is no indication which of the several different cycles of games celebrated
in Rome by the late first century ce Juvenal had in mind (if indeed he
intended any such precise reference). And the puzzle is complicated by
the fact that within just six lines he calls the presiding magistrate both
“praetor” and “consul.”71 Nonetheless, the overall implication that the
president of the games was kitted out like a triumphing general (right
down to the presence of that elusive slave) has launched a galaxy of theo-
ries on the links between the games and the triumph—in particular be-
tween the procession that opened the circus games (pompa circensis) and
the triumphal equivalent.72
Most of these theories look back once more to the earliest phases of
the city’s history. Attention has focused on the so-called Roman Games
or Great Games ( ludi Romani or magni/maximi) which are widely be-
lieved to have been the earliest of this form of celebration and to have
provided a model for the later versions. Mommsen, for example, argued
a century and a half ago (in a claim often repeated even in modern
accounts) that these ludi were originally, under the early Etruscan kings
of Rome, an integral part of the ceremony of triumph itself; but they
were progressively separated from it until they became an independent
and regular festival in the Roman calendar in the fourth century bce.
Hence—insofar as the pompa circensis was in effect a “triumphal proces-
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2 8 2
sion minus the triumph”—the distinctive outfit of the presiding magis-
trate.73 Versnel, by contrast, has tried to explain the shared symbolism of
triumph and ludi by tracing both ceremonies back to a common ances-
tor in an eastern New Year festival, whose distinctive attributes were pre-
served even as its Roman “spin-offs” diverged.74
Much of this is learned and ingenious fantasy. The problem is, in
part, that the early history of the games is even murkier than that of the
triumph, and hot scholarly dispute has raged over almost every single as-
pect. Were the Great Games and the Roman Games always synony-
mous, or was there once a distinction between the two? What was their
original purpose—to celebrate victory or, as a primitive plebeian festival,
to promote agricultural success? And just how far back in time can we
trace the rituals that later writers associate with the games?
This last question is frustratingly complicated by our one extended
literary account of a circus procession: the description by Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, writing under Augustus, of ludi vowed in 499 bce.
Dionysius explicitly claims that he has drawn on an earlier version by
the late third-century bce “father of Roman history” Fabius Pictor—
who may, or may not, have had reliable information on the fifth century.
But he has also certainly been influenced (how substantially influenced
is again hotly disputed) by his own pet theory that Rome was in origin a
Greek city and by his determination to find Greek elements in the most
hoary Roman traditions.75 Leaving that controversial text aside, big ar-
guments have necessarily been built on the tiniest scraps of evidence.
Much of the discussion of Mommsen’s hypothesis has centered on the
placing of a single comma in a passage of Livy.76
The fact is that we have no evidence at all for seeing the costume of
the president of the games as distinctively triumphal before the Em-
pire—and even for that period there is very little. The key text is that
one passage of Juvenal, plus a jibe about the Megalesian Games (con-
nected with the cult of Cybele) in the Satire that follows: “There sits the praetor, like a triumph, the booty (praeda) of the gee-gees.” Losing his
money in betting, in other words, the presiding magistrate has become
the “booty” of the horses: so not only is he dressed as for a triumph, but
The Boundaries of the Ritual
283
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 35:
The panel of a lost sarcophagus (shown here in an engraving by E. Dupérac, d.
1604) depicts the Circus Maximus in Rome and some of its distinctive monuments, including the obelisk, which stood on the center-line, or spina, of the racetrack. To the right, the figure riding in the triumphal-style chariot (though drawn by only two horses) and being crowned from behind is presumably the presiding magistrate of the games.
he has become victim of that classic triumphal paradox that always
threatens to make a victim out of the celebrating general.77 Juvenal
apart, the only unambiguous evidence identifying the two forms of cere-
monial dress is the statement by both Tacitus and Dio that at the games
established in honor of Augustus at his death in 14 ce, the tribunes who
presided were to wear triumphal costume but not to have the use of a
chariot (currus). Dionysius, significantly or not, does not mention the
magistrate’s clothing.78
The visual evidence is not much clearer. One evocative image from
Rome appears to show the president of the games driving through the
Circus Maximus, a slave behind him holding his crown—just as de-
scribed by Juvenal (Fig. 35). But as bad luck would have it, the sculpture
itself has been lost and is recorded only in Renaissance drawings and a
single engraving, none of which allows us to say much about its original
form or date (beyond that it appears to belong somewhere in the mid to
late Empire).79 Otherwise, vaguely triumphal-style figures in imperial art
tend to be claimed (according to the enthusiasm of the archaeologist
concerned) for the circus games, the processus consularis, or the triumph
proper. Or to put it another way, one consequence of the spread of tri-
umphal symbolism outside the triumph is that it is necessarily hard to
pin a definite label onto any individual “triumphal” scene.80 But—suspi-
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ciously, one might almost think—nothing survives that combines the
iconography of circus and triumph so clearly as the lost piece.
This evidence is, of course, not incompatible with the idea that from
time immemorial the leader of the games (or at least of some particular
cycles of ludi) was dressed in triumphal costume—however we might
choose to explain that. What we can document for the first time in the
first century ce might go back much earlier than that; and those who
hold that Roman religious practice was rigidly conservative and almost
unchanging would presumably argue that it almost certainly did. But a
less primitivizing reconstruction is more plausible. The evidence we
have fits much more easily with the idea that the extension of triumphal
symbolism to the circus president was part and parcel of a wider use of
triumphal dress from the start of the Principate to mark out positions of
honor and power more generally. Proof is impossible either way; but the
circus president’s triumphal garb probably owes more to the emperor
Augustus than to old King Tarquin or (on Versnel’s view) some eastern
god-king.
An obsession with the connection between the triumph and the games
has tended to obscure the links between the triumph and another great
ceremonial procession in Roman culture—known by convenient, if mis-