moving sight than his children, but he rivaled the triumphing general in
a different sense.66 In fact, the ancient cliché about this particular tri-
umph rested on its threat to subvert the hierarchy of victor and victim.
For Paullus, at the very height of his glory, was afflicted by a disaster
that struck at the heart of his household: out of his four sons, two had
already been adopted into other aristocratic families in Rome (a not
uncommon practice); the two who remained to carry on his line died
over the very period of the triumph, one five days before, the other three
days later.67
Livy puts a speech into the mouth of Paullus, in which—after con-
trasting his own misfortunes with the good fortune his campaigns had
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brought to the state—he compares himself to Perseus: “Both Perseus
and I are now on display, as powerful examples of the fate of mortal
men. He, who as a prisoner saw his children led before him, prison-
ers themselves, nevertheless has those children unharmed. I, who tri-
umphed over him, mounted my chariot fresh from the funeral of my
one son and, as I returned from the Capitol, found the other almost
breathing his last . . . There is no Paullus in my house except one old
man.” Plutarch imagines the same moment, ending Paullus’ speech with
a pithier formulation along the same lines: “Fortune makes the victor of
the triumph no less clear an example of human weakness than the
victim; except that Perseus, though conquered, keeps his children—
Aemilius, though conqueror, has lost his.”68 The message is clear. Trium-
phal glory was a perilous and greasy pole. The victor was always liable to
exchange roles with the victim.
This slippage between victim and victor found a place in more gen-
eral ethical discussions, too. Seneca, for example, exploited it to grind
home a moral point—that, in the end, from a philosophical perspective,
the triumphal victor and victim were indistinguishable. You could, he
wrote, show equal virtue whether you were the one who triumphed or
the one dragged “in front of the chariot,” so long as you were “uncon-
quered in spirit.”69 Elsewhere, in a bold (and disconcerting) anachro-
nism, he puts into the mouth of Socrates a similar point about virtue
transcending misfortune, using a triumphal analogy. The sage claims
that—even if he was placed on a bier (ferculum) and made to “decorate
the procession of a proud and fierce victor”—he would be no more
humbled when he was driven in front of the triumphal chariot of an-
other than if he was the triumphing general himself.70 The triumph, in
other words, asks you to wonder who the victor really is and so what vir-
tue and heroism consist in.
There is even more to this than a paradox of triumphal ideology, im-
portant though that may be. Modern scholarship has, by and large, been
committed to a crude view of Roman militarism. Rome, we are repeat-
edly told, was a culture in which victory and conquest were universally
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prized. Whether or not this ideology always translated directly into ag-
gressive imperialism is another matter (ideology may have a more com-
plicated relationship to practice than that). But, so the standard argu-
ment runs, military prowess was at all periods a guarantee of social glory
and political success; and apart from a handful of subversive poets, the
Romans were not the sort of people to question the desirability of win-
ning on the field of battle.71
Some of this is certainly true. It would be utterly implausible to recast
Roman culture in pacifist clothes. But the most militaristic societies can
also be—and often are—those that query most energetically the nature
and discontents of their own militarism. If we do not spot this aspect in
the case of Rome, the chances are that we have turned a blind eye to
those Roman debates, or that we have been looking in the wrong place.
Literary representations of the triumph, with all their parade of hesita-
tion and ambivalence over the status of victor and victim, are one of the
key areas in which the problems as well as the glory of Roman victory
were explored.
To take a final vivid example: when in 225 bce Lucius Aemilius Papus,
after his Gallic victory, made the chief captive tribesmen walk in their
breastplates up to the Capitol—“because he had heard that they had
sworn not to remove their breastplates until they had climbed the
Capitol”—he was not only rubbing their noses in their failed ambitions
(for they had foolishly imagined that their ascent of the hill would be in
their own seizure of Rome). The story also serves to remind the reader of
the fragile dividing line between victory and defeat, and their various
celebrations.72
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
Most modern accounts concentrate on the occasion of the triumph as a
processional moment, a single day—or at most a few days—of celebra-
tion or carnival. This tends to obscure the fact that the triumphal pro-
cession is also a single episode in a more extended narrative for victim
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1 4 0
and general alike. The ceremony should prompt the question “What
happened next?” One answer we have already explored. However fre-
quently or infrequently the triumph did in fact end in execution for the
leading captives, the often told story of execution gives a powerful narrative closure to the victims’ part in Roman history. As Cicero summed it
up, the triumph was their end. For the less illustrious, the outlook might
be no less bleak: Caesar’s prisoners of war are said to have become can-
non fodder in the arena.73 But a competing version represents it very dif-
ferently: not so much as finality but more as a rite of passage. Just as the
ceremony itself was no less the beginning of peace than it was the culmi-
nation of war, so the victims were both the humiliated and defeated ene-
mies of Rome and at the same time new participants, in whatever role,
in the Roman imperial order. The triumph was a key moment in the
process by which the enemy became Roman.
This is a theme we have already seen underlying the mythic triumph
of Statius’ Theseus, whose victim was about to become his wife. Other
writers emphasize a similarly domestic outcome for their triumphal vic-
tims. Perseus himself may have died, in strange circumstances, in captiv-
ity: according to at least one account, he got on the wrong side of his
guards, who kept him continually awake until he died of sleep depriva-
tion. One son and his daughter soon died, too, but the other son, the
aptly named Alexander, went on to learn metalworking and Latin—so
well that he eventually became a secretary to Roman magistrates, an of-
fice which (according to Plutarch) he carried out with “skill and ele-
gance.”74 Zenobia, too, in one version, settled down to the life of a
middle-aged matron outside Rome. Young Juba, who was carried as a
babe in arms in Caesar’s triumph of 46, went on to receive Roman citi-
zenship, to write famous historical works and eventually to be reinstated
on the throne of Numidia.75
At the same time, the progression of captives into Roman status
could prompt ribaldry or even insult. Scipio Aemilianus, for example,
the natural son of Aemilius Paullus who was adopted into the family of
Cornelii Scipiones, is said to have rebuked a rowdy gathering of Romans