triumphi) was one thing; and indeed “trying out the prospect of a tri-
umph” was a regular way of expressing the general’s proper petition to
the senate. Being seen to be too eager for the honor was quite another.
Cicero was not the only one who criticized cupiditas triumphi. Livy, for
example, scripts a tribune in 191 bce objecting to an immediate trium-
phal celebration for Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica on the grounds
that “in his rush for a triumph” he had lost sight of his military priori-
ties. The desire for true glory was, in other words, different from a han-
kering after its baubles.77
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The impact of such triumph-hunting, and of the senate’s desire to
curb it, on what we might now call Roman “foreign policy” is clear
enough. On the one hand, there was a repeated pressure to pick up
easy victories wherever they might be found, so further driving Roman
conquest. On the other, it is a fair guess that one of the factors that lay
behind the senate’s decision to offer alliances to various peoples in the
mid to late Republic was—if not to protect them from their own gener-
als on the look out for a triumph—at least to attempt to limit the ex-
cesses of such triumph-hunting. Not necessarily successfully: Roman
generals were perfectly capable of attacking those who were not Rome’s
enemies, or those who had come to terms with Rome.78
But at the same time, on the individual level, there were dangers in
being seen not to want a triumph. In Rome no less than other societies,
the rejection of such marks of honor might not only signal high-minded
disinterest in the insubstantial trinkets of public acclaim; it might also
imply a disdain for the system of values and priorities that those “trin-
kets” legitimated. To put it another way, if true honor goes to those who
have turned down a triumph, where does that leave those who have cele-
brated one? This dilemma is nicely captured by two very different tales
of triumphs refused told by, again, Livy and Valerius Maximus.
The first is the story of the consul Marcus Fabius Vibulanus, who
supposedly turned down a triumph that was spontaneously offered to
him by the senate after a victory in 480 bce, because both the other con-
sul and his own brother had been lost in the fighting. “He would not, he
said, accept laurel blighted with public and private grief. No triumph
ever celebrated was more renowned than this triumph refused.”79 The
opposite lesson is drawn by Valerius Maximus in another case history in
his chapter on “triumphal law.” It concerns one Cnaeus Fulvius Flaccus,
who “spurned and rejected the honor of a triumph, so sought after by
others, when it was decreed to him by the senate for his successes.” We
know nothing else of this incident, nor can we plausibly identify or date
the commander concerned. But Valerius insists that he was suitably
punished for his disdain of the prize: “In his refusal he anticipated no
more than what actually came about. For when he entered the city, he
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was instantly convicted in a public trial and punished with exile. So, if
he broke the religious law by his arrogance, he expiated the offence with
the penalty.”80
This theme is explored at much greater length and complexity in
Cicero’s speech In Pisonem (Against Piso), the written up and no doubt
reworked version of his attack on Lucius Calpurnius Piso delivered in
the senate in August 55 bce. From Cicero’s point of view, Piso’s main
claim to infamy lay in the fact that he had been consul in 58, the year
in which Cicero had been sent into exile, but the speech, as published,
is a comprehensive attack on Piso’s character, his Epicurean philosophi-
cal interests, and his political career—including his governorship of
the province of Macedonia, from where he had only just returned. This
province was, in Cicero’s bald phrase, more “triumphable” (triumphalis)
than any other, implying a ranking of imperial territory according to
how likely (or not) it was to produce a triumph for its elite Roman
masters.81
So far as we can tell through the dense fog of Cicero’s oratory, Piso
had had a very successful tenure: he had secured a considerable victory
against Thracian tribesmen, and had been hailed “Imperator” by his
troops.82 Cicero, of course, denigrates. After a litany of typically ba-
roque, if unspecific, accusations of sacrilege, murder, extortion, and rob-
bery, he claims that Piso was not even present at the crucial battle (an-
other case where the senate might have found assigning responsibility
tricky).83 But even more venom is reserved for Piso’s return to Italy, a
pointed contrast with Cicero’s own return home from exile. Whereas
Cicero came back to what was almost, even if he does not use the word
itself, a triumph or “a sort of immortality,” Piso did not even ask for a
triumph, despite his supposed victory and acclamation as imperator.
Over what is now several pages of written invective, Cicero pokes fun
and spite at that refusal, exposing in the process some crucial tensions in
the idea of “triumph-seeking.”84
At one point Cicero ventriloquizes Piso’s objections to triumphal
honors. It is, of course, a nasty parody and rests on a crude misrepresen-
tation of Epicurean views on the undesirability of worldly glory and
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217
fame, and on the importance of physical pleasure.85 But it is nevertheless
the only glimpse we have of what the views of a triumphal refusenik
might be (as well as being—although this has almost never been recog-
nized—the only republican summary of the ceremony that we have):
What is the use of that chariot? What of the generals in chains before the
chariot? What of the model towns? What of the gold? What of the silver?
What of the lieutenants on horseback and the tribunes? What of the
cheering of the soldiers? What of the whole ostentatious parade? It is
mere vanity, I assure you, the trifling pleasure one might almost say of
children, to hunt applause, to drive through the city, to want to be no-
ticed. In none of this is there anything substantial to get hold of, nothing
you can associate with bodily pleasure.86
But no less striking is Cicero’s framing of the opposite side of the ar-
gument. Far from distancing himself from “triumphal eagerness,” he in
fact elevates cupiditas triumphi to a leading principle of Roman public
life. In fact, more than that—a triumph is the single most approved
driving force in a man’s career, the acceptable face of other less accept-
able ambitions:
I have often noticed that those who seemed to me and others to be rather
too keen on being assigned a province tend to conceal and cloak their de-
sire under the pretext of wanting a triumph. This is exactly what Decius
Silanus used to say in the senate, even what my colleague used to say. In
fact, it is impossible for anyone to desire an army command and openly
canvas for it, without using eagerness for a triumph as a pretext.87
And he goes on to praise Lucius Crassus, who “went through the Alps
with a magnifying glass” looking for a triumph-worthy conflict where
there was no enemy, and Gaius Cotta, who “burned with similar desires”