
physical realization of empire and imperialism. As well as the image of
Roman conflicts with monarchy, the procession (or the procession’s
written versions) instantiated the very idea of Roman territorial expan-
sion, its conquest of the globe. The prisoners’ exotic foreignness, at the
heart of the imperial capital, put on show to the people watching the
procession (or reading of it, or hearing tell of it, later) the most tangible
expression you could wish of Rome’s world power. It was a much better
display of Roman success, as Velleius Paterculus writes of the emperor
Tiberius’ triumph in which he took part in 12 ce, to have the enemy ex-
hibited in the procession than killed on the field of battle.39
But there is more to it than that. The emphasis on the foreignness of
the enemy prisoners goes hand in hand with the equally significant
point that Romans themselves belonged only on the winning side of this
ceremony. The logic was that the triumph was a celebration of victory
over external enemies only; that a triumph in civil war, with Roman citi-
zens dragged along where the exotic barbarian foe should be, was a con-
tradiction in terms. As Lucan has it, at the start of his epic poem on the
war between Caesar and Pompey, civil war could, in a sense, be defined
as “war that would have no triumphs.”40 Yet, Lucan’s text already hints
that this is precisely one of the fault lines of Roman triumphal culture:
for, as his readers would have known, victory in the civil war recounted
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 2 4
in his poem was, in effect, celebrated in Caesar’s triumph in 46 bce—
even if disguised under the convenient rubric of “foreign” wars in Africa
and elsewhere.
While none of Caesar’s Roman adversaries were themselves on display
(the leading ones were dead anyway), paintings of several of them in
their last moments were put on parade. According to Appian, Caesar re-
frained only from exhibiting an image of Pompey, as he was “much
missed by all,” while for the rest he “took care not to inscribe the names
of any Romans,” on the grounds that such display of the names of fellow
citizens was “unseemly . . . shameful and ill-omened”—a telling detail,
given the stress we have already noted on the resonant names of promi-
nent captives.41
Cynics might have observed that the roll call of exotic captives in Vir-
gil’s version of Octavian’s triumph was a loaded cover-up for the fact
that there too civil war (against Antony) lay immediately behind the
celebrations—just as the hand-picked Jewish prisoners and the Jewish
spoils in the triumph of Vespasian and Titus were a useful disguise for
the defeat of the Roman enemies in the civil war that put the new
Flavian dynasty on the throne in 70 ce.42
BEFORE THE CHARIOT?
How exactly the prisoners were displayed in triumphal processions is
largely a matter of guesswork and presumably varied over time, accord-
ing to occasion and to different types of enemy. We find several refer-
ences to prisoners appearing in chains, while Appian thinks it worthy of
note that none of the host of captives in Pompey’s triumph in 61 were
bound.43 Some are said to have walked in the parade; others—including
some of the enemy generals in Vespasian and Titus’ triumph—were car-
ried on biers or floats; yet others, the most elite cadre of captives, rode in
wagons or chariots (of different types, finely calibrated to match the pre-
cise rank of captive, according to one Roman scholar). But by whatever
method the victims traveled, ancient writers are almost unanimous in
identifying their place in the procession: ante currum, “in front of the
Captives on Parade
125
general’s chariot.” Apart from a rogue line of Lucan that has the prison-
ers in Caesar’s triumph follow the chariot, this phrase, in fact, is repeated
so often that it seems almost the standard term in ancient triumphal jar-
gon—both in literary texts and inscriptions—for leading a victim “in a
triumphal procession.”44
It is tempting to conclude that the captives, or at least the most cele-
brated among them, were paraded—as Piloty shows his Thusnelda—di-
rectly in front of the triumphing general. And we shall certainly see that
ancient writers sometimes made a good deal of the interplay between
victor and victim that such proximity would imply. But in the only sur-
viving ancient sculpture to represent the overall choreography of a tri-
umphal procession, the layout appears more complex. In the small frieze
that winds its way around the attic storey of the Arch of Trajan at
Beneventum, apparently depicting a procession from the general’s char-
iot to the arrival of the first animals for sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter
(Fig. 21), several groups of prisoners have been identified. Some walk: