tion is the return of the emperor from his notorious tour of Greece,
where he had achieved victory—or had it engineered for him—in all the
major Greek games. In Suetonius’ version, Nero enjoyed a ceremonial
progress through Italy, entering the cities he visited on white horses
through a breach in their defenses, which was the traditional way that
Greek victors themselves had reentered their home towns after such suc-
cess. He did the same at Rome, but there he also rode in a chariot, “the
very one that Augustus had once used in his triumphs,” and he wore a
costume that combined triumphal and decidedly Greek elements: a pur-
ple robe with a Greek cloak (chlamys) decorated with golden stars; the
characteristic olive wreath of Olympic victors on his head; the laurel
wreath of the Pythian games as well as of the triumph in his hand. In
front of his chariot, placards were carried, blazoning the names and
places of the athletic and artistic contests he had won and the themes of
his songs and plays. Behind came his claque of cheerleaders, shouting
his praises and proclaiming among other thing that they were “the sol-
diers at his triumph.”
The whole procession made its way from the Circus Maximus, through
the Velabrum and the Forum, but then to the Temple of Apollo on the
Palatine, not to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol—with victims
slain along the route, saffron sprinkled over the streets, and birds, rib-
bons, and sweets showered on the emperor as he passed. Dio’s account is
very similar and was probably drawn from the same source. He adds the
detail that one of Nero’s defeated rivals, Diodorus the lyre player, trav-
The Boundaries of the Ritual
269
eled with him in the chariot, perhaps on the model of the triumphant
general’s son; and he offers a variant on the route which inserts the
Capitol as a stop on the way, before the procession reached the Palatine
(or “Palace,” both being possible translations of the Greek).
Modern scholars have debated at length the significance and intent of
these ceremonies. Plutarch explicitly claims that the Romans were of-
fended at Antony’s performance as a usurpation of the triumph, which
could properly take place only in Rome itself. But is that what Antony
was aiming at? While not disputing the basic “logic of place” that would
underlie the popular disquiet (much of the ritual, ceremony, and myth
of the Roman state was indeed closely tied to the topography of the
city), recent critics have tended to suspect a rather more complicated ex-
planation. Antony, in this view, was probably launching a specifically
Dionysiac celebration, as is suggested in the account of Velleius (“at
Alexandria he had ridden in a chariot like Father Liber [that is, Diony-
sus or Bacchus], kitted out in buskins and holding a thyrsus”). It was
Octavian’s propaganda that chose to represent this as a triumph and so
to hint that if Antony were victorious he would effectively transfer
Rome to Egypt.30
Even more ingenious attempts have been made to extract from the
hostile accounts of Suetonius and Dio the significance of Nero’s much
more explicitly triumphlike ceremony. To be sure, some recent interpre-
tations have closely followed Dio in casting the whole affair as a direct
subversion, or parody, of the traditional ritual and the values that went
with it. This antimilitary triumph is an apt conclusion to Dio’s story of
the whole Greek tour, which starts out with a barbed comparison be-
tween Nero’s retinue and an invading army—“big enough to have con-
quered the Parthians and all other nations” except that the weapons they
carried were “lyres and plectra, masks and stage-shoes.”31 The occasion
was conceived, as one of Nero’s modern biographers has put it, as an
“answer to a Roman triumph”—“his greatest insult,” as another critic
concludes, “to the Roman military tradition.”32
But others have detected different sides to this Neronian extrava-
ganza. It has, for example, been interpreted as part of a more construc-
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R o m a n Tr i u m p h
2 7 0
tive merging of the customary rituals of triumph and the homecoming
of Greek victors: Vitruvius, after all, already in the reign of Augustus had
described that Greek ceremony in decidedly triumphal terminology. It
has also been seen as a reformulation of the ritual into an essentially the-
atrical performance (the sprinkling of saffron was a distinctive feature of
the Roman theater). Others have seen it as a sincere attempt to extend
triumphlike ceremonies to honor achievement of a nonmilitary kind, a
further step perhaps down the path heralded by the ovation that cele-
brated the peaceful reconciliation of Octavian and Antony.33
One particularly ambitious recent analysis homes in on the Augustan
features of this parade: Nero’s use of Augustus’ triumphal chariot and
the procession’s final destination at the Temple of Apollo on the Pala-
tine, which was not only built by Augustus but also featured in the
Aeneid as the culmination of Virgil’s imaginary recreation of Octavian’s
triple triumph of 29 bce (which, in real life, would have ended on the
Capitoline). According to this argument, Nero was attempting to act
out that Virgilian scene and so to outdo his predecessor by creating a tri-
umph that was more “Augustan” than Octavian’s own.34
It is, of course, impossible now to recover the original form of An-
tony’s or Nero’s displays, let alone the intention behind them. What is
clear enough, however, is that the triumph, as a cultural category as well
as a ritual, had shifting and potentially controversial boundaries. The
Neronian spectacular, in its literary representations, both was and was
not a triumph. It used some of the same paraphernalia, replayed some of
the same ritual tropes (the companion in the chariot), and celebrated
the emperor’s victory; it would be easy to imagine that it could be talked
of as Nero’s “triumph.” Yet there is no sign whatsoever that it was for-
mally treated on a par with the usual ceremony. It did not celebrate the
military success that had consistently justified a triumph (even if occa-
sionally rather tenuously), and it flagrantly diverged from some of the
standard triumphal practices. The issue is not so much whether Nero’s
victory parade is to be thought of as a “triumph” or as a “parody of a tri-
umph” but—much more generally—at what point a parody becomes
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271
the real thing. For us, in other words, it raises the question of just how
triumph like a ceremony has to be before it counts as a triumph.
In these accounts, as elsewhere, triumphs and their various subver-
sions were being used by writers as a vivid index of political and military
worth. The role of the emperor or, in the case of Antony, the leading dy-
nast is a crucial factor here. As triumphs became exclusively associated
with the single ruler and his closest family, so too they became conve-
nient markers of his qualities, propriety, and legitimacy. In its simplest
terms, “good emperors” held proper triumphs for proper victories, while
“bad emperors” held sham ceremonies for empty victories. For example,
it was put down to Tiberius’ credit—not exactly a “good emperor” but
apparently a no-nonsense traditionalist in many respects—that, when
some fawning sycophant of a senator proposed that he celebrate an ova-