ized”) preparations or the different forms in which the triumph pro-
longed its impact in further spectacles and celebration would amount to
a very blinkered view of the occasion and its significance. Conversely, to
include every aspect of the memorialization and representation of the
triumph (or even of victory) as part of the ritual itself risks diluting and
decentering the ceremony beyond what is either plausible or useful.
That is not merely a modern dilemma. Romans too were involved in
the process—a contested, loaded, changing, and inevitably provisional
one—of “fixing” the ritual as ritual, defining, policing, and also trans-
gressing the boundaries that marked it off from the everyday nonritual
world, and drawing a line between the triumph and all those other cere-
monies that were not to count as triumph. This is part of what the dy-
namics of “ritualization” are all about. We have already seen one side of
this, and its potential complexity, in the various subcategories of the tri-
umphal ceremony as they are defined by Roman writers. Both the ovatio
and triumph in monte Albano were carefully distanced from the triumph
“proper” by a series of precise distinctions and calibrations: the general
traveling on foot or horseback, for example, not in a chariot; a myrtle,
not a laurel, wreath; a standard senatorial toga, rather than the toga picta;
or simply a changed location.
Such calibrations could matter. Why else would Marcus Licinius
Crassus have chosen to wear a laurel, not a myrtle, wreath at his ovation
for victory over a slave rebellion in 71 bce, if not to make it seem more
like a full triumph?24 Yet in other contexts and circumstances those dis-
tinctions could be overlooked, so as to treat all the variants as bona fide
triumphs. This was strikingly the case in the inscribed triumphal record
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in the Forum, where all were listed together. The ovation and ceremony
on the Alban Mount, in other words, both were and were not triumphs.
The rest of this chapter explores the contested margins of the ceremony
of triumph itself, and the ways that various forms of triumphal symbol-
ism extended more generally into other areas of public life. It is con-
cerned with the triumph outside the triumph.
WHEN WAS A TRIUMPH NOT A TRIUMPH?
Roman history and history writing are full of triumphlike occasions.
Outside the roster of official triumphs, the ceremony gave the general a
model of how to celebrate his victory at other times and places, just as it
offered ancient writers a model for describing and representing other
celebrations. Plutarch, for example, notes the magnificent arrival of
Aemilius Paullus back into Italy after his victory over Perseus, “like the
spectacle of triumphal procession, for the Romans to enjoy in advance,”
while Flamininus and his troops are said by Livy to have passed through
Italy in 194 bce “in a virtual triumph.” A more striking phrase—which
is most likely a clever coinage by Livy, but just conceivably an otherwise
unattested piece of technical triumphal vocabulary—describes a “camp-
site triumph” (castrensis triumphus) for a junior officer who had success-
fully rescued the Romans from a bad military blunder on the part of his
commander: “Decius had a campsite triumph, making his way through
the midst of the camp with his troops under arms, and all eyes turned
upon him.”25
Proceedings even more reminiscent of the particularities of the Ro-
man triumph may well lie behind Josephus’ account of Titus’ circuitous
journey back to Italy, after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 ce. Traveling
through Syria, “he exhibited costly spectacles in all the towns through
which he passed, and he used his Jewish captives to act out their own de-
struction.” This sounds very similar to the “floats” in the Jewish tri-
umph itself, each one featuring “an enemy general in the very attitude in
which he was captured”—prompting one recent critic to suggest that
more was at stake here than just an ostentatious victory tour: Titus was
The Boundaries of the Ritual
267
offering to the eastern cities a lesson in a distinctively Roman form of
triumphal celebration, “with its pageantry and ideologically charged im-
ages of conqueror and conquered.”26
None of these celebrations is known to have provoked controversy or
to have been seen as a challenge to the ritual of triumph itself. On other
occasions, however, triumphlike ceremonies did raise questions (as they
still do) about exactly where the ritual boundaries of the ceremony lay,
what counted as a timely adaptation of the traditional rituals, and what
was a potentially dangerous subversion. The advent of autocracy, from
Julius Caesar on, heralded a whole range of extensions of triumphal cer-
emonial that were likely to have been, at the very least, the subject of
delicate negotiation or packaging. Caesar’s hybrid celebration in 44 bce,
referred to in the inscribed Fasti as an ovation ex monte Albano is a case in point. So too is the return of Octavian and Mark Antony to Rome after temporarily patching up their differences in 40 bce. Dio refers to
them coming “into the city, mounted on horses as if at some triumph.”
The Fasti, by contrast, show no such hesitation, including the ceremony
twice, once for Octavian and once for Antony, each time with the addi-
tion of ovans; and in place of the usual information on the defeated en-
emy, it includes the explanation “because he made peace with Mark An-
tony/with Imperator Caesar” (to give Octavian his Roman title). The
justification might run that the restoration of good will between these
two was as militarily significant, and as worthy of an ovation, as any vic-
tory in war.27
But two notorious incidents particularly stand out. The first was, in
Dio’s words, “a sort of triumph” over the Armenian king Artavasdes cele-
brated by Antony in 34 bce—but in the Egyptian capital of Alexandria,
not in Rome. Among the several accounts of this event, Plutarch’s is the
most open, and acerbic, on the triumphal character and implications of
this ceremony. “Antony captured Artavasdes, took him in chains to Al-
exandria, and led him in triumph [ ethriambeusen, a standard Greek term
for the Roman ritual]. In this he gave particular offense to the Romans,
because for the sake of Cleopatra he bestowed on the Egyptians the hon-
orable and solemn ceremonies of his own country.” Others are less direct
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but still focus on various elements of the show that echo triumphal rit-
ual and symbolism: Antony driving in a chariot, the royal prisoners pa-
raded through the city, even in some accounts bound (like Zenobia) in
golden chains. In place of the distaste felt for the occasion by Plutarch’s
Romans, Dio projects resistance onto the prisoners themselves, who re-
fused to do obeisance to Cleopatra despite being pressed to—and suffer-
ing for it later.28
The second case, a bizarre triumphal ceremony of Nero in 67 ce, is
recounted even more vividly, in this case by Suetonius and Dio (in a pas-
sage known to us in his Byzantine excerption).29 The occasion in ques-