for successes in Illyricum and walked in the triumphal procession of
Tiberius in 12.19
Modern scholars offer two types of historical explanation for this
change. First, they commonly argue that the redirection of the triumph
was a crucial part of Augustus’ tactics for politically and militarily emas-
culating the Roman elite. To deprive other senators (and potential ri-
vals) of the traditional marks of glory and the symbolic rewards of vic-
tory was part and parcel of his own monopoly of power, and of his
insistence that military success lay in his hands alone, and that he and
no one else commanded the loyalty of the troops. Or to put it the other
way round, the extraordinary prominence that a triumph gave to the
successful general was too much for the canny emperor to risk sharing
widely.20
A second reason given for the change, by both ancient and modern
writers, concerns the technical qualifications for celebrating a triumph
and the legal status of most military commanders under Augustus. If
triumphs could be held only by those who had commanded troops with
imperium and “under their own auspices,” then many commanders
would not qualify. For under the new structures of provincial command
devised by Augustus, those who governed in the so-called “imperial”
provinces (where most of the legions were stationed and where most se-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
2 9 8
rious fighting took place) were technically “legates” of the emperor him-
self, acting under his auspices. Either this meant that traditional trium-
phal practice ruled out the ceremony for all but the emperor, or this
technicality provided Augustus with a convenient alibi for depriving the
rest of the aristocracy of the opportunity to triumph.21
This characterization of the Augustan triumphal revolution is not
wrong—far from it. But the changes under Augustus, the reasons for
them, and how they were understood in antiquity itself are more com-
plicated (and more interesting) than is usually supposed. Once again the
legal technicalities are not clear cut. True, ancient authors, both ex-
plicitly and implicitly, relate the apparent exclusion of victors outside
the imperial house to the superior legal and constitutional position of
the emperor. Velleius, for example, in explaining why in 9 ce Marcus
Aemilius Lepidus only received triumphal ornaments, states that “if he
had been fighting under his own auspices, he ought to have celebrated a
triumph.” And in his Res Gestae (Achievements), Augustus himself notes
that supplicationes were voted to him “either for successes won by myself
or through my legates acting under my auspices.”22 Yet, even so, these
technicalities do not provide a clear guide to who triumphed and who
did not.
Looking back, for example, to the period between 45 bce and the
final victory of Octavian in the civil wars after Caesar’s assassination,
triumphs were certainly then celebrated by those who were legates and
subordinates of the supreme commanders.23 And after 19 ce those who
scored military victories as proconsuls of senatorial provinces (accord-
ing, more or less, to the old model of provincial command) did not cele-
brate triumphs, even if they had been acclaimed imperator, which would
normally indicate the possibility, at least, of a subsequent triumphal
celebration.24 Germanicus, by contrast, was awarded a triumph even
though he was fighting “under the auspices of Tiberius.”25
The only way to inject consistency into this conflicting evidence is to
turn a blind eye to material that does not fit, or to ingeniously explain it
away. Were legates at this period, for example, entitled to be hailed “im-
perator”? Some scholars have argued that they were—in the face of
The Triumph of History
299
strong contrary implications in Dio; others would regard those acclama-
tions for which we have evidence largely in inscriptions as entirely unof-
ficial, or the action of those who did not understand what the rules re-
ally were. How easy would it be to explain to the soldiers that, however
enthusiastic about their general’s achievements they might have been, he
did not actually “qualify” for an acclamation? The truth is that, far from
being able to decide who was entitled to what honor, we often do not
know what constitutional authority a general possessed. We do not un-
derstand, for example, who fought “under their own auspices” at this
crucial period of change and who did not; and, according to one recent
commentator, neither did Livy (“Livy indeed may not have realized that
promagistrates lacked the auspices”).
Perhaps even more to the point, we do not know how far to trust Dio,
who provides the only detailed narrative of the period. Writing in the
third century ce, by which time it may well have been taken for granted
that only those fully invested with imperium could triumph, he repeat-
edly attempts to use this “rule” as the key to making sense of the evi-
dence of the triumviral and Augustan periods—even though it some-
times ended in entirely implausible reconstructions of events.26
There is no simple way to delineate the legal or constitutional basis of
the changes in triumphal celebrations at the start of the Principate. But
the conclusions reached in Chapter 6 about how improvisatory trium-
phal practice was suggest that, once again, we should not necessarily be
thinking of identifying fixed rules. Much more likely we are dealing
with a rapid period of change, uncertainties in the structures of com-
mand, and a series of ad hoc triumphal decisions, combined with at-
tempts both at the time and later to justify and explain the principles by
which those decisions were reached or might be defended.
But other factors too suggest that we are missing the point if we con-
centrate on the legal restrictions which might lie behind the change in
triumphal practice. If the first emperor had wished to share triumphal
celebrations widely, he would not have been prevented from doing so by
a narrow application of the rules. To imagine an apologetic courtier ex-
plaining to Augustus that the law did not allow him to grant a triumph
Th e
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3 0 0
to a general who had not, say, fought “under his own auspices” is com-
pletely incompatible with our understanding of the power structures of
the Empire more generally. At most, the appeal to restrictive legislation
can only have been a way of packaging or conceptualizing the change,
not its cause.
Also, the idea that the major development in triumphal practice initi-
ated under Augustus was the exclusion from the ritual of those out-
side the imperial family does not completely capture the nature of the
change. That is certainly one aspect of it. But hardly less striking is the
fact that even the emperor and his family triumphed very rarely. After
the triple triumph of 29, Augustus never triumphed again. The rest of
his reign is characterized not by triumphal celebrations (after Balbus,
there were only two triumphs, in 7 bce and 12 ce, and an ovation in 9
bce—all by Tiberius) but by a series of offers of triumphs to himself or
to members of his family that were refused. For example, Augustus was
offered a triumph in 25 bce, but he refused it, as he probably did again
in 19. In 12 bce after the senate voted a triumph to Tiberius, Augustus