the price of disloyalty might be.80
Even more striking, though, are the stories of the reuse—and with
it the resignification—of these objects of triumphal display. Spurius
Carvilius, for example, in the early third century bce is supposed to have
turned the bronze weapons captured from the Samnites into a statue of
Jupiter on the Capitol, “big enough to be seen from the sanctuary of Ju-
piter Latiaris” (on the Alban Mount); “and from the filings he had a
statue of himself made which stands at the feet of the other.” True or
not, this offers a nice image of captured arms being converted into both
a symbol of Roman religious power and a memorial of the glory of the
triumphing general.81
But even the display of arms in a temple or house was not necessarily
the end of their story. Despite Plutarch’s assertion that the spoils of war
were the only dedications to the gods which were never moved or re-
paired (echoing Pliny’s view of the permanence of the spoils decorating
the general’s house), weapons from a past triumph could find themselves
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177
conveniently recycled.82 In the desperate stages of Rome’s fight against
Hannibal, criminals were enlisted and were said to have been armed
with the weapons taken from the Gauls and paraded in the triumph of
Caius Flaminius seven years earlier.83 The partisans of the tribune Caius
Gracchus in 121 bce made use of armor on display in the house of
Fulvius Flaccus, who had triumphed in 123, in the violent conflicts in
which the tribune himself was eventually killed.84 Indeed, we know of
those spoils given to Hiero only because, after the king’s death and the
assassination of his successor, they were torn down from the temple and
put to use by the insurgents.85
Some of these stories hint once more at the darker side of the Roman
ideology of victory. For it was one thing to appropriate the Gallic spoils
as a last ditch weapon against the Carthaginians. It was surely quite an-
other, and a warning of the fragility of power, glory, and political stabil-
ity, to see triumphal spoils turned against Romans themselves and play-
ing their part in the civil war between Gracchus and his conservative
enemies; or for that matter to see the gifts to Hiero used against the sup-
porters of his grandson and successor (albeit under a slogan of “liberty”).
We find a hint here too of a more complicated configuration of impe-
rial power than most modern interpretations allow. Certainly the trium-
phal parade could be seen as a model of the imperial process, a jingoistic
display of the profits of empire and the consequences of military vic-
tory to the Roman spectator (and reader). But the spoils and booty also
gave a glimpse of an altogether bigger narrative of historical change and
transfer of power. That is partly the lesson of the recycling of the weap-
ons—and with it the reappearance of the instruments of past conflicts
and the symbols of past Roman victories in different hands and under
different political and military regimes. This lesson was also stressed
by some of the displays of precious booty—a point made particularly
clearly by Appian in his account of Scipio Aemilianus’ triumph over
Carthage in 146 bce. This was (as so often) “the most splendid triumph
of all,” partly no doubt because it was “teeming with all the statues and
objets d’art that the Carthaginians had brought to Africa from all over
the world through the long period of their own continuous victories.”86
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 7 8
What had been the profits of one empire now appeared in the victory
parade of another, so that the triumph heralded not simply the Empire
of Rome but at the same time the changing pattern of imperial power
itself.
Seen in this light, Pompey’s reputed use of the cloak of Alexander the
Great was not just an instance of a Roman general taking on the mantle
of his most famous predecessor, but a larger gesture portraying Rome as
the successor of the empire of Macedon. How far this prompted people
to wonder, more widely, if Rome also one day would have a successor,
we do not know. But for Polybius, at least, the despoiling of Syracuse by
the Romans in 211 bce (the campaign for which Marcellus was awarded
an ovation) raised acute issues about the ambivalence and transience of
domination: “At any rate,” he concluded his reflections, “the point of
my remarks is directed to those who succeed to empire in their turn, so
that even as they pillage cities they should not suppose that the misfor-
tunes of others are an honor to their own country.”87
PERFORMANCE ART
Modern historians of Roman art and culture have often been overly en-
thusiastic in their desire to pinpoint the origin of distinctively “Roman”
forms of art in the institutions of the city of Rome and in the social
practices of its elite members. It took a very long time indeed for them
to give up the idea that the whole genre of portraiture (and particularly
the “hyper-realistic” style often known as “verism”) could be traced back
directly to death masks and the rituals of the aristocratic Roman funeral.
The idea clung tenaciously despite an almost total absence of evidence
in its favor, and a considerable amount to the contrary.88
A similar theory that the traditions of Roman historical painting and
some of their most distinctive conventions of narrative representation in
sculpture derive from artwork associated with the triumph is still re-
markably buoyant—despite having no more to recommend it than the
shibboleth about portraiture. For a start, we have very little idea about
the artistic idiom of any of the paintings or models carried in the trium-
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179
phal procession. None survive, pace all the optimistic rediscoveries of the image of Cleopatra. And the few tantalizing hints we read about their
workmanship—such as Pliny’s claim that Paullus asked for an artist
from Athens “to decorate his triumph,” or the references to the model
town in Caesar’s triumph in 45 being made of ivory (in contrast to the
wooden versions in the procession of his subordinates)—are not enough
to give any general impression.89
It is little more than a guess to suggest, as art historians often do, that
the paintings were rendered in the style of a group of third-century
tomb paintings found on the Esquiline hill in Rome, which apparently
show scenes from Roman wars with the Samnites.90 In fact, the vocabu-
lary used by ancient authors to evoke the triumphal representations does
not always allow us to be certain whether they have paintings, tapestries,
or three-dimensional models in mind—or, for that matter, whether the
towns they refer to were miniature replicas or personifications. There
are, for example, any number of possibilities for the “representation of
the captured city of Syracuse” (simulacrum captarum Syracusarum) in
Marcellus’ ovation. Was it a painting or a sculptural model? A female
Syracuse in chains, a map of the city, or the ancient equivalent of a card-
board cutout?
Even more to the point, there is a much bigger gap than is usually
supposed between whatever might have been carried in the triumphal
parades and the famous series of references, for the most part from Pliny,
to early “historical painting” at Rome. These included such works of art
as the painting of a battle between the Romans and Carthaginians,