triumphal regalia is for others just a man in a purple cloak.
Yet these intriguing ambiguities of the evidence are only one side of
the problems that any search for the origins of the triumph must raise. It
is not just that the surviving material fails to deliver a clear answer to the
question of where the triumph came from, and when. In a fundamental
respect, that question is wrongly posed. The simple point is that there
was no such thing in a literal sense as the “first” or “earliest” triumph.
The “origin” of any ceremonial institution or ritual—“invented tradi-
tion” or not—is almost always a form of historical retrojection. It is not
(or only in the rarest of circumstances) a moment “in the present tense”
when we can imagine the primitive community coming together, devis-
ing and performing for the first time a ceremony that they intend to
make customary. It is almost always the product of a retrospective ideo-
logical collusion to identify one moment, or one influence, rather than
another as the start and foundation of traditional practice. As a term of
description and analysis, it acts—and acted—as a tool in the construc-
tion of a cultural genealogy: in the case of the triumph, a culturally
agreed (and culturally debated) ordering device intended to historicize
the messy, divergent, and changing ritual improvisations that from time
immemorial had no doubt ceremonialized the end of fighting.46
The “origin of the triumph” is, in other words, a cultural trope. Its job
is to draw a line between, on the one hand, the kind of occasion when
the lads rolled home in a jolly mood, victorious with their loot and cap-
tives and, on the other, a Roman institution with a history. There is no
objectively correct time or place to locate the triumph’s origin; instead,
we are faced with choices, of potential inclusions and exclusions, each
investing the ritual with a different history, character, authority, and
legitimacy. To put it another way, any decision to identify, say, the
fourth century bce as the birth of the triumph is about more than chro-
nology. Such decisions are always already about what the triumph is
thought to be for, and what is or is not to count in the institution’s
history.
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313
This inevitably focuses our attention once again on discursive aspects
of the triumphal story, on how the ritual’s origins were defined and de-
bated by the Romans themselves, and with what implications for our
understanding of it. Here too we find a much wider range of “origin ac-
counts” than the cherry-picking practiced by modern scholars usually
admits. Ancient claims about the Etruscan origins of the toga picta, the
golden crown, or the eagle-topped scepter are enthusiastically repeated;
so too, as we have noted, is Varro’s tentative derivation of the word
triumphus ultimately from a Greek epithet of the god Dionysus. A blind
eye, however, has fairly consistently been turned to those ancient theo-
ries that sit less comfortably with modern ideas. The claim by one late
commentary that Pliny and the Augustan historian Pompeius Trogus
(whose work is largely lost to us) both believed that the triumph was in-
vented by the Africans hardly makes it to even the most learned foot-
notes. Likewise swept under the carpet for the most part is the deriva-
tion of triumphus suggested by Suetonius (at least as Isidore in the
seventh century reports him), which puts the accent on the tri partite
honor that a grant of a triumph represents—being dependent on the de-
cision of the army, senate, and Roman people.47
The issue, of course, is not whether these theories are correct (what-
ever being “correct” would mean in this context). It is rather how such
curious speculations and false etymologies reflect different ways of con-
ceptualizing the triumph, bringing different aspects of it into our view.
Suetonius’ etymology appears to assert the centrality of the institution
within the Roman polity and its delicate balance of power. More often,
though, ancient theorizing broaches a cluster of issues that underlie so
much of Roman cultural debate more generally: What was Roman
about this characteristically Roman institution? Do the roots of Roman
cultural practice lie outside the city? How far is traditional Roman cul-
ture always by definition “foreign”? These themes are familiar from the
conflicting stories told of the origins of the Roman state as a whole,
where the idea of a native Italic identity (in the shape of the Romulus
myth) is held in tension with the competing version (in the shape of the
Aeneas myth) that derives the Roman state from distant Troy. They are
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 1 4
familiar too from the more self-consciously intellectualizing version of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the aim of whose Antiquitates Romanae (Ro-
man Antiquities) was to prove that Rome had been in origin a Greek city.
In the range of often fantastic explanations of the triumph, its cus-
toms, and its terminology, we find the “Romanness” of that ceremony
also keenly scrutinized and debated. On the one hand are attempts to
locate its origins externally, even (to follow the wild card of Pliny and
Pompeius Trogus) outside the nexus of Greek and Etruscan myth and
culture and inside Africa. On the other hand are the claims that the tri-
umph is inextricably bound up with Rome itself.
These claims are seen most vividly in the Forum inscription. We have
already explored the implications of the last triumph recorded here. The
first triumph recorded is no less loaded. That honor is ascribed to
Romulus on the “Kalends of March” (March 1) in the first year of the
city. This date is much more resonant than it might appear at first sight.
For it was a common assumption among ancient scholars that the Ro-
man year had originally begun not in January but in March.48 The first
of March in year 1 would have counted as the first day in the existence of
Rome. Leaving aside the chronological paradoxes that this raises (How
does it relate to the famous birthday of the city celebrated on April 21?
How was Romulus’ victory secured before Roman time had begun?), it
amounts to a very strong assertion indeed that the triumph was cotermi-
nous with Rome itself. The inscription presents a complete series of cel-
ebrations from 753 to 19 bce, with a beginning and an end defined by
the physical limits of its marble frame, as if there was no need to look for
triumphal history beyond or before that. The message is clear: Rome
was a triumphal city from its very birth; there was no Rome without the
triumph, no triumph without Rome.49
Strikingly similar debates are replayed in discussions of the origins of
the ovatio, which Romans also argued over, albeit with less intensity.
The issue was not, as in modern scholarship, its possible priority to the
triumph proper but the cultural and ethnic identity revealed by the title
of the ceremony. Two main views were canvassed. On the one hand were
those who saw the name as straightforwardly Greek, derived from the
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315
Greek word euasmos—which refers to the shout of eua! characteristic of Greek rituals and apparently also of the ovatio. This was predictably the