ebrations of the general Belisarius, who had scored a notable success
over the Vandals in Africa and returned to celebrate a “triumph” in 534.
Procopius underlines the significance of the event: “He was deemed
worthy to receive the honors which in earlier times had been granted
to those generals of the Romans who had won the greatest and most
noteworthy victories. A period of around six hundred years had gone
by since anyone had achieved these honors, except for Titus and Trajan,
and the other emperors who had won campaigns against the bar-
barians.”
We find all kinds of traditional triumphal features in Procopius’ ac-
count of this ceremony. Belisarius, he explains, had brought back for
display the Vandal king Gelimer, who behaved with the dignity associ-
ated with the most noble captives and who rose above the occasion far
enough to have muttered repeatedly the words “Vanity of vanities, all is
vanity” at the climax of the parade. (He was later granted land by the
emperor and lived out his days with his family.) There was an array of
prisoners, too, chosen for their striking appearance—“tall and physically
beautiful.” Most impressive of all, though, were the spoils, including the
holy treasure from the Temple of Jerusalem which had first been looted
by Vespasian and Titus, then in this version of the story taken off to
Africa by the Vandals in the mid-fifth century ce, and finally recaptured
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319
by Belisarius. What had been paraded through in the triumph of
Vespasian and Titus in 71 ce was here put on display again in a triumph
450 years later.60
This celebration has often captured the imagination. According to
Procopius it was commemorated in a mosaic in the imperial pal-
ace, which brilliantly evoked the joyful spirit of the occasion. More re-
cently it has been dramatically restaged in, for example, Donizetti’s op-
era Belisario and makes a marvelous set piece in Robert Graves’ novel
Count Belisarius. For Graves, as for a number of scholars, Belisarius was
“the last to be awarded a triumph.”61 This was, in other words, the “last
Roman triumph.”
If so, it was significantly different from the triumphs we have been
exploring. This ceremony was taking place not in Rome but in Constan-
tinople, a city with its own well-established traditions of victory cele-
bration and commemoration.62 It involved a procession on foot, not
in a chariot, and to the Hippodrome, not to the Capitoline. And in
the Christian city, no sacrifices were offered to Jupiter. Instead, both
Gelimer and Belisarius prostrated themselves in front of the emperor
Justinian; and the rhetoric is so far from being pagan that the moralizing
slogan muttered by the king was actually a quotation from Ecclesiastes.
Besides, however Procopius construes this as a triumph of Belisarius
(and so a return to pre-Augustan practice), the principal honorand is
more often seen as the emperor himself. According to Procopius’ own
account, this was the message behind the design of the palace mosaic,
with Justinian and the empress Theodora at center-stage, honored by
both captives and general. Other accounts also focus on Justinian, some-
times not counting the celebration as a “triumph” at all, still less a tri-
umph of Belisarius.63
Procopius’ own version, in fact, highlights some ambivalences about
just how traditional (or “traditional” in what sense) this ceremony could
be made out to be. True, he launches his account by stressing the return
to ancient practice after six hundred years. But that length of time itself,
as well as his careful explanation of “what the Romans call a ‘triumph,’”
raises the question of how far we should take this as a self-conscious re-
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R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 2 0
vival of an ancient institution rather than a seamless part of ancestral
custom. He is also quite straightforward about the fact that what took
place was “not in the ancient manner” at all—for several of the reasons
just noted (Belisarius was on foot, following a different route in a differ-
ent city).
But even more revealing of the chronological and narrative complexi-
ties, Procopius goes on to remark that “a little later the triumph was also
celebrated by Belisarius in the ancient manner. ” By this he means not
that he celebrated a regular triumph, but that he entered into his consul-
ship in January 535 with what had become, by that date, the traditional
“triumphal” ceremonial. Confusingly for us, and for Procopius’ original
readers also no doubt, two different versions of the “ancient manner”
were in competition here: on the one hand, the “ancient manner” of the
Roman victory procession (to which the triumphal ceremonial in the
Hippodrome had not quite matched up); on the other, the “ancient
manner” of the consular inauguration in triumphal style (by the sixth
century ce a venerably old-fashioned institution).
In short, Procopius’ account shows how complicated the traditions of
the triumph and its different chronologies had become after more than a
millennium of triumphal history. It also hints at some of the dilemmas
that we face in trying to fix an endpoint for the ceremony’s history. Un-
like some rituals (such as animal sacrifice, for example), we know of no
legislation that outlawed its performance. And ceremonies harked back
to ancient triumphal symbolism or claimed specifically to imitate or re-
vive it through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, right into the twenti-
eth century. The question has been where to draw the dividing line be-
tween the Roman ceremony and later imitations or revivals—between
the life and the afterlife of the triumph. This raises issues of intellectual
policing similar to those that surrounded the question of triumphal ori-
gins. Unsurprisingly, the “Triumph of Belisarius” is only one of a hand-
ful of candidates for the accolade of “last Roman triumph.” Others are
much more closely connected—in place, religion, and ritual practice—
to the ceremony that has been the subject of this book than the Chris-
tian spectacle in 534. But all the different choices expose different views
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321
about what counts as the irreducible core of the ceremony, about what
allows a ritual to qualify as a “Roman triumph.”
The period from the middle of the second century ce through the
third is, for the modern observer at least, a very low point in the his-
tory of the triumph. Between the triumph of Marcus Aurelius over the
Parthians in 166 and the victory celebrations of the co-emperors
Diocletian and Maximian in 303, we can document fewer than ten tri-
umphs—and most of these are not the subject of any lavish description,
reliable or not.64 An exception is the triumph celebrated by the emperor
Aurelian in 274 over enemies in the East and West (including that ersatz
Cleopatra, Queen Zenobia) and extravagantly evoked in that puz-
zling—and often flagrantly fantastical—collection of late Roman impe-
rial biographies known as the Historia Augusta (Augustan History). The
description of this triumph lives up to the reputation of the work as a
whole. It features a glittering array of captured royal chariots, in one of
which Aurelian himself rode, drawn by stags that were to be sacrificed
on the Capitol. Other exotic animals, from elephants to elks, are said to