in the Forum protesting against the murder of Tiberius Gracchus with
Captives on Parade
141
the taunt: “Let those to whom Italy is a step-mother hold their tongues.
You won’t make me afraid of those I brought here in chains even now
they are freed.”76 This is a taunt that rests on the idea that prisoners had
a Roman life after their captivity. So too do some of the jibes made
against Julius Caesar for supposedly admitting Gauls to the senate itself.
One of the popular verses sung at the time, according to Suetonius,
made a direct connection between the appearance of Gallic prisoners in
Caesar’s triumph and their subsequent appearance in the senate:
The Gauls our Caesar led to triumph, led them to the
senate too.
The Gauls have swapped their breeches for the senate’s
swanky toga.77
This aspect of the triumph as rite de passage is most vividly encapsu-
lated by the career of Publius Ventidius Bassus, who celebrated a tri-
umph over the Parthians in 38 bce. In the competitive culture of trium-
phal glory, this celebration was particularly renowned. It was, as Roman
writers insisted, the first triumph the Romans had ever celebrated over
the Parthians (who had inflicted such a devastating defeat on Roman
forces under Crassus at the battle of Carrhae in 53 bce). But it was
notable for another reason, too—as the same writers insist. For
Ventidius Bassus was a native of the Italian town of Picenum and years
earlier had been carried as a child victim in the triumph of Pompey’s fa-
ther, Pompeius Strabo, for victories in the Social War. His career was
particularly extraordinary, then, as he was the only Roman ever to take
part in a triumphal procession as both victor and victim. Or, as Valerius
Maximus put it, “The same man, who as a captive had shuddered at the
prison, as a victor filled the Capitol with his success.” His is the limit
case, in other words, of the triumph as a rite of passage into “Roman-
ness”—the clearest example we have of the part the ceremony could play
in a narrative of Romanization. Not only that. It is also the limit case of
the potential identity of the triumphing general and his victim.78
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 4 2
POETIC REVERSAL?
These ironies of the triumph were not lost on Ovid, whom we have
identified as our only surviving “voice of the victim.” In the second
poem of his collection of Amores he suffered “in front of the chariot” of
Cupid. But not for long. Ovid soon claims for himself the part of the
Ventidius Bassus of Love. By the middle of his second book of poems,
he has won a notable victory—albeit, as he goes on to confess (or to
boast), a bloodless one:
A wreath for my brows, a wreath of triumphal laurel!
Victory—Corinna is here, in my arms
. . . Thus bloodless conquest
Demands a super-triumph. Look at the spoils.79
On the erotic battlefield, our erstwhile victim has become a triumph-
ing general.
c h a p t e r
V
The Art of Representation
IMAGES OF DEFEAT
Cleopatra did not entirely escape display in Octavian’s triumphal pro-
cession, despite her suicide. For in place of the living queen was a replica
staging the moment of her death, probably a three-dimensional model
on a couch but perhaps a painting: a tableau mourant, as it were, com-
plete with an asp or two. This was one of the star turns of the triumph
for ancient viewers and commentators. “It was as if,” Dio writes, “in a
kind of way she was there with the other prisoners”; and Propertius, who
casts himself as an eyewitness of the celebration, claims to have seen
“her arms bitten by the sacred snakes and her body drawing in the hid-
den poison that brought oblivion.”1 It also greatly intrigued Renaissance
and later scholars, who assumed that the model had been preserved and
expended enormous energy and ingenuity in attempting to track it
down. One favorite candidate was the statue we commonly know as the
Sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican Museums (Fig. 25)—what we now inter-
pret as an armlet being identified as the snakes.2
An early sixteenth-century verse monologue by Baldassare Castiglione,
written as if spoken by this mute work of art, nicely captures the ambiv-
alent slippage between replica and human prisoner (here in a translation
by Alexander Pope):
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 4 4
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 25:
Sleeping Ariadne. This sculpture—a Roman version of a third- or second-century bce Greek work—very likely represents a classic theme of ancient art and myth: Ariadne, abandoned in her sleep by Theseus, whom she had helped to kill the Minotaur. In the Renaissance it was commonly entitled Cleopatra and believed to be the model of the Egyptian queen carried in the triumph of 29 bce.
Whoe’re thou art whom this fair statue charms,
These curling aspicks, and these wounded arms,
Who view’st these eyes for ever fixt in death,
Think not unwilling I resign’d my breath.
What, shou’d a Queen, so long the boast of fame,
Have stoop’d to serve an haughty Roman dame?
Shou’d I have liv’d, in Caesar’s triumph born,
To grace his conquests and his pomp adorn?3
Even as late as 1885 the hunt was still on, when the American artist John
Sartain penned a pamphlet to argue that a painting on slate supposedly
found at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli in 1818 and attributed to, among oth-
The Art of Representation
145
ers, Leonardo da Vinci was indeed nothing other than Octavian’s replica
of Cleopatra. His description is a mixture of art historical dispassion and
lascivious interest: “The right arm is bent in a right-angle, the forearm
being strongly foreshortened . . . The dark green, yellow-spotted snake
has inserted its teeth into the left breast, from which some drops of
blood ooze out.”4 Needless to say, the claims of this object to be what
was carried in the procession of 29 are about as weak as those of the
Sleeping Ariadne.
Cleopatra was not the only absent victim to be incorporated into
the parade as a painting or model, even if others have not proved to be
such compelling topics of modern speculation. So it was, according to
Appian, that Mithradates and Tigranes were displayed in Pompey’s tri-
umph as paintings. Again in 46 bce Julius Caesar paraded “on canvas”
the deaths of his adversaries in the civil war: Lucius Scipio throwing
himself into the sea, Petreius shafting himself at dinner, Cato disembow-
eling himself “like a wild animal.” These humiliating images nearly re-
bounded on the victor, as the audience groaned at the pathetic sight be-
fore settling down to applaud or mock some other less tragic final
moments. There was obviously a fine line to be drawn between the im-
pressive vaunting of success and the frankly bad taste of displaying pic-
tures of Roman citizens pulling their own guts out.5
But if the place of a live prisoner in the procession could be taken by a
mute representation, the further twist is that live victims themselves
could sometimes be seen in the guise of images or models. When Dio
gestured at the equivalence between the effigy of Cleopatra and the liv-
ing prisoners (“in a kind of way she was there with the others”), he si-