up all hope of a triumphal ceremony.28
GENERALIZING FROM CICERO?
Cicero’s correspondence brings to the surface significant problems in the
award of triumphal honors. It is clear, for a start, that lack of reliable in-
formation about military achievements in a distant province, and com-
peting versions from different parties, made any decision about granting
a triumph a delicate one. Major military success was certainly seen as a
basic requirement; but whose story was to be believed? To make matters
more complicated, the uncertainty in the chain of command (particu-
larly at the time of transition from governor to governor) was liable to
raise questions about whose responsibility any victory was. Suppose that
Cassius really had scored a major success against a Parthian invasion be-
fore Bibulus had even reached the province of Syria. Would Bibulus, as
overall commander (and the holder of imperium), have been the candi-
date for triumph? Or Cassius, despite his subordinate position?
And as the exchange of letters with Cato reveals, in perhaps an unusu-
ally extreme form, different parties might hold different ideas about
what kind of victory counted as triumph-worthy. Here we find the sug-
gestion that the conduct of the victorious general might count, as well as
simple fact of an enemy defeated. But how was that to be assessed? It
must partly be because of the gaps in information, and the dilemmas
facing anyone who tried to judge competing claims, that the role of per-
sonal canvassing was so crucial. Cicero’s letters ask for his triumphal
claims to be taken seriously on, as Romans might have seen it, the best
of all possible grounds: his standing, connections, and friendships.
The letters also expose various ways in which the triumph and its pre-
liminaries could impact on politics more widely. In practical terms, a
thanksgiving or triumphal celebration was inevitably an intrusion—wel-
Playing by the Rules
197
come or not—into the political business of the city, with consequences
(as Curio’s anxieties show) for other aspects of public life. Its timing and
length were almost bound to be the subject of loaded negotiations and
conflicting claims. And for this reason, if for no other, triumphal debates
would often be drawn into political wheeling and dealing.
In the wider competition for public status, too, the triumph ranked
high. Cicero’s insistence on not appearing too “eager” for the honor
hints at some of the social ground rules of the competitive culture of
the late-republican Roman elite: in this area at least, ambition was veiled
as much as it was displayed; and protection from the possible public
humiliation of failure might be secured by a contrived insouciance. But
equally, the triumph was a hugely desirable mark of distinction and
crucial in the relative ranking of prestige. When Cicero fulminates at
Bibulus’ success in achieving a lengthy thanksgiving, it is not merely an
indication of personal pique; it shows how the triumph and its associ-
ated rituals were a key element in the calibration of glory and status
among the elite—and inevitably “political” for that.
Yet Cicero’s extraordinarily vivid insider’s story on the preliminaries
to a triumph has rarely been central to modern studies of the cere-
mony.29 Why? Part of the reason must be that Cicero never did achieve
his ambition; so, as a noncelebration, this tends to fall through the
cracks in the roster of triumphal history and its chronology of awards.
Part also, I suspect, is that Cicero’s military career as a whole is never
treated seriously, as critics tend either to take his own rhetorical self-dep-
recation literally or alternatively to recoil from the glimpses of pompos-
ity and pride that the correspondence simultaneously offers. Any com-
parison between Cicero and Alexander the Great does seem, after all,
faintly ridiculous; so too does the image of him apparently so desperate
for triumphal glory that he spent the first two years of a cataclysmic civil
war traipsing around Italy and Greece with a posse of lictors in tow, car-
rying their laurel-wreathed fasces. Equally unappealing is the energetic
postal campaign to some six hundred senators urging their support for
his supplicatio—although in the absence of comparable evidence for
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 9 8
other occasions, there is in fact no reason to suppose that this was not a
fairly normal procedure: Flamininus, Aemilius Paullus, Mummius, and
Pompey may all have tried to ensure a favorable vote in just that way.
An even more significant reason for passing over Cicero’s would-be
triumph must be the sense that the messy negotiations and trade-offs
that the letters expose are a feature of the political collapse of the period,
bringing with it a decline in triumphal propriety and order. By this
stage, so the argument would go, the honor was a trinket to be squab-
bled over by generals with only a paltry victory to their name—a far cry
from the framework of rules and regulations within which the third-
and second-century triumphal debates described by Livy appear to take
place, and from the major military successes with which they are con-
cerned. It is to those rules (however highly politicized or partisan their
application might sometimes have been) that we should turn if we wish
to reconstruct the principles on which the award of a triumph was tradi-
tionally made. From this perspective, the simple fact that Cicero and his
correspondents seem hardly bothered with any formal qualifications for
requesting or granting the honor is a good gauge of how far the system
as a whole had sunk into mere in-fighting. Only Cato appears to touch
on something remotely like a rule (albeit a negative one) with his asser-
tion that a triumph does not always follow a supplicatio—and so, pre-
dictably enough, this nugget alone has often been extracted by modern
historians from such a rich vein of material.30
Such comparisons, however, are hazardous. On the basis of the num-
bers of triumphs celebrated, it is misleading to claim that the final years
of the Republic were a particularly easy time to achieve a triumph as tra-
ditional standards broke down: if anything, the early and middle years
of the first century bce show a dearth rather than a bumper crop of cele-
brations. There is also the question of whether we are comparing like
with like. After all, the general’s view of the day-to-day negotiations as
they progress will inevitably create a different impression from a retro-
spective historical narrative whose job is to impose order on events as
they unfolded, sometimes chaotically. It is perfectly conceivable that
Cicero’s correspondence took the rules and regulations that framed a tri-
Playing by the Rules
199
umphal award for granted, without a mention. No less conceivable is it
that, had they survived, the private letters of (say) Aemilius Paullus
would reveal just as intricate and messy a series of negotiations and un-
certainties.
Underlying the whole problem is the issue of what kind of decision-
making process we are looking for in the award of a triumph. Starting
from Cicero allows us to rethink some of the most hotly debated ques-
tions in the history of the ceremony: how, and under what conditions,