line taken by Dionysius, but he claimed that many “native histories” also
supported that derivation.50 Plutarch certainly gives the impression that
he felt himself in the minority in rejecting that explanation (partly be-
cause “they use that cry in triumphs too”) and in seeing the origin of the
word in the type of sacrifice offered at the ovatio. “For at the major tri-
umph it was the custom for generals to sacrifice an ox, but at this cere-
mony they used to sacrifice a sheep. The Roman name for sheep is oba
(Latin ovis). And so they call the lesser triumph oba (ovatio). ”51
Desperately unconvincing it may be, but it is also found in Servius’
fourth-century commentary on the Aeneid: “The man who earns an
ovatio . . . sacrifices sheep (oves). Hence the name ovatio. ”52 This surely takes us back to the pastoral world of early Italy and its religious rules,
rather than to the rituals of Greece. Indeed, Plutarch makes a point of
saying that religious procedure at Sparta was the reverse: a lesser victor
sacrificed an ox.
The shout of eua introduces yet another, boldly mythical, version of
triumphal origins that I have already had cause to note on various occa-
sions. For, as Plutarch states, it was especially associated with the Greek
god Dionysus. And Dionysus—or his Latin counterpart, Liber—is also
credited with the invention of the triumph. This turns out to be a story
that illustrates not only the multicultural complexities of such myths of
origin but also how active a part in ritual practice itself these stories can
play. As we shall see, the story of Dionysus does not simply explain the
origins of the ritual of triumph, it also reconfigures and reshapes its per-
formance.
When Pliny claims that Liber invented the triumph, he is evoking
a story that we have come to know (thanks in part to its place of
honor in Renaissance painting) as “The Triumph of Bacchus.”53 This
was the story of the victorious military campaigns of the god Bacchus
(or Dionysus) against the Indians and his triumphal progress back to
Greece amidst a band of satyrs, maenads, and assorted drunks. We find
hints of a story of Dionysus’ journey from the Far East as early as the
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 1 6
opening of Euripides’ Bacchae. 54 But whatever the earliest versions of the myth, it was clearly drastically resignified following the eastern campaigns of Alexander the Great. At that point the tale of Bacchus’ exploits
in India was vastly elaborated and taken as the model for Alexander in
his role as the new Dionysus. There is, as many modern students of
myth have seen, a series of double bluffs here. For the truth is that the
god’s exploits were modeled on Alexander’s, not the other way round;
and that it is an entirely second-order reworking of the story to suggest
that Alexander saw himself in terms of the god (rather that the god
being presented as Alexander).55 But whatever the processes were by
which it developed, there are numerous traces in the Hellenistic Greek
world of this newly elaborated “Return of Bacchus” from India. These
include one of the main floats in the third-century procession of Ptol-
emy Philadelpus in Alexandria, which supposedly carried a tableau of
Dionysus’ return—including, so Callixeinos would have us believe, an
eighteen-foot statue of the god, followed by his Bacchic troops and In-
dian prisoners.
How exactly, and when, this myth was appropriated by Roman theo-
rists as the origin of their own ceremony of triumph we do not know.
The theory is almost certainly bound up with Varro’s etymology of the
word triumphus from the Dionysiac thriambos; but whether that etymology launched, legitimated, or followed the identification of Dionysus
as the “first to triumph” is lost to us. What is clear, however, is that at
least by the first century bce the “Return of Dionysus” from the East (as
Callixeinos puts it) had been translated into the “Triumph of Dionysus/
Bacchus” and repackaged in explicitly Roman triumphal terms. Even
if the conventional title for the myth, at any period, is now “The Tri-
umph of Bacchus,” the god’s return could not have been thought of as a
“triumph” in a technical sense until the Romans had seen in it the
founding moment of their own triumphal ceremony (which, inciden-
tally perhaps, had the added advantage of translating Alexander the
Great too into Roman cultural and religious vocabulary).56
But the chain of connections does not stop there. First, within Ro-
man representations, the story of Bacchus’ triumph became increasingly
The Triumph of History
317
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 42:
The Triumph of Bacchus on a Roman sarcophagus, mid-second century ce. For
all its elements of Bacchic extravagance (the exotic animals, the cupids), this divine procession bears a decided resemblance to a triumph—in, for example, the pathetic group of prisoners to the right.
assimilated into a triumph in the most specifically Roman sense of the
word. It is a not-uncommon theme on imperial sarcophagi, for example;
and it can be presented in a strikingly official triumphal guise. A sar-
cophagus from Rome illustrates this point nicely (Fig. 42). True, there
are some decidedly Bacchic elements here: the elephants pulling the
chariot, with cupids as their drivers; the lions and tigers carrying partici-
pants in the procession; the thyrsus in the “general’s” hands. But the
chariot is close enough to a triumphal shape; the crew of prisoners is
reminiscent of a Roman triumphal procession; and there may even be
that elusive slave pictured standing behind the god (reminding him that
he was only a man?). Other sarcophagi of this type depict carts showing
off booty, with chained prisoners crouching beside, as on official Roman
representations of the procession.57
But just as the Triumph of Bacchus came to be seen in increasingly
Roman terms, so the reverse was also true: the Roman triumphal cere-
mony itself could be seen afresh in Bacchic terms. The classic case of
this is the first triumph of Pompey, at which the commander attempted
to have his chariot drawn by elephants rather than horses. We cannot
now reconstruct Pompey’s motivations in launching this extravagant—
and ultimately failed—gesture. Very likely he was reformulating the
ceremony in the light of the return of Dionysus. But whether that was
Pompey’s intention or not, Roman observers and commentators saw
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 1 8
it in that way. Pliny, for example, specifically relates the story of
Pompey’s elephants to the “Triumph of Liber.”58 In other words, the
story of triumphal origins becomes acted out (or, at least, is seen to be
acted out) in a significantly new form of triumph. It takes a determining
as well as an explanatory role.
Irrecoverable—nonexistent, perhaps—as the historical origin of the
triumph must be, the myth of its origin is nevertheless a dynamic con-
stituent of that nexus of Roman actions and representations that make
up “the ritual.”59
THE END OF THE TRIUMPH?
In the sixth century ce the historian Procopius described the victory cel-