process is elusive. In contrast to Mithradates and his family (whose im-
ages took the place of the human beings who, in other circumstances,
might have been present in the procession themselves), these gods could
appear in no form other than images. The eikones here, in other words,
were not standing in for captives who were unavoidably absent; they
were the “real thing,” the captive gods themselves, dressed like the other
prisoners in their exotic foreign garb. At least that is the case if we imag-
ine that eikones were the statues of these divine figures brought from the East. But we cannot be sure that they were not paintings of those divine
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183
images ( eikones of eikones), a second order of representation on painted canvas. In Appian’s written representation of the triumph, statues and
paintings of statues are impossible to distinguish.95
It makes a nice contrast with Josephus’ hints on this theme in his
account of the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. There the procession
is said to have included “images of the Roman gods, of amazing size
and skilled workmanship, and all made of some rich material.” Roman
statues of this kind (such as Pompey’s pearl head) may have been a regu-
lar presence in triumphal processions, and if so would have contributed
to the slippage we have already noted between victor and victim—the
treasures of the victors being an object of spectacle no less than those
of the vanquished. But they would have been a particularly loaded pres-
ence in this case, when, of course, there could have been no images
of the Jewish god. His place was taken by representations of a quite
different order, the holy objects from the temple and the written text of
the Law.96
Such mimetic games raised important and difficult questions of inter-
pretation and belief. How did you make sense of what you saw? And
could you trust your eyes? Appian directly confronted the problem of
belief when he made it absolutely clear that he was none too sure that
Pompey really was wearing the genuine cloak of Alexander the Great.
But Ovid, again, offers a particularly sophisticated and witty variation
on this theme, when he presents the triumphal procession in his Ars
Amatoria (Art of Love) as a good place for his learner-lover to impress
and pick up a girl. The idea is that Ovid’s girl (being a girl) cannot work
out for herself who or what the personifications of conquered places and
peoples are meant to be; and so the boy is advised to play the interpreter
and (with confident, if spurious, learning) to produce a plausible set of
names to identify the figures, models, and images as they pass.
. . . “Here comes Euphrates,” tell her,
“With reed-fringed brow; those dark
Blue tresses belong to Tigris, I fancy; there go Armenians,
That’s Persia, and that, h’r’m, was some
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 8 4
Upland Achaemenid city. Both those men are generals.”
Give the names if you know them; if not. . .
Invent a likely tale.97
The joke in this passage turns on the slipperiness of triumphal imagery.
It is partly, of course, on the girl, who cannot make sense of what she
sees. But it is on the boy and the narrator, too, as well as on the conven-
tions of the whole charade—and so also on the reader.
After all, just how plausible are the confidently spurious identifica-
tions the boy and the narrator between them devise? They may sound
reasonable enough to start with, but a moment’s thought will surely sug-
gest otherwise. Was it not a dumb decision, for example, to pretend to
distinguish so easily the two rivers that are the natural twins of the
world’s waterways?98 Has not the boy just revealed the very superficiality
of his own patronizing bravura? Maybe. But any readers who were to
take pleasure in their own superiority in this guessing game of interpre-
tation would risk falling into exactly the same trap as the learner-lover.
For part of the point of the passage is to insinuate the sheer under-deter-
minacy of the images (kings, rivers, a chieftain or two) that pass by in a
triumph. Besides, another question mark hovers here—over the victory
itself that is being celebrated. Ovid hints that he has in mind some fu-
ture triumph of Gaius Caesar (one of Augustus’ long series of ill-fated
heirs), for a victory over the Parthians. The chances are then that it will
be just another one of those diplomatic stitch-ups, passing as military
heroics, that characterized most Augustan encounters with that particu-
lar enemy. But who cares when the “real” conquest is the girl standing
next to you?
In the end, as always, the poet has the last laugh, insinuating a more
sinister agenda into this mimetic fun and disrupting the conventional
distinction between representation and reality. Suppose we banish the
suspicion that these processional images are overblown symbols to bol-
ster bogus heroics and take them straight as memorials of a series of suc-
cessful Roman massacres in the East. There is then an odd mixture of
times and tenses in Ovid’s account: “That is Persia,” “that was . . . ” At The Art of Representation
185
first sight this seems to be tied to the perspective of the boy and girl, as
the present tense of what they see now, gives way to a past tense of
what has just passed by. But more is hanging on the verbs than that. For
“that was some upland Achaemenid city” is literally true in another
sense. Whatever this nameless town used to be, the chances are that,
following our glorious Roman victory, it exists no more: it has only a
past. All that is “real” about it now is the brilliant cardboard cutout
or painting carried along in the procession. Representation has become
the only reality there is.
FAKING IT?
The boundary between models, representations, and replicas on the one
hand and fakes and shams on the other is an awkward one—just as
Tacitus insinuated in his account of Tiberius’ triumph over Germany
when he cast the simulacra in the procession as an appropriate com-
memoration for a victory that was itself only a pretense. The final twist
in the complicated story of triumphal representation comes with the ac-
counts of the triumphs or projected triumphs of the emperors Caligula
and Domitian; here mimesis is turned into deception.
Both of these scored hollow military victories and planned, even if
they did not celebrate, equally hollow triumphs. But where were the vic-
tims or the booty to come from? According to Suetonius, to celebrate his
triumph over the Germans, Caligula planned to dress up some Gauls to
impersonate bona fid e German prisoners. They were chosen with the
usual desiderata for triumphal captives in mind (“He chose all the tallest
of the Gauls”)—and, in fact, the emperor is credited with the nice coin-
age (in Greek) axiothriambeutos, or “worth leading in a triumphal pro-
cession,” to describe the qualities he was looking for. To make the cha-
rade more plausible, he was going to get them to dye their hair red, learn
the German language, and adopt German names. This is the occasion
that the satirist Persius probably refers to when he sends up Caligula’s