archives.
A prime candidate, but not the only one, is some official record or in-
ventory of the Roman treasury. This is suggested both by Cicero’s eulogy
of Servilius (though no surviving literary account of any triumph goes
anywhere near to detailing the size or attitudes of the statues as Cicero
claims Servilius did) and also by Livy’s common expression in listing the
cash or bullion in the triumph: “The general delivered to the treasury
. . .” It may also be reflected in Livy’s account of the details of the plun-
der at the sack of New Carthage, where he claims that a quaestor (a ju-
nior Roman magistrate, sometimes directly connected with the treasury)
was on hand supervising the weighing out and counting of the coin and
precious metal.62
Certainly there were archives at Rome which were concerned in dif-
ferent ways with booty in general and with the triumphal ceremony in
particular, and there is a reasonable chance that some of the data we
have on the objects in the procession (as well as the plunder seized on
the battlefield) goes back ultimately, even if circuitously, to this source.
Yet whether these were themselves sufficiently systematic, accurate, and
accessible to validate the literary accounts is quite another matter. Part
of the problem is that for the great majority of triumphs we are dealing
with information on the display of booty and cash provided by only one
author, most often Livy. It is an uncomfortable truth of modern studies
of the ancient world that we often find it easier to be confident of our
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171
evidence the less of it we have. Nothing can contradict a single account;
more often than not two accounts of the same event prove incompatible
or at least different in significant details. So it is with ancient descrip-
tions of triumphs, archivally based or not.
We already spotted some flagrant contradictions and awkward diver-
gences in the versions of Pompey’s celebration in 61 bce. Similar issues
emerge almost every time that more than one ancient writer gives details
of a particular procession. It would be tempting to imagine, for exam-
ple, that Diodorus Siculus’ account of the three-day triumphal display
of Aemilius Paullus goes back to an archival inventory. The repertoire
for each day is carefully distinguished, and detailed information (albeit
tending toward round numbers) is offered: 1,200 wagons full of em-
bossed shields, 12 of bronze shields, 300 carrying other weapons, gold in
220 “loads” or “carriers” (probably the Greek phorÃmata is a translation
of fercula), 2,000 elephant tusks, a horse in battle gear, a golden couch
with flowered covers, 400 garlands “presented by cities and kings,” and
so on.63 But if some archival source does stand behind this, we need to
explain why Plutarch’s no less full version is so different. He divides the
booty up between the three days in a way that directly contradicts
Diodorus’ account (not armor on the first day but statues and paint-
ings), and throughout he specifies quite different details (77, not 220,
“vessels” or “caskets” of gold, for example).64 And it is not only between
different authors that such discrepancies are found: Livy himself offers
two different figures for the amount of uncoined silver carried in the
ovation of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior (191 bce) on the two occasions when
he mentions it.65
Unsettling in a different way are the accounts, in Plutarch and Livy,
of the cash and bullion carried in the three-day triumph of Titus
Quinctius Flamininus over Macedon in 194 bce. At first sight they look
reassuringly compatible. Plutarch cites the authority of “the followers
of Tuditanus” for his specific information on the amount of gold and
silver: “3,713 pounds of gold bullion, 43,270 pounds of silver and 14,514
gold ‘Philips’ [that is, coins bearing the head of King Philip]”; and these
figures almost exactly match (but for a single pound of gold bullion)
Th e
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those given by Livy.66 This has usually been taken to suggest that Livy
and Plutarch were dependent on the same historical tradition, which
(via the second-century bce historian Caius Sempronius Tuditanus, whose
work has not survived) extended back to a documentary or archival
source. Of course, other explanations for the match are possible: that
Plutarch took his figures (directly or indirectly) from Livy; that both
were dependent on the “information” of an earlier historian, who had
nothing to do with any archival tradition.
But it is more complicated than that. In fact, the text of Livy as pre-
served in the manuscript tradition is significantly different from what
we now usually see printed, and it agrees much less closely with Plu-
tarch: while the figures for “Philips” and for gold bullion are the same,
Livy’s manuscripts have “18,270 pounds of silver,” not 43,270. Quite
simply the manuscripts have been emended by modern editors of the
text to bring Livy’s figures into line with Plutarch’s. There is a case for
doing this: ingenious critics have correctly pointed out that in Roman
numerals 43 (XLIII, as in 43,270) is different by only one digit from 18
(XVIII, as in 18,270), so corruption somewhere along the line of trans-
mission is plausible.67 But at the same time it shows a scholarly incentive
to normalize the variant accounts of triumphal processions and their
contents that extends to “improving” the Latin texts themselves. It will
come as no surprise that the difference between Livy’s two figures for
Nobilior’s silver has often been massaged away by a similar technique.68
Where does this leave any modern attempt to reconstruct the displays
in the triumphal procession? As so often in the study of ritual occasions
in antiquity (or of any other occasions, for that matter), we scratch the
surface of what appears to be the clearest evidence and that clarity soon
disappears. Accounts of the processions given by Greek and Roman
writers almost certainly owe something, sometimes, to archival or of-
ficial records; they may also derive in part from eyewitness accounts and
popular memory (however reliably or unreliably transmitted), as well as
being the product of misinformation, wild exaggeration, over-optimistic
reinvention, and willful misunderstanding. The problem is that it is
now next to impossible to determine the status of any individual piece
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173
of “evidence” in the accounts we have: which is a bona fide nugget from
an official archive, which is a wild flight of fancy, or which is a plucky
ancient guess dressed up with spurious precision as if it were one of
those archival nuggets? The outright incompatibilities between different
accounts alert us to the difficulties. But the overlaps are not necessarily
reassuring either: they may indicate a standard authoritative tradition,
or they may equally well indicate copying of the same piece of misinfor-
mation.
One thing is fairly clear. Seen inevitably, like the triumph itself, through
centuries of efforts of reconstruction and repainting, Mantegna’s ambi-
tious and influential exercise in recreation is a misleading image to have
in mind when we think back to the triumphal procession of, say, Caius
Pomptinus as it made its way through the Roman streets in 54 bce.