although he also was unable to find a proper opponent. But irony is an
even sharper weapon. Poor old Pompey, “He really has made a mistake,”
he sighs at one point. “He never had the appetite for your sort of philos-
ophy. The fool has already triumphed three times.” As for “the likes of
Camillus, Curius, Fabricius, Calatinus, Scipio, Marcellus, Maximus,” he
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thunders, listing an honorable clutch of famous triumphing generals,
“Fools the lot of you!”88
Different circumstances inevitably call for different arguments. No
doubt Cicero could have been equally, but quite differently, devastating
if the target of his invective had been a man who was lingering outside
the pomerium, plus army and lictors with their fading laurel, just waiting for the senate to say yes. But the cultural logic of Cicero’s case against
Piso is nevertheless striking. Why was Piso’s disdain for triumph-seeking
a powerful rhetorical weapon? Why the insistence here on cupiditas
triumphi as a positive force? There were presumably immediate rhetori-
cal factors to be considered. Cicero was playing to the assumptions
about triumphal ambitions among his listeners, and later readers. If the
majority of the senate shared aspirations for triumphal glory, to mock
someone who did not share those aspirations would have been as dis-
tancing of Piso as it was bonding for the collectivity. Who did Cicero
wish to seem more ridiculous? Those keen characters who hoped that
even an unlikely backwater of the Alps might allow them to follow in
the triumphal footsteps of the heroes of the past? Or the triumphal re-
fusenik, Piso? Piso, of course.
Yet this hints a broader structural point too. What Cicero implies by
his attack on Piso is that the desire for a triumph played an important
role in the structural cohesion of the Roman political and military elite.
For all the elegant denial of excessive desire for such rewards that Cicero
and others might on occasion display, the shared goal of triumphal glory
was one of the mechanisms through which the ambitions of the elite
were framed and regulated. A rash of trivial triumph-hunting was much
less dangerous to the collectivity than a rash of men choosing to disdain
the traditional goals and the procedures through which they were po-
liced. It is, in fact, a powerful marker of the end of the competitive poli-
tics of the Republic that the first emperor, Augustus, is able not only to
monopolize triumphal glory to himself and his family but also to turn
repeated triumphal refusal into a positive political stance.
c h a p t e r
VII
Playing God
TRIUMPHATOR?
Some years before the fragments of the triumphal Fasti were excavated
from the Roman Forum and installed in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on
the Capitoline hill, another major triumphal monument had been put
on display in the same building. This was a large marble sculptured
panel, measuring three and a half by almost two and a half meters, de-
picting the second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius, attended by a fig-
ure of Victory, in a triumphal chariot drawn by four horses (Fig. 31).
It was usually assumed to represent his triumph of 176 ce. Long part
of the decoration of the small church of Santa Martina at the northwest-
ern end of the Forum, it was removed in 1515 to the courtyard of the Pa-
lazzo dei Conservatori, along with two other matching panels, one de-
picting the emperor receiving the submission of barbarians, the other
showing him performing sacrifice. In 1572 all three were installed in-
doors, on the landing of the monumental staircase, where they remain
to this day.1
They are an intensely controversial group of sculptures. Debates have
raged for well over a hundred years on many aspects of their history and
archaeology: from the precise identification of the events depicted, to
the style and location of the monument from which they came.2 But the
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[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 31:
The triumph of Marcus Aurelius, one of a series of panels from a lost monu-
ment in honor of the emperor, 176–80 ce. The vacant space in front of Marcus was once occupied by his son Commodus, who was erased after his assassination in 192 (and the lower left-hand corner of the temple in the background awkwardly extended).
sense in which this triumphal panel captured the idea of “triumph” is
clear enough. In contrast to those few surviving ancient representations
that attempted to encompass the procession as a whole, this image
trades on an emblematic shorthand for the ceremony that is still familiar
from many sculptures and literally thousands of Roman coins—and
in antiquity would have been even more, perhaps oppressively, famil-
iar as the standard theme of the free-standing sculptural groups that
Playing God
221
once stood on top of commemorative arches, dominating the imperial
cityscape.3 This is the triumph seen without the paraphernalia of prison-
ers, booty, paintings, and models but instead pared down to the figure
of the triumphing general, aloft on his chariot, accompanied by only his
closest entourage, divine and human. The image more or less conflates
the ceremony of triumph with the triumphing general himself; or—to
use for once the favored modern term, which I have otherwise deliber-
ately avoided (largely because it is not attested in surviving Latin be-
fore the second century ce)—the image conflates the triumph with the
triumphator. 4
A BUMPY RIDE
In this scene, the triumphant emperor stands against a background of a
temple and an awkwardly attenuated arch. Various attempts have been
made to identify these buildings and so, of course, to support different
theories on the triumphal route.5 But to attempt to read this visual evo-
cation of triumphal topography literally is probably to miss the point.
The image itself hints otherwise—with its team of horses that simulta-
neously turns through and swerves away from the arch, the fasces that
signify magisterial authority not carried, as they would have been, at the
ceremony itself but etched into the pillar of the arch, and the mag-
nificent trumpet which, impossibly, fills the whole passageway.
The viewer is being prompted to remember this ceremony as one em-
bedded in the cityscape, rather than to pinpoint any particular stage of
the procession, and—no less important—to recapture the sounds of its
musical accompaniment. We cannot know how musicians were de-
ployed through the parade (and they are certainly not so prominent in
the sculptures of the complete procession as they are here). But ancient
writers do sometimes imagine trumpets “leading the way” or “blaring
around” the general, and Appian refers to a “a chorus of lyre players and
pipers” in the parade.6 In fact, a rare republican representation of a tri-
umphal procession—a little-known and frankly unprepossessing frag-
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ment of relief sculpture from Pesaro—depicts a trio of two pipers and a
lyre player in front of what appears to be a group of barbarian prisoners
(hence the identification as a triumph).7
On the Capitoline panel, Marcus Aurelius rides in a lavishly deco-