perial territory before the eyes of the spectators (or of those who later
read of these occasions). As one recent commentator on triumphal cul-
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ture in the first century ce has put it, the triumph “is an imperial geog-
raphy”; and he characterizes the ceremony “as a performance of the
availability of new territory to Rome . . . train[ing] the gaze on the city
of Rome, where new discoveries have been brought in from the edges for
theatrical display.” Or, as another critic has more succinctly punned,
“the triumphal procession . . . brings the orbs [world] within the walls of the urbs [city].”36
These are all important aspects of Rome’s triumphal culture, vividly
illustrated by ancient discussions of the ceremony. Writers certainly in-
sisted on the vast sums of money sometimes paraded through the streets:
Velleius Paterculus, for example, had 600 million sesterces carried in
Caesar’s quadruple triumph—a colossal sum, equivalent to the mini-
mum subsistence of more than a million families for a year, and outbid-
ding even the biggest estimates of Pompey’s war profits. And other eye-
opening figures are scattered through notices of triumphs.37 More to the
point, the effects of the influx of wealth that came with lavish tri-
umphs prompted rare economic observations even from ancient writers,
who were not usually much concerned with such topics. Famously,
Suetonius notes that “the royal treasure of Egypt, brought into the city
for Octavian’s Alexandrian triumph, caused such growth in the money
supply that, as the rate of interest fell, the price of land rose sharply.”38
Nor can there be any doubt at all that the triumphal procession was
one major route through which not only cash but the artistic traditions
of the eastern Mediterranean were brought to a Roman audience—a
dramatic entrypoint for a whole array of masterpieces amidst the razz-
matazz, the cheers, the electricity of a big public occasion. The triumph
also provided a highly charged focus around which the conflicts of
hellenization (or, as many Romans would have called it, “the growth of
luxury”) were debated. It was, of course, the preceding conquest—the
victory, not the victory parade—that was the main agent in delivering
wealth and “luxury” to Rome. Nonetheless, controversy could focus
more narrowly on the triumphal display, which was a convenient sym-
bol of the whole process of expansion.
We have already seen how the triumph of Cnaeus Manlius Vulso in
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187 bce was strongly linked to a story of cultural change—the intro-
duction of not only such dangerous luxuries as one-legged tables but
also of the whole art of cookery. But other triumphal processions too
take their place in a narrative of innovation. Pliny identifies the tri-
umph of Scipio Asiaticus in 189 bce as a key moment of change, or—
curmudgeonly moralizer that he was—decline: “The conquest of Asia
first brought luxury to Italy, since Lucius Scipio in his triumph exhibited
1,400 pounds of chased silverware and 1,500 pounds of golden vessels,”
while the silver statues of Pharnaces and Mithradates displayed in the
triumph of Pompey give the lie, Pliny insists, to the idea that such ob-
jects were a novelty of the reign of Augustus.39
Several ancient discussions of triumphal ceremonies do also highlight
the role of the procession in the dramatization of imperialism and the
geography of empire. When, for example, Plutarch specifies the dif-
ferent varieties of tableware in the triumph of Aemilius Paullus—
Antigonids, Seleucids, and Thericleians—their very names conjured Ro-
man victory over eastern cities and dynasties, prompting readers to
think of the triumph as a model of imperial expansion. So too when
Plutarch emphasizes the details of the distinctive weaponry of the de-
feated peoples, or when Pliny reminds us that even exotic trees could be
paraded in the triumphal procession on their way to become “tax-paying
subjects” of Rome.40 But some ancient writers make more explicit points
about the triumph’s role as a model of imperialism.
When Polybius, for example, claims that the procession was a means
for generals to bring “right before the eyes of the Roman people a vivid
impression of their achievements,” he is in essence saying that it re-pre-
sented imperial conquest at the center of the Roman world.41 Josephus
goes even further in theorizing the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. He
not only defines the objects on parade as a demonstration of “the great-
ness of the Roman Empire,” but by likening the stream of riches flowing
into the city to a river, he also emphasizes the naturalness of—he natu-
ralizes—the imperial process. If other parts of his description cast the
triumph as a magnificent disruption of the natural order (those gems,
for example, which in their extraordinary profusion called into question
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163
the very notion of natural rarity), here he offers a glimpse of Roman im-
perialism, seen in the ritual of the triumph, as unstoppably elemental.42
Alternatively, in a rather simpler sense, the parade of riches could be un-
derstood as an inducement to further military expansion. Plutarch in-
sists, for example, that it was the sight of all the riches in Lucullus’ pa-
rade in 63—in particular the royal diadem of Tigranes—that spurred
Crassus to plan his own campaigns in Asia; though, as he further ob-
serves, Crassus, who was killed fighting the Parthians, would discover
that there was more to barbarians than spoil and booty.43
Yet, important as these aspects are in ancient and modern representa-
tions of the triumphal processions, modern enthusiasm for Roman im-
perialist excess has tended to occlude other ways of seeing the parade of
captured booty and the representational devices that went along with it.
CUTTING THE SPOILS DOWN TO SIZE
How far can we take at face value those lavish accounts of the triumphal
parade? Of course booty did flow in to Rome through the period of its
imperial expansion, sometimes in huge quantities. But how common a
sight were the extravagant displays that form our image of the cere-
mony? And how far can we trust those sometimes very precise tallies
given by ancient writers? As with the details of the captives, these ques-
tions reveal the tantalizing uncertainties about the triumphal ritual as it
was enacted on the streets of Rome. Yet more is at stake here, not least
because of the general modern assumption that—thanks to archives of
various sorts which were available to ancient writers—accurate records
of the content of triumphal display have been transmitted to us.
It goes without saying (though it is perhaps not actually said often
enough) that of the 320 triumphs that Orosius claimed had been cele-
brated at Rome between Romulus and Vespasian, only a small propor-
tion can have included the parade of lavish booty and all those other ac-
coutrements that we so readily associate with the ceremony. On the
most generous estimate, we are dealing with something in the order of
fifty occasions between the third century bce and 71 ce; and even that
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figure involves both taking on trust some of the overblown descriptions
of triumphal riches that we have and assuming a splendid show of