rated chariot—the figures have been identified as Neptune, Minerva,
and the divine personification of Rome—beneath a pair of Victories
holding a shield that is largely hidden behind the horse. As usual, the
practical details are as elusive as they are intriguing. Most representa-
tions of a triumph depict a chariot of very much this design: two large
wheels, high suspension, tall sides, with a curved front and open back,
often richly ornamented. This tallies well enough with Dio’s claim, as re-
ported at least in Byzantine paraphrase, that it was “like a round tower.”
Dio also insists that the triumphal chariot proper did not resemble the
version used in warfare or in games.
If he is correct (by Dio’s time chariots had played no part in regular
Roman warfare for centuries), it is far from clear when the chariot took
on its recognizable form and distinctively ceremonial character, and
what the implications of that were for its manufacture and possible re-
use.8 Were triumphal chariots in Rome stored away, ready to be brought
out again next time? Or if they were made specially for each occa-
sion, what happened to them when the ceremony was over? One of
the few hints we have comes from accounts of Nero’s quasi-triumph in
67 ce for his athletic and artistic victories on the Greek festival circuit:
both Suetonius and Dio claim that he rode in the very triumphal chariot
that Augustus had used to celebrate his military victories.9
What is clear is that these chariots must have offered the general an
uncomfortable ride. This did not escape the notice of J. C. Ginzrot, the
author—some two centuries ago—of one of the most thorough studies
ever of ancient chariots, who used his rare practical expertise as “Inspec-
tor of Carriage-Building at the Bavarian Court” to throw light on the
Roman traditions. It would have been very difficult, he pointed out, af-
ter a careful study of the surviving images, to keep upright all day in
such a means of transport: whatever the upholstery, the passenger would
be standing directly over the axle and, without the possibility of sitting
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down, “the jolting would have been almost intolerable for the elderly.”10
Ginzrot was in part echoing the sentiments of Vespasian after his tri-
umph of 71. According to Suetonius, the emperor, “exhausted by the
slow and tiresome procession,” made one of his famous down-to-earth
quips: “I’ve got my come-uppance for being so stupid as to long for a tri-
umph in my old age.”11
Yet this bumpy vehicle was one of the most richly symbolic of all the
triumphing general’s accessories. However cheap, everyday, or do-it-
yourself the reality may often have been, in their mind’s eye ancient
writers as well as artists repeatedly imagined the triumphal chariot in ex-
travagant terms. It was not only Ovid’s triumphant Cupid who was said
to ride in a chariot of gold. Other poets and historians play up the ex-
quisite decoration and precious materials: Pompey’s chariot in 61, for ex-
ample, was pictured as “studded with gems”; Aemilius Paullus was said
to have ridden “in an astonishing chariot of ivory”; Livy’s roster of the
honors associated with a triumph includes a “gilded chariot” (or perhaps
“inlaid with gold”).12 In fact, second only to “laurel,” the word “chariot”
(currus) was often used as a shorthand for the ceremony as a whole, and
the honor it implied. “What good did the chariots of my ancestors do
me?” asks the shade of Cornelia from beyond the grave, in one of
Propertius’ poems—meaning “What good did their triumphs do?” as
they could not save her from death.13
But more than that, the physical image of the chariot was itself con-
scripted into those Roman ethical debates on the nature of triumphal
glory and the conditions of true triumphal honor. In a particularly
memorable passage at the start of his Facta et Dicta Memorabilia (Memo-
rable Deeds and Sayings), Valerius Maximus tells the story of the flight
of the Vestal Virgins from Rome in 390 bce, when the city had been
captured by the Gauls. Weighed down with all the sacred objects they
were rescuing from the enemy, the Virgins were given a lift to safety
in the town of Caere by a local farmer, who (“as public religion was
more important to him than private affection”) had turfed his wife and
daughter out of his wagon to make room for the priestesses and their
precious cargo. So it came about that the “rustic cart of theirs, dirty as it
Th e
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2 2 4
was . . . equaled or even surpassed the glory of the most brilliant trium-
phal chariot you could imagine.”14 Again, as so often in triumphal cul-
ture, we are being asked to reflect on the different forms that honor and
glory might take.
However difficult the ride may have been, there is something even
more decidedly awkward about the pose of the passengers in Marcus
Aurelius’ triumphal chariot. The winged Victory, who in visual images
usually took the place of the slave that is such a favorite of modern
scholars, was originally holding a garland above the emperor’s head—as
the trace of a ribbon still hanging from her left hand shows. But she
is precariously balanced, not to say uncomfortably squashed, behind
the emperor, despite the fact that there is plenty of space in front of
him. This is because, as other marks on the stone (and the unsatisfac-
tory reworking of the lower left-hand side of the temple) indicate, an-
other, smaller passenger once stood in the chariot whose figure has been
erased.15
It seems to have been, or become, the custom that the general’s
young children should travel in the chariot with him, or, if they were
older, to ride horses alongside. We have already seen Germanicus shar-
ing his chariot in 17 ce with five offspring. Appian claims that Scipio
in 201 bce was accompanied by “boys and girls,” while Livy laments
the fact that in 167 bce Aemilius Paullus’ young sons could not—
through death or sickness—travel with him, “planning similar tri-
umphs for themselves” (a nice interpretation of the ceremony as a
prompt to ambition and a spur to the continuation of family glory).16
Notably, the newly discovered monument from the battlesite of Ac-
tium depicting the triumph of 29 bce shows two children, a boy and
a girl, beside the figure of Octavian (Augustus). The excavator is de-
termined to see in these figures the two children of Cleopatra by Mark
Antony, Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios.17 But Roman tradi-
tion would strongly suggest that they were the children or young rela-
tives of the triumphing general himself. If, as Suetonius claims, Ti-
berius and Marcellus rode alongside Octavian’s chariot on horseback,
then the slightly younger Julia and Drusus (the offspring respectively of
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Octavian and Livia from their first marriages) are the most likely candi-
dates.18
On the Aurelian panel, the erased figure must have been Marcus
Aurelius’ son, the future emperor Commodus (aged fifteen in 176 and
hailed imperator for victories over the Germans and Sarmatians along
with his father). Coins and medallions show him sharing the chariot.19
Here, he was presumably deleted after his assassination in 192 ce. This is
a pointed reminder not only of the uncertainties in the transmission of