Rome’s imperial success depended greatly on the efficient channeling of potentially disruptive internal rivalries into externally directed imperialist action. In this context, the triumph constituted one of the media through which the Roman nobility could display military success and its rewards to the Roman populace, thereby helping to ensure the future participation of the populace in aristocratically directed warfare.2 Hence the importance of the display of booty and military feats: thus were the fruits of empire made visible.3 It is one of the most interesting aspects of this system of communication that it furnished hardly any institutionalized outlet for communication concerning, and public recognition of, military defeats. The Romans did not even have a parallel to the Greek cult of those who died during a victorious campaign.4 The significance of the triumph can be further deduced from the fact that, among the alternative means available to successful generals for the display and investment of booty—such as temples, buildings, and games5—the triumph offered a prestige that, from the second century onward, some tried to exploit far beyond the temporal framework of the ritual proper.6
Even after the triumphator’s death, the deceased received conspicuous recognition for his achievement. In the funeral of a Roman noble, those of his ancestors who themselves had reached magistracies were represented by actors who, in addition to a wax mask, wore the insignia and clothing of the highest office reached in life by the person they were impersonating. Each “magistrate” was accompanied by the appropriate number of lictors, and counting them was the only means by which one could differentiate between former consuls, praetors, and aediles. All of them were dressed in the toga praetexta, the white toga with a stripe of purple worn by Roman magistrates. For triumphatores, on the other hand, such arithmetic was unnecessary: their all-purple garment set them apart from the crowd of mere officeholders.
But what are the semantics in the political communication performed by the triumphator or, for that matter, in the procession of masks? Do we have to postulate a change from a predominantly religious meaning to a predominantly political one? That is to say, was there some earlier period in which the triumphator was meant to be, or at least represent, Iuppiter, and in which not representations, but the dead ancestors themselves, rumbled through the city during the pompa funebris?7 As regards the triumph, one could imagine that such a change occurred at the end of the fourth century, during the formative phase, that is, of the new nobility. In this case, the change in signification seems to have left the basic elements of the ritual unaltered. For the pompa imaginum, Harriet Flower has argued for the transformation, at about the same period, of some unknown earlier (religious) ritual into the later, well known, and primarily political event.8 Yet in order to save the hypothesis of a more religious earlier version of the aristocratic funeral and the cult of the ancestors—one completely unknown to us—she has to argue that the entire complex of funeral speech and commemorative use of masks, as well as their storage in the atrium of the aristocratic house, is a nonreligious addition dating to that period.9 The only evidence for the postulated prior stage is statuary from that period of (what are supposedly) ancestors. Fully convincing parallels for that type of ancestor cult are lacking.10
This chapter offers a new hypothesis to explain the form and the significance of both rituals, by relating them to the practice of erecting honorific statues. The hypothesis is not supported by direct ancient evidence. Yet it better explains and provides fuller historical contextualization of the odd features of both rituals, in particular of the triumph, than previous attempts at understanding them. As processional rituals that offered space for differentiated communication by plays and speeches, respectively, and by their combination with ludic elements, they no longer appear isolated, but can be understood as participants in the ritual development of the middle Republic described in the previous chapters. In the case of the triumph in particular, ritualization turns out to be a medium of public control. This rests on the assumption that by the fourth century the display of private statues in public space—owing more to their associations than sheer numbers—was seen as threatening the stability of the nobility.
Iuppiter or Rex?
Our knowledge of the Roman triumph derives mostly from literary sources, especially from Livy onward. The written sources on which these historians, antiquarians, or poets relied could not have gone farther back than the end of the third century; usually they are later. The astonishingly few images relating to the triumph all come from imperial times. As a matter of method, every attempt at reconstruction of the ritual for earlier periods is therefore necessarily antiquarian in approach: one picks out and interprets individual elements, or combinations thereof, as nonfunctional survivals from a period when they would have possessed greater pragmatic meaning and value. This heuristic procedure is operative in every study of the republican triumph, including my own.
How are we supposed to envisage this ritual? On the most basic level, we are dealing with a procession of soldiers and booty that had its notional center in the victorious general. The triumph was staged at the end of a campaign, after the return of the army, and was subject to the Senate’s approval. In legal terms, it involved the entrance of a bearer of imperium and armed soldiers into the city proper. The crossing of the boundary into the city was therefore emphasized.11 That said, the meager evidence for an elaborate entry ritual or fixed point of entry, tied to a fixed route, points to the variability of these elements and argues against totalizing interpretations based on them.12 Booty and captives were presented to the populace; some of the latter might be killed once the procession had reached the Capitoline. Sacrifices to Iuppiter Optimus Maximus concluded the ceremony, probably in correspondence to, and fulfillment of, vows made upon the general’s departure on campaign, which had been addressed to the same deity.13 The whole procedure was supposed to honor the triumphing general. Riding in the center of the procession, he wore a costume that Juvenal (whose testimony is also quoted by Servius) designated as tunica Iovis, “the tunic of Iuppiter.”
Other paraphernalia, too, might have been designed to relate the triumphator to Iuppiter: he wore a golden crown,14 held a scepter topped by an eagle, and rode on a quadriga that replicated the one displayed on the roof of the Capitoline temple. Modern scholars tend to view the satirical verses sung by the participants as apotropaic elements.15 On the other hand, ancient antiquarian research related some of the symbols used in the triumph culturally to Etruria and chronologically to the period of the kings. Taken together with the apparent connection to Iuppiter, this piece of antiquarian information set the agenda for two centuries of modern inquiry, which then revolved around the question whether the triumphator impersonated the god who was the embodiment of the entire res publica, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, or instead revived the figure of the king.
Hendrik Versnel claimed that the ostensible alternatives are not mutually exclusive but two related facets of a religious ceremony known from the ancient Mediterranean world. According to Versnel, the triumph should be viewed as the modified form of a New Year ritual during which the king confronted the highest god of the state and, in turn, became his embodiment. The direct Roman descendant of this festival is to be found on the Ides of September, the epulum Iovis and the ludi Romani. These commenced with the pompa circensis, a ritual strikingly similar to the triumph, especially in the role played by the leading magistrate. One of Versnel’s most important arguments involves the element of the triumph from which the ceremony derives its name, namely the soldiers’ cry, (io) triumphe. This formulation is used in the archaic carmen Arvale, a song that explicitly asked Mars and other deities for an epiphany and must stem from a cultic address to a deity from Asia Minor, Dionysus, who was invited to appear with the cry thriambe.16
There is, however, a serious problem with Versnel’s solution: the historical Romans did not associate the appearance and acclamation of the triumphant general with his ascent to divine status, to say nothing of his transformation into Iuppiter ipse. The Roman nobility frowned on peers who laid claim to royal power or identified themselves with the highest god of the res publica. Caesar was killed for doing so. Full
