did a general secure a triumph? This is a very different aspect of the cere-
mony and its scholarship from the display of wealth and conquest that
has been my main theme so far; and it requires attending carefully to
contradictory details of principles, procedure, and technicalities, as they
are described by ancient writers. Yet the picture that will emerge from
this is of a ceremony much less rigidly governed by rules and formal
qualifications than has often been assumed. In fact, the triumphal ac-
counts in Livy turn out to be rather more “Ciceronian” in character than
is usually recognized.
ARGUING THE CASE
Triumphs were claimed or demanded by a general; they were not usually
bestowed on him spontaneously by a grateful senate or people.31 During
the Republic at least (the Empire was very different) the assumption of
most surviving accounts is that the initiative lay with the victorious
commander. It was always liable to be a politically contentious claim;
and all the more so because it is far from clear now—and almost cer-
tainly was not much clearer in the ancient world itself—who in the state
had the final authority to grant or withhold a general’s “right” to cele-
brate a triumph. Most of the debates on this question that are replayed
(or reinvented) in the pages of Roman writers are set in the senate, and
the senate is regularly said to allow or refuse the honor. Yet we have no-
torious examples of men who apparently triumphed in the face of sena-
torial refusal, with or without the support of the people; and these tri-
umphs, not only those celebrated outside Rome on the Alban Mount,
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had sufficient official status to appear in the inscribed list in the Forum.
An adverse senatorial decision did not in itself, in other words, deny
legitimacy to the celebration.32
How a triumph was claimed in the earliest period of the Republic
is frankly anyone’s guess, and the different formulations used by writ-
ers such as Livy probably do not bear the weight of speculation placed
on them. When he describes an early triumph simply as the com-
mander “returning to Rome in triumph,” this may—or may not—im-
ply an archaic version of the ceremony that was little more than a victo-
rious re-entry into the city, without formal regulation.33 What is clear,
however, is that both Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus not infre-
quently envisage political conflict in the triumphal celebrations from the
very earliest period.
Dionysius, for example, recounting the triumph of Servilius Priscus
in 495, explains that the senate refused authorization for narrowly politi-
cal reasons and that Servilius took his case instead to the assembly of
the people, who enthusiastically endorsed it.34 Half a century later, Livy
elaborates (probably fancifully) on the supplicatio and triumph of
Valerius Publicola in 449. The thanksgiving of a single day decreed by
the senate was thought too mean, and the people spontaneously cele-
brated an extra one. The senate subsequently refused a triumph, which
was granted by an assembly of the people, proposed by a tribune. One
objector is supposed to have claimed that, in leading the motion, the tri-
bune was paying back a personal favor, not honoring military success.35
Fanciful or not, these incidents clearly show that in the Roman histori-
cal imagination, political conflicts surrounding the triumph could go
back (almost) as far as the institution itself.
Later in the Republic, from at least the end of the third century bce,
we can detect clearer signs of a regular procedure—although, as with
most aspects of the triumph, not as fixed as many modern scholars have
liked to imagine.36 There are, indeed, all kinds of diverse tales of how a
general might obtain the honor. Pompey’s first triumph, for example,
was written up by Plutarch as a favor granted by the dictator Sulla. And
writing of the confused period after the assassination of Julius Caesar,
Playing by the Rules
201
Dio casts Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia as the power behind the grant of a
triumph to Lucius Antonius. He had, according to this account, done
little to deserve one, but once Fulvia had given the nod “they voted for it
unanimously” (who “they” are is not clear)—“and she gave herself rather
more airs than he did, and for a better reason; for to give someone the
authority to hold a triumph was a much greater achievement than to
celebrate it as the gift of another.”37 But, of course, the fact that Plutarch
and Dio pointedly chose to tell the story of these triumphal grants in
terms of personal, autocratic, or transgressively female power does not
prove that no other public procedures of decision-making took place
even in these cases. As Dio’s reference to the “unanimous voting” shows,
he imagines Fulvia as dominating, rather than replacing, the regular pro-
cess of triumphal awards.
That process is usually seen—largely on the basis of accounts given
by Livy for triumphs of the late third and early second centuries bce—
in two stages. The first took place in the senate, the second before the
people. On his return to Rome, if a victorious general wanted to seek a
triumph, he would convene the senate outside the pomerium, a favorite
location being the temple of the appropriately warlike goddess Bellona.38
This would not be the first the senate knew of the general’s ambi-
tions. He would have sent official dispatches from the field of conflict
(“laureled letters”—literally, it seems, letters decorated with laurel) or
an official envoy, as well as private letters to his friends and colleagues.
He might well have emphasized his acclamation as imperator by his
troops. And very likely he would have already requested and been awarded
a thanksgiving: out of some sixty-five republican supplicationes, just eleven are known not to have been followed by a triumph, Cicero’s and Bibulus’
included.39 Nonetheless, in front of the senators he would put his case
for a triumph in a formal address.
The best direct evidence for these communications, whether the speech
of the general himself or of his intermediaries, is thought to come not
from any historical account but from the late third-century to early sec-
ond-century bce comedies of Plautus, which on several occasions appear
to parody elements of triumphal celebration. The Amphitruo, in particu-
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lar, which focuses on the tragicomic return home of the victorious
Theban general (and cuckolded husband) Amphitruo, makes a point of
mimicking triumphal language. Early in the play, Amphitruo’s slave
messenger Sosia explains to the audience the circumstances of his mas-
ter’s return: “The enemy defeated, the victorious legions are return-
ing home, this mighty conflict brought to an end and the enemy exter-
minated. A city which brought many casualties to the Theban people
has been defeated by the strength and valor of our troops and taken
by storm, under the authority and auspices (imperio atque auspicio) of
my master Amphitruo, especially.” The formality of expression and the
clipped style echo such traces we have of apparently official records of
Roman military achievement, suggesting that Plautus was offering, to
those in the know, a wry parody of the traditional language in which re-