whole state onto himself ”—and presumably away from those nine gen-
erals “who triumphed thanks to him.”62 It was not only glamorous cap-
tives who might upstage the commander in the Roman imagination.
There was the lurking question of who was really responsible for the
victory being celebrated. The man in the chariot, or one of those who
were merely walking or riding in the procession? And at the same time
the other moral qualities on display might always challenge the military
heroics that appear to underpin the ceremony. Moderation might trump
victory.
It is a reasonable guess that the majority of participants in the trium-
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phal procession were the rank-and-file soldiery who followed the gen-
eral’s chariot. These men are invisible in the many visual representations
of the triumph, which focus on the general or—if more widely—on the
captives, spoils, and occasionally animal victims destined for slaughter
on the Capitol. It is, in fact, a striking testimony to the selective gaze of
Roman visual culture that there is no surviving ancient image of the cel-
ebration that depicts the mass of soldiers. Literary representations, how-
ever, do sometimes bring them strongly into the frame. The triumph
could be presented as a celebration that belonged to the troops as much
as to the general. In the dispute over Aemilius Paullus’ celebration in
167 bce, for example, Livy puts into the mouth of an elderly war hero
a speech that stresses the centrality of the soldiers themselves: “In fact
the triumph is the business of the soldiers . . . If ever the troops are
not brought back from the field of campaigning to the triumph,
they complain. Yet even when they are absent, they believe that they
are part of the triumph, since the victory was won by their hands. If
someone were to ask you, soldiers, for what purpose you were brought
back to Italy and were not demobbed as soon as your mission was
done . . . what would you say, except that you wished to be seen tri-
umphing?”63
This is a tendentious piece of rhetoric, intended to encourage the
troops to vote for the triumph of their general. But the idea of the
triumph as a prize and a spectacle (note the emphasis on “be seen tri-
umphing”) in which the soldiers had as much stake as their commander
is found elsewhere, too. A revealing case is an incident, reported by
Appian, when the threat to deprive them of their role in a triumph is
successfully used as a weapon against mutinous soldiers. In 47 bce,
when Julius Caesar’s troops complained that they had not been paid
their promised donatives (in effect, cash bonuses) and demanded to be
discharged, Caesar is said to have responded shrewdly: he agreed to their
discharge and said, “I shall give you everything I have promised when I
triumph with other troops.” In Appian’s reconstruction, it was in part
the thought that “others would triumph instead of themselves” that
brought them to beg Caesar to take them back into the army.64
Playing God
243
This anecdote points also to the importance of the donative associ-
ated with the triumph. From the late third century, when Livy’s account
regularly includes a record of the total amount added to the treasury by
the triumphing general, it also includes a note of the bonuses given to
the troops and how this was scaled by rank (it was usual practice with
handouts in the ancient world that the higher status you held the more
cash you received). The figures given here and elsewhere vary plausibly,
with an underlying inflationary tendency up to the massive handouts of
Pompey in 61 and later Caesar.65 But their reliability is as uncertain as
any, and the apparently standard rule that centurions received twice as
much as rank-and-file foot soldiers—and elite equestrian officers three
times as much—is partly a product of scholarly emendations (right or
wrong) of the numerals in ancient texts, to bring them into line with
these “standard” proportions.66
Whatever the exact amounts, the interests of the soldiers in this ele-
ment of triumphal tradition are easy to understand. From the general’s
point of view, it must have been a useful bait to bring his soldiers back to
Rome for the procession. On some, if not many occasions the troops
would have returned to their homes during that period of waiting before
a triumph was granted or celebrated; beyond the symbolic value of the
triumph itself, the cash would have been a powerful incentive to turn up
on the day.67 How old the tradition was, how the cash was distributed to
the men, or at what precise point in the proceedings we do not know. It
is one of the penumbra of rituals associated with the triumph that are al-
most completely lost to us.
Donatives could, however, backfire. The enthusiasm of the soldiers
certainly played its part in ensuring that a triumph was granted. For ex-
ample, the hailing of the general as imperator on the battlefield after his victory might be (as in Cicero’s case) an important first step in his campaign for triumphal honors. But conversely, disgruntled troops could al-
ways attempt to wreck their commander’s aspirations or at least spoil his
show. Pompey’s first triumph was almost ruined by the soldiers who
threatened to mutiny or help themselves to the booty on display, if they
were not given a bigger bonus.
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Even more notorious was the reaction of the troops to the senatorial
approval given to Aemilius Paullus’ triumph in 167 bce. For the soldiers,
angered by his meanness with the donative and smarting under his rigid
“old-fashioned discipline,” were stirred up by one of their junior officers
and a personal enemy of Paullus to try to hijack the assembly specially
convened to assign him imperium on the day of his triumph and so pre-
vent his procession: “Avenge yourselves on that domineering and stingy
commander by voting down the proposal about his triumph.” Only the
intervention of the elderly war hero with his emphasis on the impor-
tance of the triumph for the soldiers (and accompanied by a public dis-
play of war wounds) saved the day for Paullus.68 The rights and wrongs
of this conflict are impossible to determine—especially given the ten-
dency of officer-class historians (ancient as well as modern) to present
the demands of the rank and file as impertinent greed, and stinginess on
the part of the general as admirable prudence. But it makes clear how
the soldiers themselves could be seen as a force to be reckoned with in
the planning and voting of a triumph—even if we know of no case
where the ambitions of a general were in fact blocked by his men.
On the day itself the soldiers brought up the rear of the procession,
marching, according to some accounts, in proper military order (one
cannot help but suspect that the reality was often less disciplined). Un-
like the general, they wore military dress and displayed their various mil-
itary decorations—armlets, crowns of various shapes and sizes, presenta-
tion spears, and the ancient equivalents of campaign medals (albeit not
usually in the quantity paraded by Siccius Dentatus). This was the only
time that regular soldiers under arms legitimately entered Rome and an
extraordinary, almost aggressive reversal of the usual norm that the city
itself was a demilitarized zone.69
SOLDIERS’ KIT
Three features of the soldiers’ dress or behavior have played a particular