bound prisoners and booty (Fig. 39). Other archaeological material has
been pressed to deliver even more dramatic conclusions. At the town of
Praeneste, for example, a group of sixth- or fifth-century terracottas (Fig.
40), produced during a period of Etruscan influence, have been taken to
evoke not just a triumphal procession but the ideology of the ceremony
more specifically: the claim is that the design depicts the apotheosis of
the triumphant general who has just left his mortal chariot (on the
right) to join his divine transport, with its winged horses and goddess as
driver (on the left).
These terracottas have in turn been linked to the reconstruction of a
whole “triumphal route” through the city, leading up to the (perhaps
significantly named) Temple of Jupiter Imperator. In Rome itself, mean-
while, material excavated from the earliest phases of occupation on the
Capitoline hill has been attributed to the complex around Romulus’
original Temple of Jupiter Feretrius; and reconstruction drawings have
been produced that depict the very oak tree on which the spoils he won
from the king of the Caeninenses can be seen hanging!38
Some difficulties with these lines of argument should be obvious
straightaway. We have already seen that the surviving evidence for the
dedication of the spolia opima is just as compatible with its being a
relatively late, invented tradition as with its being a primitive relic of
The Triumph of History
309
pretriumphal Rome. (Needless to say the archaeological traces that lie
behind the confident reconstructions are flimsy in the extreme.) The
ovation too might equally well have postdated as predated the triumph
proper. There is no good evidence (beyond hunch and first principles)
for establishing the priority of one over the other.
But what of the specific arguments for the Etruscan ancestry of the
ceremony? The Roman literary evidence is frankly flimsy. We cannot as-
sume that any particular feature of the triumph originated in Etruria
simply because some ancient scholar asserted that it did. They may well
have been just as much at a loss as we are, and Etruria offered a conve-
nient explanation for puzzling features of Roman cultural and religious
practice. Besides, although individual aspects of triumphal custom are
credited with an Etruscan origin, it is only Florus who goes so far as to
hint that the ceremony as a whole was an Etruscan phenomenon.39
The material traces of the supposed Etruscan triumph are no more se-
cure. In fact, not a single one of the “triumphal” depictions I have noted
stands up to much hard-nosed scrutiny. Most collapse almost instantly. A
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 40:
One of a series of architectural terracottas (roof edgings) from Praeneste, with
scenes of chariots and riders (sixth or fifth century bce). The idea that the warrior on the left is mounting a divine chariot, drawn by winged horses, has in turn suggested links with the Roman triumph, and the divine associations of the successful general.
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 1 0
purple cloak (and it is a cloak, not a toga) does not necessarily mean a
triumph, even if Vel Saties is wearing a wreath of some sort.40 But the
sculptural evidence is equally flimsy. The “triumphing general” on the
sixth-century funerary relief from Cerveteri certainly did not leap to
the notice of the author of the only extensive publication of the sculp-
ture—who identified the figure in the chariot (which is, in any case,
sitting down rather than standing up) as a woman, and in place of the
attendant with a crown saw a female servant with a fan!41 The sarcopha-
gus from Perugia clearly depicts four figures, bound at the neck and so
presumably slaves or prisoners, followed by men and women leading,
among other things, some heavily laden pack animals. This may (or may
not) represent a procession of spoils of war. But there is no sign whatso-
ever of any of the key distinguishing features of a triumph, such as the
general in his chariot.42
The reliefs from Praeneste do at least include chariots. But, despite
the determination to find a narrative of triumphal apotheosis, there is
no good reason to assume that the man mounting the left-hand chariot
has just dismounted from the chariot on the right—or, if he has, that his
action alludes to the ideology of the triumph. There is in fact nothing to
rule out some mythological story.43 And as for the “triumphal route,”
this is another case of an imaginative joining of the dots. Two of the
fixed points on the route are provided by the temples to which these
(possibly triumphal, more possibly not) archaic reliefs were once fixed.
The supposed porta triumphalis is identified from nothing more than
the findspot of the second-century ce relief from Praeneste (see Fig. 17)
depicting the triumph of the emperor Trajan. It is a very fragile con-
struction indeed.44
From the second century bce we do have, to be sure, a series of funer-
ary urns, especially from the area around the Etruscan city of Volterra,
showing a scene that seems much closer to the Roman triumph than
any of those earlier examples: a toga-clad figure in the distinctively
shaped (triumphal) chariot, drawn by four horses, and preceded by
lictors (Fig. 41). These urns may have been intended to depict a trium-
phal ceremony; they may have appropriated the symbolism of the tri-
The Triumph of History
311
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 41:
Etruscan funerary urn, from Volterra, second century bce. This scene—with its
toga-clad figure riding in a quadriga, and the bundles of fasces carried in front—is strikingly reminiscent of the Roman triumph. But is this a sign of Roman influence on Etruria, rather than vice versa?
umph for a funerary message; or possibly, to be honest, we may have im-
posed a “triumphal” reading on a more less specific rendering of a man
in a chariot. We cannot be certain. But even if we opt to see a clear refer-
ence to the triumph here, we still have not found powerful evidence for
an early Etruscan triumphal ceremony. In this case the date is the crucial
factor. For these urns are from a period well after the Roman conquest of
Etruria. If their iconography includes a triumph, it is almost certainly
a Roman triumph, and the influence is from Rome to Etruria, not vice
versa. 45
Of course, we should not rule out the possibility of all kinds of mu-
tual interdependence and cultural interaction between “Etruscan” and
“Roman” culture. To suggest that early Rome existed in a vacuum, im-
mune from the influence of its neighbors, would be simply wrong. But
we have no clearly decisive evidence at all for the favorite modern theory
of an Etruscan genealogy of the Roman ceremony. None of the much-
cited material objects can bear the weight of argument regularly placed
on them. Again, as so often is the case in the game of cultural “match-
ing,” the criteria that distinguish significant or telling similarities are elu-Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 1 2
sive: one person’s “man holding a crown” is another’s “woman with a
fan”; one person’s proto-triumphing general sporting an early version of