to Plutarch) Lucullus chose in 63 bce to decorate the Circus Flaminius
with the captured weapons and siege engines, rather than carry them in
procession.54 Besides, no order suggested in any literary account is re-
motely compatible with that on the small frieze of Trajan’s Arch at
Beneventum (see Figs. 10 and 21), where the fercula (just six in all) carrying booty and a couple of golden crowns are distributed throughout the
procession in front of the general, intermingled with the prisoners.
The bottom line, of course, is that there is always a gap, even in a con-
temporary eyewitness description, between that messy aggregate of indi-
vidual movements, displays, stunts, and human beings that make up
“the parade” and the literary (or, for that matter, visual) representations
that capture it in text (or stone). And for no triumph at all do we possess
the full roster of the objects on display. At best, each of the literary ver-
sions we have has selected elements from the parade with their own pri-
orities in mind. One obvious case of this is the two descriptions of the
triumph of Germanicus in 17 ce: Strabo the geographer concentrates on
the various German prisoners, while Tacitus the cynical analyst of impe-
rial power emphasizes the simulacra (replicas) of the mountains, ri-
vers, and battle, with the full panoply of imperial (dis)simulation in his
sights. At worst (worst, that is, for anyone trying to get back to the
procession as it appeared on the streets), those accounts are a confec-
tion of exaggeration, misinformation, misunderstandings, and outright
falsification.
THE LIMITS OF GULLIBILITY
Occasionally we can spot a story of triumphal spoils that we can be sure
is false. Something is certainly wrong with Livy’s tale of the gilded
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shields carried in the triumph of Lucius Papirius Cursor (309 bce) being
divided up “among the proprietors of the banks [or money changers]”
and used for decorating the Forum; for there was no coined money to
speak of in Rome at that date, still less were there “money changers.”
And similar doubts have been raised about the denominations—some of
them anachronistic or impossible in other ways—in which Livy ex-
presses the coins carried in the processions. He claims, for example, that
vast quantities of cistophori from Pergamum were displayed in a series of
triumphs around 190 bce, even though these coins are now generally
thought not to have been minted until later in the second century. Livy
(or his source) may well have been mistakenly retrojecting a currency
back into an early triumph—or possibly translating an unfamiliar cur-
rency into a more familiar name.55
Usually we must rely on first principles and on the limits of our own
gullibility in deciding how suspicious to be about any of the objects on
display. By and large, modern historians of the triumph (and of other
ancient parades and processions) have erred on the side of credulity.
Pompey’s extravagant display in 61 bce has not been seriously called into
question (even that gold statue of Mithradates eight cubits tall), nor
have many of the vast figures for bullion in some implausibly early tri-
umphs, such as the 2,533,000 pounds of bronze supposedly raised from
the sale of captives and displayed at the triumph of Lucius Papirius Cur-
sor in 293 bce.56 None of this, however, matches the credence generally
given to the account (by one Callixeinos of Rhodes, though preserved
only as a quotation in a later, second century ce compendium) of a royal
procession sponsored by King Ptolemy Philadelphus in Alexandria in
the early third century bce—a hellenistic parade of a type often assumed
to have influenced, directly or indirectly, the form, grandeur, and artifice
of the Roman triumph.
Maybe we can envisage, as most scholars have wanted to, Callixeinos’
“twelve-foot tall statue . . . [which] stood up mechanically without any-
one laying a hand on it and sat back down again when it had poured a li-
bation of milk”; given the wealth and sophistication of the city of Alex-
andria, maybe the vast carts pulled by 600 men, chariots towed by
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169
ostriches, or a golden phallos 180 foot long all seem plausible. But surely
not a “wine-sack made of leopard skin and holding 3,000 measures”
which slowly dribbled its contents onto the parade route. To give some
idea of scale, this container made of stitched animal skins and towed
through streets of Alexandria is supposed to have had a capacity rather
larger than three modern road tankers.57
Gullibility? The modern scholarly alibi for trusting the accuracy of
both Callixeinos and many of the Roman triumphal accounts is the con-
fidence that they are based on archival records, and that—whatever the
strategic omissions or the inevitable gap between the performance and
the written record—many of the objects described and listed derive
from some form of official documentation. In the case of the Ptolemaic
procession, this is hinted only by a brief reference in Callixeinos’ ac-
count itself to “the records of the five yearly festivals.”58 For the triumph
we have rather clearer evidence of an infrastructure of record-keeping as-
sociated with the procession and the handling of booty in general.
The key text is a passage from Cicero’s attack on Verres where he con-
trasts his adversary’s illicit plundering from Sicily with the properly scru-
pulous conduct of Publius Servilius, who celebrated a triumph over the
Isauri in 74 bce. According to Cicero, Servilius brought home all kinds
of statues and works of art which “he carried in his triumph and had
fully registered in the public records at the treasury”; and he goes on to
claim that these records contained “not only the number of statues, but
also the size of each one, its shape and attitude.”59 Combine this and
other hints of such record keeping, with the precise figures sometimes
given by ancient writers for the quantity of bullion or coin (“14,732
pounds of silver, 17,023 denarii, 119,449 silver coins of Osca”) or the
amount of statuary on parade (“785 bronze statues, 280 marble”) and the
idea that a documentary basis underlies the accounts of triumphal booty
may seem both appealing and reassuring.60
That indeed is what most historians have usually assumed—for want
of any obvious argument to the contrary, as well as a strong desire to
find for once some firm evidence to build on and a propensity to be
more trusting of ancient figures that do not end (when converted to
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modern numeration) in 000. In particular they have seen in the austere
and relatively standardized records of triumphal booty given systemati-
cally by Livy from 207 bce until the end of his surviving text in 167 bce
evidence that derives directly or more likely indirectly (through the ear-
lier historians on whom Livy drew) from an archival record.61 True, the
argument goes, there may be embellishment at the margins; and true,
ancient numerals are always liable to have been garbled by repeated
copying from one manuscript to the next. So complete trust is not in or-
der. But, in its essentials, the data on Roman triumphal booty that we
read particularly in Livy’s later books, but also sometimes in other au-
thors who offer similarly precise lists, are based on some kind of official