of the emperor Anastasius in 498 to the triumph of Aemilius Paullus.77
The ideological choices that underlie these triumphal portrayals are clear
if we compare other accounts of the same events. In discussing what is
elsewhere treated as the (pagan) “triumph” of Constantine, Eusebius and
Lactantius, both committed to seeing Constantine in the lineage of spe-
cifically Christian history, take a different approach. Lactantius merely
refers to great rejoicing at the emperor’s victory; Eusebius conscripts the
incident into the story of the triumph of Christianity.
Yet we should hesitate before we conclude that the ancient triumph
lasted as long as anyone was prepared to describe ceremonies in trium-
phal terms. This was, after all, contested territory. And at a certain point
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the gap between the triumphal rhetoric and the ritual action must have
become so wide as to be implausible. The “ritual in ink,” in other words,
had lost touch with ritual practice. It must have seemed either a brilliant
literary game, a frankly desperate gambit in defense of old Roman tradi-
tions, or hopeless blindness to see Aemilius Paullus as a meaningful an-
cestor for the emperors of the fifth century ce. When that “certain
point” was is almost impossible to determine, but the parameters for the
end of the “traditional Roman triumph” are clear enough, albeit wide.
If one boundary is the triumphal ceremony in Constantinople in 534,
whose ambivalences were so nicely exposed by Procopius, the earlier
limit must be set several centuries before. Subversive suggestion though
it is, a case could even be made for seeing the celebration of Vespasian
and Titus in 71, with Josephus’ insistent rhetoric of precedent and proce-
dure (while the whole thing ended up at a temple that was in fact in ru-
ins), as the first triumph that was more of a “revival” than living tradi-
tion, more afterlife than life.
POSTSCRIPT: ABYSSINIA 1916
The contemporary world continues to debate the ways in which vic-
tory should be celebrated. In the United Kingdom, the Church has
several times over the past few decades spoken out explicitly against
“triumphalism”—in response to a government that wishes to honor (as
well as to magnify) the country’s military success. Parades through the
streets are less controversial when they involve winning football teams
than when they feature winning armies. Even when such processions are
sanctioned, they are usually a display of the well-choreographed surviv-
ing soldiers and the victorious military hardware. They do not now in-
clude those distinctive elements of the Roman triumph, spoils and pris-
oners. Admiral Dewey may have had a triumphal arch on Madison
Avenue, but no exotic captives were on display. If the idea of the tri-
umph is still very much with us, the details of its practice are not.
The last great triumphal display of looted works of art in Europe
must have been the procession of the masterpieces of Italy paraded
The Triumph of History
329
through the streets of Paris after Napoleon’s conquests. Modern western
warfare does not aim for spoils in the same way. Oil does not make a
particularly picturesque show. And although cultural treasures are often
stolen and still constitute a significant profit (or loss) of warfare, this is
more often under cover than in full view. A classic example is the prehis-
toric gold from Troy discovered by Heinrich Schliemann, taken from
Berlin by the Soviets in 1945, and not officially rediscovered, in a Mos-
cow museum, until the 1980s. The closest the Soviets came to parading
their booty was in the 1945 Victory Parade in Moscow, when German
flags and military standards were thrown at the foot of Lenin’s tomb.
The display of prisoners of war is also officially off the agenda in
a post–Geneva Convention world. This not to say that there are no
opportunities for voyeurism (provided by television and especially the
Internet, or occasionally by the apparently spontaneous public humilia-
tion of enemy prisoners); but there could be no thought of marching
captives through the streets with the victorious army in an official dis-
play. The crowd-pulling exotic elements are now more commonly pro-
vided by the home team. In the 1945 Victory Parade in London, it was
the Commonwealth troops and the Greek soldiers in their ceremonial
kit that provided the color.
Yet some of these triumphal practices may not be so remote as we
imagine. One of the very first memories of the explorer and writer
Wilfred Thesiger was witnessing in Abyssinia in 1916 the parade to cele-
brate the victory of the troops of Ras Tafari (later Haile Selassi) over the
rebel Negus Mikael. It is described at length in a letter from Thesiger’s
father, who was head of the British Legation in Addis Ababa.78 First the
“minstrel” from the victorious army marched past the ruling empress.
Some of the men “tore off their mantles and threw them before the Em-
press” and asked for better clothes. “On these occasions,” Thesiger se-
nior noted, “every freedom of speech is allowed.” Then came the cavalry
(“round the horses’ necks were hung the bloodstained cloaks and tro-
phies of the men each rider had killed”), followed by the foot soldiers—
and eventually Ras Tafari himself, followed by the “banners and icons of
the two principal churches which had sent their Arks to be present at the
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3 3 0
battle.” Finally it was the prisoners’ turn: “Negus Mikael was brought in.
He came on foot and in chains, an old, fine-looking man dressed in the
usual black silk cloak with a white cloth wound round his head, stern
and very dignified . . . One felt sorry for him; he had fought like a man
. . . Only a month before Mikael had been the proudest chief in Abys-
sinia and it must have been a bitter moment for him to be led in tri-
umph before the hated Shoans.”
“It was,” he concluded, “the most wonderful sight I have ever seen,
wild and barbaric to the last degree and the whole thing so wonderfully
staged and orderly.” His son’s memories chime in. “Even now, nearly
seventy years later, I can recall almost every detaiclass="underline" the embroidered caps
of the drummers decorated with cowries; a man falling off his horse as
he charged by; a small boy carried past in triumph—he had killed two
men though he seemed little older than myself . . . I believe that day im-
planted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery
and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting venera-
tion for long-established custom and ritual.” The echoes with the Ro-
man triumph seem uncanny: the freedom of speech, the impact of the
noble captive, the memorable mishaps. And the deep impression that
the whole occasion made on both the Thesigers perhaps gives us some
hint of how the triumph, too, lasted in Roman memory.
Yet there is a sting in the tail. Before we become too carried away
with ideas of the universality of the triumph, we should remember that
these observers had been educated in elite British schools, with all their
emphasis on Latin, Greek, and ancient culture. They must both have
known well some of the classic accounts of the Roman ceremony. Al-
most certainly they were seeing the Abyssinian occasion through Roman
eyes; no less than the classicizing writers of late antiquity, they were re-
creating a triumph in ink.