sometimes couched, and perceived by participants at the time, in legal
or quasi-legal terms. Unless Livy and Valerius Maximus were writing en-
tirely against the grain of Roman assumptions in their ex post facto rationalizing explanations, their appeals to established (or invented) prece-
dent were all very likely the weapons of choice in the contested process
of deciding who was, or was not, to triumph—not to mention claims of
fair reward for success and the occasional call to adjust tradition to new
circumstances.
This was necessarily a shifting set of precedents and arguments. For
the senate’s job was not to adjudicate whether any particular com-
mander qualified for a triumph against a clear framework of prescriptive
legal rules. The question before it was whether he should or should not
celebrate one on this occasion, in the light of his request, the achieve-
ments he reported, and all the particular circumstances. The stakes were
high, and there was a repertoire—as time went by, a widening reper-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
2 1 2
toire—of potentially conflicting factors that might steer the senate to-
ward a decision. Precedents could be remembered or forgotten, rules
defended, invented, adjusted, or discarded, and political partisanship
dressed up as principle. This is a far cry from the systematization of “tri-
umphal law” imagined by the majority of modern scholars.67
Even more important, perhaps, is that fact that Livy (especially) sug-
gests a much more varied set of criteria and a wider range of dilemmas
facing the senate than is usually recognized—and indeed closer to some
of the issues prominent in the triumphal correspondence of Cicero.
Much as they have replayed Cato’s sound-bite on the relationship of
the triumph and thanksgiving, modern legally inclined historians have
tended to lay enormous emphasis on the occasional claims in Livy’s tri-
umphal debates that might pass as a rule or firm principle: “It was estab-
lished that up to that time no one had triumphed whose successes had
been achieved without a magistracy,” or “The reason for refusing him a
triumph was that he had fought under another person’s auspices, in an-
other person’s province.”68 In doing so, they have often failed to pay at-
tention to the more general texture of Livy’s discussions and to those less
obviously “legal” issues that he presents as central to the debates and de-
cision-making.
The first of these is the question of responsibility and achievement.
The priority of Livy’s senate is to reward the man responsible for scoring
a decisive success on behalf of Rome, or—where appropriate—to divide
the honor of a triumph fairly between two commanders.69 The dilemma
it repeatedly faces is how to make a decision on those terms, particularly
in the complicated, messy, and unprecedented situations that war threw
up. True, the technical issue of imperium is relevant here. It was one po-
tential guarantee of where ultimate command lay, and it ensured that
the victory was achieved by an official acting for the Roman state (the
triumph was not intended to reward private brigandage, however many
barbarians might have been killed). In fact, the majority of Roman com-
manders in major military engagements during the Republic did possess
imperium—and so, therefore, did the majority of those who triumphed.
But Livy also depicts his senators grappling with more practical and
Playing by the Rules
213
awkward considerations. For example, when they decided to award a tri-
umph to the praetor Lucius Furius Purpureo in 200, despite the fact that
he had not brought his army back home and that, in any case, the army
was technically under the command of an absent consul, one of the fac-
tors they were said to have borne in mind was simply “what he had
achieved.” That was just the argument Livy later put into the mouth of
Cnaeus Manlius Vulso, who triumphed in 187. While his opponents ac-
cused him of illegal war-mongering, he rested his (successful) defense on
the idea of military necessity and the outstanding results of his actions.70
Who was actually in command could be a more pressing and compli-
cated question than asking who had formal authority.71
Likewise the question of what counted as a decisive Roman success
could be trickier than either simply counting up the casualties or check-
ing that war had been properly declared. Livy himself gives us a glimpse
of one of the surprising limit cases here, when he records what he calls
the first triumph awarded “without a war being fought.” The consuls
Marcus Baebius Tamphilus and Publius Cornelius Cethegus had in 180
marched against the Ligurians, who had promptly surrendered; and the
whole population of about 40,000 men (plus women and children) was
resettled away from their mountain strongholds, thus bringing the war
to an end.72 Livy does not on this occasion script any senatorial debate
on the consuls’ triumph, but Cato’s stress on the “principles of govern-
ment” rather than brute conquest would surely have been one of the rel-
evant considerations here.
More striking still is Livy’s portrayal of the senate’s concern with ob-
taining proof of the victory claimed, and their repeated anxiety over how
competing claims might be adjudicated. In the case of Purpureo’s tri-
umph, he reports that some senior senators wished to postpone a deci-
sion until the consul returned to Rome, since “when they had heard the
consul and praetor debating face to face, they would be able to judge the
issue more accurately.” And indeed, he claims, when the consul did
finally return to Rome, he protested that they had heard only one side of
the case, as even the soldiers (as “witnesses of the achievements”) had
been absent.73 Just three years later, in 197 bce, a triumph was refused to
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
2 1 4
Quintus Minucius Rufus, who had reputedly fabricated the surrender of
a few towns and villages “with no proof.”74
In 193 Livy stages a much more elaborate dispute over a celebration
claimed by Lucius Cornelius Merula. The senatorial vote was post-
poned because of a clash of evidence: Merula’s dispatches were contra-
dicted by the account of his military campaigns in letters written “to a
large proportion of the senators” by Marcus Claudius Marcellus, an ex-
consul, serving as one of Merula’s legates, and it was felt that the dis-
agreements ought to be resolved with both men present.75 To be sure,
we have no means of knowing how far these issues presented by Livy
accurately reflected the concerns of the senatorial debates at the time.
Yet accurate or not, it is arresting to look beyond Livy’s nuggets of ap-
parent legalism and to find his senators facing very similar issues to those
faced by Cicero’s colleagues—stories about military victories that were
not entirely trustworthy and a flood of letters from one of the interested
parties.76
ON WANTING OR NON-WANTING A TRIUMPH
There is, however, a twist in the stories of the victorious commander’s
campaign for a triumph—a campaign that Livy once archly insinuated
might be the cause of “greater strife than the war itself.” Many of the
moral lessons pointed by Roman writers at the eager general do indeed
stress the dangers of wanting a triumph too much and the virtue of a
certain reluctance to grab the honor. “The prospect of a triumph” (spes