scholar, for example, has recently conjectured that the low social status
of the last man to triumph on the Alban Mount, in 172, was one factor
that “doom[ed] the institution in perpetuity.”7 This is a perfectly reason-
able guess on the basis of the evidence we have—yet a single declassé
honorand seems hardly sufficient to kill off an institution unless other
factors were at work, too. Others have suggested that it was the increas-
ing emphasis on triumphal dress as a mark of the emperor’s power that
caused the demise of triumphal insignia for “ordinary” generals.8 Again,
this is a reasonable guess, but no more than that.
As for the peaks and troughs in the history of ovations, it does seem
that the ceremony—whatever its origin—came to be used as a way of
adjusting triumphal honors to different occasions, circumstances, or
types of victory. The seven ovations clustered in the early second century
bce are, as one modern commentator has emphasized, all for “non-con-
sular commanders returning from Spain”; and it has been tempting to
see the ceremony as a way of handling the demands of lower-status gen-
erals, in the context of new and wider spheres of warfare.9 Later, the
ovatio apparently proved useful as a means of rewarding those who had
defeated enemies of lower status, namely, slaves. The development of the
ceremony under Caesar and Octavian (when, as we have seen, it was
used to celebrate such “victories” as the pact made between Antony and
Octavian in 40 bce) would also fit this improvisatory pattern. So far, so
good. But it is hard to see what prompts the improvisation on some oc-
casions and not others, and why the experiments are so short-lived.
But the underlying problem in any attempt to reconstruct the devel-
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opment of the triumph in traditional historical terms is the complex re-
lationship between the ceremony as performed and the ceremony as
written. Or, to put it more positively, the history of the triumph is a
marvelously instructive example of the dynamic relationship between
ritual practice and “rituals in ink”—a relationship that cannot be re-
duced to a simple story of development and change and that, indeed, of-
ten directly subverts the very idea of a linear narrative.
This is partly a question of the so-called invention of tradition. One
of the ways in which change is legitimated in any culture is by the con-
struction of precedent. New rituals are given authority not by their nov-
elty but by claims that they mark a return to the rituals of old. Some-
times these claims may be true; sometimes they are flagrant fictions,
whether consciously invented or not; more often, no doubt, they lie
somewhere on the spectrum between truth and fiction. But, whichever
precise variant we are dealing with, the key point is that innovations can
be dressed up as tradition and projected back into the past so success-
fully that it is almost impossible—whether for the modern historian or
even for members of the culture concerned—to distinguish the “truly”
ancient rituals from the retrojections. After all, how many people in
twentieth-first-century Britain are aware that most so-called traditional
royal pageantry is a brilliant confection cooked up in the late nineteenth
century, rather than a precious inheritance from “Merrie England” and
the Middle Ages?10 Societies that make repeated use of this means of cul-
tural legitimation are often characterized, like ancient Rome, as “conser-
vative”; but they do not so much resist change as justify sometimes very
radical innovation by the denial that it is innovation at all.11
We have already noted some individual elements of the triumph that
have been understood in this way—for example, the role of Camillus as
an invented precedent for Julius Caesar. The potential impact of such
inventions on our understanding of the triumph’s history as a whole
is vividly encapsulated by the confusion that surrounds the “sub-
triumphal” ritual of the dedication of the spolia opima (“the spoils of
honor”). It is an honor usually assumed to have been granted only to
those Romans who had killed the enemy commander in single com-
The Triumph of History
293
bat—and who then, we are told, carried the spoils taken from the body
to dedicate them on the Capitoline at the Temple of Jupiter “Feretrius”
(Romans debated whether the title came from carrying the spoils (ferre) or smiting (ferire) the enemy).12
According to the orthodox account, this happened only three times
in the whole of Roman history: first when Romulus killed the king
of the Caeninenses; second in the late fifth century bce when Aulus
Cornelius Cossus killed the king of Veii; and in 222 when Marcus Clau-
dius Marcellus combined dedicating the spolia of King Viridomarus
with his triumph proper.13 One deviant tradition—particularly striking
given the chorus of writers who insist on just the trio of celebrations,
and usually dismissed as wrong—has Scipio Aemilianus also dedicating
the spolia opima thanks to a victory in single combat in Spain some fifty
years after Marcellus.14
Taking their cue from the association with Romulus, some modern
scholars see in the spolia opima a primitive proto-triumph, the most an-
cient version of Roman victory parade.15 But the evidence we have is
equally compatible with exactly the opposite position. Indeed, one re-
cent study has claimed that the only historical celebration of the dedica-
tion of these spoils was that by Marcellus in 222 bce—an innovation
that was legitimated by the invention, or (less pejoratively) the imagina-
tive rediscovery, of the two earlier dedications.16 If this is the case, it of-
fers a marvelous example of the inextricable inter-relationship of “his-
tory” and “invented tradition.” For, as Livy notes, the emperor Augustus
himself claimed to have seen the spoils of Cossus in the Temple of Jupi-
ter Feretrius, as well as his linen corselet (which carried an inscription
proving that Cossus was consul at the time of his dedication, not a mere
military tribune). Cossus’ dedication may have been an imaginative
fiction. But even if he had dedicated his spoils in the 430s or 420s, the
linen corselet can have been at best the product of loving restoration
over four centuries, at worst an outright fake.
Nonetheless, invention or not, the object itself, what was inscribed
upon it, and the ritual believed to lie behind it held an established place
in Roman literary tradition and historical investigations—and it mat-
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2 9 4
tered to Livy and Augustus himself. Modern writers have often inferred
(though there is no explicit evidence for it in any ancient text) that Au-
gustus was particularly interested in the corselet because, by proving
Cossus’ high rank, it offered him ammunition against one of his gener-
als, Marcus Licinius Crassus, whom he wanted to prevent from dedicat-
ing the spolia after killing an enemy king in 29 bce. That may (or may
not) be the background to Dio’s claim that Crassus would have per-
formed the ritual “if he had been supreme commander.”17