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[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 24:
Terracotta relief (“Campana plaque”) showing prisoners in a triumphal proces-
sion; probably early second century ce. Here the Roman guards control (or harass) their captives with chains attached to their necks.
The degradation of the victims, however, is only one side of the
story. There is a competing logic in the display of Roman (or any)
victory. The successful general accrues little glory for representing his
victory as won by thrashing a mangy band of feeble and unimpressive
suppliants. The best conquests are won against tough and worthy oppo-
nents, not against those who look as though they could not have put up
much of a fight in the first place. As the Panegyric of Constantine put it, the captives “added luster to” (almost in the Latin “added dignity,”
honestassent) to the celebration.57 Hence in part the stress on the high
status of the prisoners; hence too the readiness of Pompey to steal some
of his Roman rival’s most impressive captives.
Indeed, throughout the stories of the triumph, we find—alongside
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the idea of humiliation—repeated emphasis on the nobility and stature
of those “in front of the chariot.” In Marius’ triumph in 101 bce,
Teutobodus, king of the Teutones, made a splendid sight (or so some
said; other writers had him die on the field of battle). A man “of extraor-
dinary height” who was reputed to be able to vault over four, or even six,
horses, he “towered over the trophies of his own defeat.”58 It is an image
reflected in Tiepolo’s eighteenth-century version of Marius’ triumph in
104 over the impressive figure of Jugurtha (see Frontispiece). Other
monarchs too caught the eye. In Florus’ account, Bituitus starred in the
procession of Fabius Maximus in 120 bce, wearing the brightly colored
armor and traveling in the silver chariot in which he had fought.59
Zenobia was said to have been decked out for the triumph of Aurelian in
jewels and golden chains so heavy that she needed attendants to carry
them.60
The image of a regal victim surrounded by attendants carrying her
golden ornaments (albeit chains of bondage) cannot help but raise ques-
tions about exactly who was the star of the event. Quite simply, glamor-
ous and impressive prisoners were a powerful proof of the splendor of
the victory achieved. But at the same time, just like Piloty’s vision of
Thusnelda, the more impressive they appeared, the more likely they
were to steal the show and to upstage the triumphing general himself.
On several occasions Roman writers hint at just this scenario, and at a
slippage between victor and victim. For Florus (or his source), “nothing
stood out more” in Fabius’ triumph than the defeated Bituitus.61 Dio
also plays with this paradox when he describes the journey of Tiridates,
king of Armenia, to Rome in 66 ce. The idea was that, after the decisive
Roman victories under Corbulo, Tiridates was to come to the capital to
receive back his crown, as suppliant, from Nero. But with his royal reti-
nue and accompanying army, not to mention his personal appearance
and impressive stature, his journey from the Euphrates seemed to resem-
ble more a triumph in his own name than a mark of his defeat.62
Ovid had already developed this theme in a poem written about 10 ce
from his exile on the Black Sea, imagining the scene back home of a Ro-
man triumph over Germany. It is a tremendous tour de force that makes
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the most of the literary and representational complexities of the cere-
mony. In one particularly neat, and gruesome, touch, Ovid pictures (a
model of ) the river Rhine being carried in the procession—just like the
“two-horned Rhine” that Virgil had imagined at the climax of his Actian
parade. Ovid’s Rhine is a sorry specimen in comparison: he is, frankly, a
mess, “covered in green sedge,” “stained with his own blood”; his horns
have been “smashed.” But much of the poet’s attention goes to the hu-
man victims:
So all the populace can watch the triumph,
Read names of generals and captured towns
See captive kings with necks in chains and marching
Before the horses in gay laurel crowns
And note some faces fallen like their fortunes
And others fierce forgetting how they fare.
Several of the commonplaces of the triumphal procession are de-
ployed here: the victims are kings; they are chained; they cast their eyes
to the ground or project a grim absent-mindedness. But Ovid proceeds
to insinuate just how difficult it is to keep the captives in their place, as
he recounts the words of an imaginary spectator explaining the show—
starting from the victims—to his neighbors: “That one,” he begins,
“who gleams aloft in Sidonian purple was the leader (dux) in the war.”
Where, we are being asked to wonder, does the boundary lie between
triumphant general and this proud prisoner? Both are royally clad in
purple, aloft in their chariots, leaders (duces) of their people. What does it take to tell them apart?63
This problem underlies all mass spectacle: how do you control the
gaze of the viewer? Is it the emperor in his box who holds our attention
in the arena or the slave-gladiator fighting for his life? In the triumphal
procession, the grand nobility of the victims can draw the crowds. So
also can the pathos of the prisoners on display. The most notorious
case of this was the parade in Caesar’s triumph of 46 bce of the young
Egyptian princess Arsinoe, carried on a bier (or ferculum) like a regular
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piece of booty. The sight of her in chains, in Dio’s account at least,
aroused the spectators to pity and prompted them to lament their own
misfortunes.64
A similar story is told of the triumph of Aemilius Paullus over King
Perseus in 167. According to Plutarch, it was the king’s children who
captured the attention of the crowd: “There were two boys and one girl,
too young to be entirely aware of the scale of their misfortunes. Indeed
they evoked even more pity—for the very reason that they would in due
course lose their innocence—so that Perseus himself walked along al-
most unnoticed. And so it was out of compassion that the Romans fixed
their gaze on the young ones and many ended up crying, and for all of
them the spectacle turned out to be a mixture of pleasure and pain until
the children had gone by.”65 Of course, we cannot be sure if this is a reli-
able or well-documented account of reactions on the day itself (we have
no reason to believe that Plutarch had, directly or indirectly, an eyewit-
ness source; and he had probably never seen a triumph himself ). But
even if he is by-passing the available evidence to exploit the rhetorical
traditions of pathos, Plutarch’s account shows exactly how, in the imagi-
nation at least, the pathetic victims could steal the show.
That ambivalence between victor and victim is a theme which informs
the accounts of Paullus’ triumph of 167 bce in other respects, too.
Perseus—“wearing a dark cloak and distinctively Macedonian boots,
struck dumb by the scale of his misfortunes”—may have made a less