of the censors was to place the contract for coloring Jupiter with cinnabar.
The origin of this custom, I must say, baffles me.38
Pliny does not vouch for this practice himself, nor claim that it took
place in his day, or even in Verrius’. But this has not stopped (indeed, it
has encouraged) generations of modern critics from basing extravagant
theories on it—partly in the belief, no doubt, that Pliny’s sources are
taking us back to the raw primitive heart of triumphal practice, or some-
where near it.
For many, the key lies in the equivalence that may be hinted in Pliny’s
text between the cult image of Jupiter and the general. At its strongest,
this has been taken to indicate that the general did not so much imper-
sonate a god as impersonate a statue (so launching theories that link the
origin of the triumph with the origin of commemorative statuary).39 For
others, the color itself has prompted a variety of (sub-)anthropological
speculations: that, for example, the face-painting was an apotropaic de-
vice to frighten off the spirits of the conquered dead; or that it was an
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imitation of blood—and indeed that “it was not red paint at all origi-
nally, but blood” intended to transfer the mana (“life force” or “power”
in Austronesian terms) of the enemy to the victorious general.40
In fact, the tenuous evidence we have hardly supports the idea that
the triumphing general’s face, or body for that matter, was regularly
colored red, or that there was a well-established association between
the general and the statue of Jupiter (or the statue of anyone else). In
fact, the cult image on the Capitoline can hardly have been made of
terracotta after 83 bce, when the archaic temple was completely de-
stroyed, and so would not then have required the treatment with cinna-
bar that Pliny describes. At the very most, from the early first century,
the general would have been imitating a previous version of the cult
statue that no longer existed.41
Of course, we always run the risk of normalizing the Romans, of
too readily erasing behavior that seems, in our terms, impossibly weird
or archaic. Painted faces may perhaps have been a standard feature of
early triumphs, and we cannot definitively rule out the practice at any
point. Nonetheless, my guess is that there is no particular need to see red
on the face of any of the late republican or early imperial generals.
Aemilius Paullus, Pompey, and Octavian did not necessarily ride in tri-
umph smeared with cinnabar.
The problem we are confronting here is not just the fragility of the
evidence, or its over-enthusiastic interpretation, though that is part of it.
It is equally a question, as the various interpretations of the red face viv-
idly illustrate, of the fixation of modern scholars with explaining the in-
dividual elements in the ceremony by reference to the customs and sym-
bols of primitive Rome. Few historians of the triumph have been able to
resist the attraction of the obscure origins of the ceremony—whether
that means detecting in the general a hangover of the god-kings of
“Frazer-land,” a descendant of the rulers of the early Etruscan city, or
even an embodiment of primitive conceptualizations of the divine. The
rarely stated truth is that we have no reliable evidence at all for what
early triumphing generals wore and not much more for the costume of
the Etruscan kings of the city.
Playing God
233
The Romans themselves were equally ill-informed. True, “Etruscan
origins” were one of the most convenient recourses they had when ex-
plaining puzzling features of their own culture. But we certainly should
not assume that they were correct. What is more, at least from the
period of Julius Caesar on (as we shall explore in the next chapter), they
were busy confusing such issues even further by seeking precedents
and models for the increasingly dynastic attire of their political leaders
not just in triumphal costume but also in their imaginative reconstruc-
tion of early regal outfits. The confident statements of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus and others about Etruscan symbols of monarchy may pos-
sibly be a product of some archaeological knowledge; but they are much
more likely to be the outcome of this politically loaded combination of
antiquarian fantasy and invented tradition.42
For the most part, long as its history is, the triumph does not give us a
clear window onto the primitive customs of Rome—nor, conversely, can
its features simply be explained by retreating to the religious and politi-
cal culture of the early city.
MAN OR GOD?
By contrast, what we do know is that there were strong links between
the triumphing general and those contested ideas of deity and deificat-
ion that were so high on the cultural and political agenda of the late Re-
public and early Empire. These connections are often passed over, if not
lost, in the preoccupation with the ritual’s prehistory, but they offer us a
much surer point of entry to the intriguing evidence we have.
The power of late republican dynasts and of the early imperial family
was often represented in divine terms. Human success and its accompa-
nying glory could push a mortal toward and even across the permeable
boundary which, for the Romans, separated men from gods. This was
seen in many different ways—from metaphors of power that implicitly
identified the individual with the gods to, eventually, the institutional
structure of cult and worship that delivered more or less explicit divine
honors to both dead and living emperors. So far as we can tell, Roman
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thinkers and writers took the idea of deification (that is, of a human be-
ing literally becoming a god) with no greater equanimity than we do
ourselves. The nature of the “divine human” was constantly debated,
recalibrated, negotiated, and ridiculed. Emperors drew back from claim-
ing the role and privileges of gods as enthusiastically as they basked in
divine worship. The dividing line between mortality and immortality
could be as carefully respected as it was triumphantly crossed. Nonethe-
less, divine power and status were a measure against which to judge its
human equivalents, and a potential goal and ambition for the super-
successful.43
These debates offer the best context for understanding the special sta-
tus of the triumphing general. Whatever Livy’s phrase ornatus Iovis tells
us of the regular costume adopted in the ceremony (less than we might
hope, as I have already suggested), it certainly shows that Livy could
imagine the general in divine terms. But the nuances and implications
of that connection with the gods come out more clearly if we look at an-
other element in his retinue—the horses who pulled the triumphal char-
iot. Again, the appearance of these animals on the Aurelian panel hardly
gives the modern viewer any hint of the controversy that has surrounded
them, or any hint of what they might imply about the status of the gen-
eral whom they transport. But ancient literary discussions occasionally
lay great emphasis on the different types of beast that might appear in
this role and their significance.44
All kinds of variants are in fact recorded (the most extravagantly ba-
roque being the mention of stags that supposedly drew the chariot of the
emperor Aurelian and then did double duty as sacrificial victims when