role in modern accounts of the triumph. The first is their characteristic
chant, as they went through the streets: “Io triumpe.” The second is the
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laurel wreaths, which they—like other participants—are said to have
worn. Third is their singing directed at the general, part in praise, part
in ribaldry. Each one of these has usually been explained by reference to
the deepest prehistory and primitive meaning of the ceremony; and each
in turn has been conscripted as evidence into some particular theory of
triumphal origins. But once again, there are major stumbling blocks
with this approach—and other more telling interpretations.
In the case of “Io triumpe,” many critics have eagerly fallen on Varro’s
tentative explanation in his treatise De Lingua Latina (On the Latin lan-
guage): the whole ceremony, he claims, owes its name to the chant (not
vice versa), which “could be derived from the word thriambos and the
Greek title of Liber [or Bacchus/Dionysus].” Not only does Varro ap-
pear to suggest a Bacchic origin for the ceremony. But, according to one
significant variant of this argument, his etymology of the Latin triumpe
from the Greek thriambos is only linguistically possible if we imagine an
intermediate Etruscan phase—a predictably attractive idea to those who
would like to see the ceremony as an import to Rome from Etruria.
Others have linked the soldiers’ chant with the refrain triumpe triumpe
triumpe triumpe in a surviving (and deeply obscure) archaic hymn, and
concluded that the word was an appeal for divine epiphany—and so a
convenient support for the idea that the triumphing general in some
way represented a god.70
All this is guesswork. We have no idea if Varro is right. We have no
clue even about the grammatical form of io triumpe (a vocative, an im-
perative, a primitive exclamation, or an Etruscan nominative have all
been suggested). And the latest linguist to look at the question, without
starting from a parti pris on the history of the triumph, has concluded
that the history of the word may have included an Etruscan phase but
did not necessarily do so.71
What gets passed over is the significance of the phrase for those who
shouted it out, listened to it, or committed it to writing in the historical
period. For some, it may have evoked the archaic religious world. Some
may have shared Varro’s speculation on the Dionysiac roots of the chant.
But the overwhelming impression must have been that the participants
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in the procession were repeatedly hailing the very ceremony they were
enacting (“Triumph, Triumph, Triumph”)—or, as Livy puts it, that the
soldiers “called on triumph by name.”72 There is no need to translate this
as “calling on the spirit of Triumph,” as if Livy had some kind of tutelary deity of the ceremony in mind.73 It is easier to see this as a powerful example of a characteristic kind of ritual solipsism—whereby the ritual
turns itself into the object of ritual, the triumph celebrates the triumph.
Ancient writers themselves were more interested in the wearing of
laurel than in the triumphal chant. Some Roman etymologists could not
resist the obvious temptation to explain its use in the ceremony by deriv-
ing the word laurus (laurel) from laus (praise).74 Pliny, however, in a long discussion of various species of the plant, trails a whole series of different
lines of approach. Modern scholars who have their eye on explaining the
origins of the triumph as a purification of the troops from the blood
guilt of war have often homed in on the suggestion he reports (from the
pen of the first-century ce Masurius Sabinus, and echoed in Festus’
dictionary) that would connect its role in the ceremony with its
purificatory properties.75 What they do not usually emphasize is that this
idea is explicitly rejected by Pliny, who prefers three different explana-
tions of the connection of laurel with the triumph: that it was a plant
dear to Apollo at Delphi; that “laurel-bearing ground” at Delphi had
been kissed by Lucius Junius Brutus (later first consul of the Republic),
in response to a famous oracle offering power (imperium) at Rome to
him who first kissed his “mother”; or that it was the only cultivated
plant never struck by lightning.
Our evidence, beyond this, for the early significance of laurel and for
how it might have related to the primitive function of the triumph is
very slight. It is possible—who knows?—that in stressing the role of
purification Masurius and Festus (or their sources) had picked up a
theme in the ceremony that did stretch back to the distant Roman
past.76 Certainly the problems of pollution seem more plausible to us
now than Pliny’s daft theories about Delphi and lightning. But in pass-
ing these over, we are in danger again of turning a blind eye to the his-
tory of the triumph in favor of its imagined prehistory. No one would
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think for moment that Pliny was “right” on why laurel was originally
used in a triumphal procession. But his explanations are important in
gesturing toward the different ways in which the plant (and the cere-
mony as a whole) was understood in the multicultural world of the first
century bce and later. Delphic laurel underpins such ideas as the “tri-
umph of poetry” (as we have seen already in Horace and Propertius) and
the “triumph of love” (in the myth of Apollo and Daphne—turned, as
she was, into laurel). In a sense, Pliny is offering not so much an expla-
nation of why laurel was used in the first place as a legitimating aetiology
for the widest interpretation of “triumphal culture.”77
A third characteristic of the soldiers in the procession that has re-
cently captured the most scholarly attention is their songs. These are
regularly referred to by Livy as carmina incondita, which might mean
anything from “spontaneous” to “artless” or “rude.”78 The best known,
and some of the very few directly quoted by ancient writers, are those
sung at the triumph of Caesar in 46 bce—including some predictable
potshots at the commander’s sexual exploits:
Romans, watch your wives, see the bald adulterer’s back home.
You fucked away in Gaul the gold you borrowed here in Rome79
Caesar screwed the lands of Gaul, Nicomedes screwed our Caesar,
Look Caesar now is triumphing, the one who screwed the Gauls
No Nicomedes triumphs though, the one who screwed our Caesar80
But there were also some more narrowly political darts. Dio reports
some clear references to Caesar’s desire to become king and the illegali-
ties that entailed. In an unusually acute piece of analysis (born, one
imagines, of a lifetime’s experience of autocratic rule), Dio claims that
Caesar was rather flattered by most of this, as the troops’ boldness to
speak their mind ultimately reflected well on himself. Most autocrats,
after all, like to be seen to be able to take a joke—up to a point. That
point, for Caesar, was (again, according to Dio) the insinuations about
his affair with Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, in which the Latin of
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