pomerium or imperium. The fundamental question was this: how and in what circumstances could it be deemed legitimate for a successful general to enter the city in triumph?
One answer—and probably the safest—was to obtain the support of
the senate and to parade respect for the legal rules which policed the
very boundaries that a triumphal celebration would break. That was the
answer inscribed in the “traditional procedure” as it is usually painted—
though the carping remarks of Cato to Cicero, pointing out that a tri-
umph did not always follow a thanksgiving, shows how the edges of that
“tradition” could be blurred even for Romans. Yet, uncongenial as it
must seem to the generations of modern scholars who have cast the
Romans as legalistic obsessives, this was not the only way of claiming
legitimacy for a triumph. To go over the heads of the senate directly to
the assembly of the people as arbiters of the distribution of glory was an-
other. Sheer chutzpah was another option, albeit rare. Indeed, though
many more triumphs may have been celebrated in the general’s head and
then rejected as wishful thinking, and others transferred to the Alban
Mount in the face of senatorial rejection, we know of no triumphal pro-
cession that was ever launched onto the streets of Rome and not subse-
quently treated as a legitimate ceremony.
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MORE RULES AND REGULATIONS
The variants in procedure, then, were numerous. Nonetheless, the sen-
ate is usually portrayed as the main arena in which a commander’s
request for a triumph was debated, endorsed, decried or postponed—
and through which, if we are to believe Polybius, his triumph was
funded.53 These senatorial proceedings are vividly recreated by Livy,
whose account of the years 211 to 167 (where his surviving text breaks
off ) includes a series of debates for and against the triumph of individual
claimants. In 211, for example, Marcus Claudius Marcellus returned
from Sicily and, meeting the senate in the Temple of Bellona, requested
a triumph. Livy tells of a long discussion. On one side, some insisted
that it would be illogical to deny the general a triumph, when a
supplicatio for his victories had already been agreed to (not an argument
that Cato would have approved). On the other side, some objected that
the war could not be regarded as finished if his army had not been
brought back to Rome. As a compromise, he was granted an ovatio, and
he also celebrated a triumph in Monte Albano. 54
A decade later, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus, who had held a special
command in Spain, not as a regularly elected magistrate, made a re-
quest for a triumph. The senate, Livy tells us, agreed that his achieve-
ments were worthy of a triumph but that “no precedent had been
handed down from their ancestors for someone to triumph who had not
achieved his successes either as dictator or consul or praetor.” Again, an
ovatio was voted as a compromise, but this time in the face of opposition
from a tribune, who argued that the lesser award did not solve the prob-
lem and, in fact, “was just as out of step with traditional custom.”55
The arguments and counter-arguments produced in these narratives,
combined with a few surviving discussions of “triumphal law” by schol-
ars in antiquity itself, have been largely responsible for one of the most
curious academic industries of the last century or so: the repeated at-
tempts to say exactly what criteria the senate applied in deciding whose
triumph to ratify and whose not. This industry is fueled, rather than
dampened, by the evident contradictions in the decisions described. For
Playing by the Rules
207
example, how do we account for the grant of a triumph to Lucius Furius
Purpureo in 200, despite the fact that he had not brought his army
home, while that is said to have been the main reason for refusing
Marcellus just a decade earlier? Only the occasional voice has ever sug-
gested that these decisions were ad hoc, if not arbitrary; most have tried to detect the system, or at least the pattern, underlying the confusing
evidence.56
One influential view is that a clear set of rules always governed the
awards made by the senate, even if they might have been reformed and
recast over the course of the Republic, with additional criteria (such as a
minimum number of enemy casualties) introduced from time to time—
and even if they were sometimes disrupted by all kinds of personal and
political interests, favors, and back-scratching. Theodor Mommsen, for
example, identified the crucial, nonnegotiable qualification as the pos-
session of the highest form of imperium by a serving magistrate; so that
no general could properly triumph if, for example, he had won his vic-
tory while a second-in-command, or after he had resigned his magis-
tracy. Others, as I have noted, stressed instead the religious qualification
of auspicium, that is, command and authority seen in terms of the right
to conduct relations with the gods on behalf of the state.57
This approach is characteristic of that strand of nineteenth-century
scholarship which was set on recovering the main principles and details
of Roman constitutional law. In reaction to its rigid systematization,
more recent critics—while often still stressing the importance of impe-
rium—have suggested a much greater degree of improvisation on the
part of the senate, especially as they adjusted the traditional rules to the
changing circumstances of military leadership and the increasing use by
the Romans of generals who were not serving magistrates or held various
types of “special commands.” The triumphal debates in Livy, for exam-
ple, have been scrutinized to reveal an increasing willingness to grant tri-
umphs to men who were commanding armies in the, formally, more ju-
nior office of praetor rather than consul, while the same evidence has
been used to expose the introduction of various other qualifications for
an award—such as the stipulation applied to Marcellus that no triumph
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could be awarded to any commander who had not brought his army
back home. But for all the apparent flexibility of this approach (“The ac-
tual record demonstrates the Senate had few general principles in this
area which it was determined to make stick,” as one historian has frankly
observed), it still tends to fall back on the language of fixed criteria (even
if they were only temporarily fixed). We read, for example, of the “minor
rules, ” “certain requirements, ” and “commanders in the field struggling to conform with new stipulations. ”58
The truth is that this refreshing emphasis on flexibility does not usu-
ally go far enough, nor does it fully reflect the problems of the ancient
evidence on which this whole scholarly edifice has been based. It is
partly the fact that evidence never quite fits the rules proposed, leading
modern scholars to accommodate disjunctions and inconsistencies by
postulating some special circumstance, some particular change of policy,
or simply disobedience to the law. So, for example, that requirement for
a general to bring home his army in order to qualify for a triumph was,