Mary Beard
THE ROMAN TRIUMPH
434pp. Harvard University Press. £19.95 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 02613 1
"Triumph” is a word with umph. Victorious arms thrown in the air, enemies
and rivals cast to the ground – a triumph is nothing if not complete. It has
become the ultimate expression of success (“A triumph” shouts the
billboard), the ultimate celebration of adversity overcome (“A triumph of
the human spirit”). Our word derives from the Latin triumphus, the term the
ancient Romans used for a ritual victory celebration, one of the most common
emblems of Roman culture in the modern popular imagination. The Romans
called this ritual a “triumph” because the victorious troops cried “io
triumpe” as they marched through the streets; but the meaning of the cry is
obscure to us and would have been so to the troops themselves.
One ancient theory derived it from the Greek word thriambos, an epithet of
Dionysos (Bacchus), but linguists argue that this etymology must have passed
first through Etruscan to end up as triumpus; others connect it with the
refrain “triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe” in an obscure archaic Roman
hymn, in which it may be a call for divine epiphany. Even its grammatical
form is disputed. Is triumpe a vocative, an imperative, an Etruscan
nominative, or an exclamation? All have been suggested. The etymology of
triumphus is only one of the disputed or obscure aspects of this most Roman
of institutions, and if Mary Beard’s new book, The Roman Triumph, can be
considered the definitive treatment, it is not because she solves any of the
canonical problems.
In fact, Professor Beard makes it clear that there never can be a complete
account of the triumph, and that almost everything we thought we knew about
it is questionable. Looking beyond the impossible task of reconstruction,
she offers us a different approach to the study of ancient society in this
wide-ranging study of “triumphal culture” in Rome. Beard argues that ancient
accounts of the triumph should not be thought of as sources but as theories,
driven as much by preconceptions and contemporary agendas as are modern
scholarly studies, and she expands our vision beyond the triumphal
procession itself to take in the preliminaries and the aftermath, the
descriptions, memorials, images and metaphors of triumph that together make
of ancient Rome “a triumphal culture”.
Not every Roman military victory was celebrated by a triumph. A triumph was
awarded by the Senate (or not) on the request of the general, who had to
make a case that his victory merited this supreme honour. It has been
calculated that about 300 triumphs took place in the 1,000 years of the
city’s history. Every Roman politician aspired to a triumph, and practically
every Roman politician who reached the consulship (and many who did not)
would have had the chance to command an army, somewhere in the Roman Empire
or beyond, and so to earn a triumph. Military service and command were not
optional for a Roman politician, nor did they involve a particular choice of
career; militarism lay at the heart of Roman culture and was integral to the
life of just about every Roman male. Even Cicero, Rome’s pre-eminent orator,
launched a mighty campaign to win a triumph, on the basis of some not
altogether glorious manoeuvrings while he was Governor of Cilicia. We can
follow this (unsuccessful) campaign in some detail, through Cicero’s
voluminous and fascinating correspondence. From what his friend Caelius
writes to him shortly after he arrives in Cilicia it is clear that thoughts
of a triumph were at the back of any Roman governor’s mind: “If we could
only get the balance right so that a war came along of just the right size
for the strength of our forces and we achieved what was needed for glory and
a triumph without facing the really dangerous clash – that would be the
dream ticket”. In his speech Against Piso Cicero mocks Piso’s
philosophically high-minded lack of interest in applying for a triumph and
represents the desire for one as the acceptable, even approved, face of
ambition.
Beard shows us that even Cicero’s letters, that most detailed account of the
day-to-day existence of Rome’s elite, leave us in the dark about the
criteria for a triumph. Valerius Maximus, writing in the time of the Emperor
Tiberius, articulates a grisly “triumphal law”, according to which a minimum
of 5,000 enemy troops had to be killed in a single battle for a triumph to
be celebrated; but this law is not mentioned in any surviving account of
triumphal debates. Beard sees Valerius as behaving no differently from
modern historians who try to impose regularity and rules on a fluid reality.
Just what qualified a general to celebrate a triumph was negotiable, though
it seems that the first initiative lay with the troops, whose acclamation of
the general as “imperator” was often seen as the first step on the road to a
triumph. It has been speculated that a passage in Plautus’ comedy Amphitruo
may be a parody of the traditional language in which requests for a triumph
were expressed or granted: “The enemy defeated, the victorious legions are
returning home, the mighty conflict brought to an end and the enemy
exterminated. A city which brought many casualties to the Theban people has
been defeated by the strength and valour of our troops and taken by storm,
under the authority and auspices of my master Amphitruo, especially”.
Most of the existing scholarship on the triumph has struggled to reconstruct
the details of the ceremony from the often contradictory bits and pieces of
evidence scattered through texts and images of different kinds and periods.
The triumphal route, the order of the procession, the general’s dress, his
chariot and the insignia of triumph, as well as the origins of the ceremony,
have all been studied and debated. Beard shows that the composite picture
traditional in modern reference works and histories is based on very shaky
foundations. She demonstrates in some detail, for instance, that it is
impossible to reconcile the various accounts of the triumphal route; the
only point about which there is general agreement is that it ended with a
steep climb up to the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter.
The final climb must have been quite a challenge for a procession which
included not only enemy captives and Roman troops but floats, models and
pictures representing cities captured and battles won and, above all, loot.
The triumph encouraged Roman writers to flights of extravagant description.
At Pompey’s triumph of 61 BCE (his third!), we are told that the booty
displayed in the triumph included 75,100,000 drachmae of silver coin,
thirty-three crowns of pearl, countless wagonloads of weapons and a huge
gaming board made of precious stones holding a golden moon weighing thirty
pounds. The triumph provided the opportunity to list and count (bullion,
statues, captives, weapons), to describe the outlandish and the exotic, and
to revel in the power of Imperial Rome.
Or to deplore its decadence. For, with the triumphal procession, novel forms
of foreign extravagance flowed into the city: lute girls, harpists, cooks,
sideboards and one-legged tables all feature prominently in disapproving
ancient descriptions. Some of this loot took the form of Greek statues and
other works of art, which would generate a competitive mania for collecting
in Rome’s elite. It is this cultural effect of the conquest of the Greek
world that led Horace to remark that “captive Greece took the savage victor
captive”, a paradox of the kind that, as Beard shows, was characteristic of
triumphal writing.
The triumph was not only a ritual of success, it was also a ritual of
humiliation. A general triumphed over an enemy, and the humbled enemy had to be
paraded for all to see. In the triumphal procession the enemy leader and a
selection of enemy troops, suitably loaded with chains and other insignia of
defeat, preceded the triumphing general in his chariot. But this spectacle
of humiliation was inherently fragile. Obviously the triumphing general
wanted to display the conquered as worthy adversaries, and contemporary
accounts stress that the captives in the procession were chosen for their
stature and beauty. But a particularly dignified leader, unbowed in defeat,
could upstage the general following in his chariot. Beard’s frontispiece
shows Jugurtha doing just that to the triumphing Marius in Tiepolo’s
sumptuously dramatic “The Triumph of Marius”. Horace’s poem celebrating the
defeat of Cleopatra by Octavian (the future Augustus) ends with the Queen
committing suicide so as to avoid being led in triumph at Rome. Horace
exploits the flexibility of Latin word order to end his poem with the line
“no lowly woman in the triumph”, shifting the triumph from victor to
vanquished. What, he asks, constitutes the true triumph, the true heroism?
Spectacular triumphal backfires came in other forms too: Roman authors
reported occasions in which the miserable captives had awakened pity rather
than Schadenfreude in the spectators, who were led to reflect on their own
troubles, or on the possibility that they too might find themselves in the
position of the defeated.
Roman audiences might identify with the captives, but it was crucial that the
captives displayed in a triumph should not actually be Romans. This caused
problems in the waning years of the Republic, when so many victories were
won in civil wars. Lucan’s epic poem on the civil war between Pompey and
Caesar describes it aptly as a “war that could have no triumphs”. Octavian’s
victory over Cleopatra was really the climax of a civil war in which the
enemy was led by Mark Antony, and Octavian’s celebration of a triumph helped
to disguise that fact.
Balancing the enemy captives and bringing up the rear of the triumphal
procession were the victorious general’s troops, chanting the mysterious “io
triumpe”. Less mysterious were the rude chants that the triumphing troops
were licensed to direct at their general. Suetonius gives us a sample of
what Caesar’s troops contributed: “Romans, watch your wives, the bald
adulterer’s back home. You fucked away in Gaul the gold you borrowed here in
Rome”. Traditionally these chants have been seen as “apotropaic”, designed
to ward off envy and the evil eye in the moment when the successful general
was most vulnerable. This is consistent with what is perhaps the best-known
aspect of the traditional picture of the triumph, the slave who supposedly
stood behind the general in his chariot to remind him that he was not a god,
by repeating the words “Look behind. Remember that you are a man”. In the
film Quo Vadis? the slave’s words receive an unintended comic twist when
they are delivered to a triumphing Marcus Vinicius as he ogles a pretty girl
in the crowd (nothing wrong with Marcus Vinicius!). Beard points out that
the slave and his cautionary words have been cobbled together out of bits
and pieces of evidence from different contexts and periods and that no
single text gives us the whole picture. She is similarly sceptical about the
modern theory that the triumphing general impersonated the god Jupiter Best
and Greatest, dressed in the clothes of his cult statue and with his face
similarly painted red. The impersonation of the god, the admonitory slave
and the apotropaic songs all make a tempting package, but the evidence for
the triumphator’s impersonation of Jupiter is very slender. What we can say
is that Roman authors of the late Republic and early Empire were
particularly concerned with the line between the human and the divine, and
with the problematic concept of the divine human. Eventually, the emperor
would be hailed as a god and receive divine honours, but this would be a
slow and difficult process.
Like the emperor, the triumphing general raises the problem of how to balance
his status as godlike, and so exceptional, with that of the servant of his
community. In the early years of the civil strife that would eventually
bring Augustus to power as the first Roman Emperor, the poet Lucretius used
triumphal imagery to make a subversive point about the ideal relation
between the heroic individual and his community. Lucretius’ On the Nature of
Things, his epic poem expounding the principles of Epicurean philosophy,
casts Epicurus as a triumphing Roman general who, having dared to campaign
against the religious fear that is oppressing mortals, brings back as the
spoils to be displayed in his triumph the knowledge of “what can be and what
cannot”, giving us the wherewithal to resist fear of the gods. “So religion,
cast beneath our feet, is trampled in its turn and his victory raises us to
the heavens.” Epicurus’ “triumph of the mind” has this advantage over that
of the Roman general: it is the community, not the triumphing general that
is raised to divine status.
Beard argues that the controversy surrounding the deification of humans in
this period is the context in which to understand ancient references to the
divine status of the triumphing general, and that they do not offer any
support to theories about the primitive origins of the triumph in notions of
divine kingship. Must we then resign ourselves, in the face of Beard’s
scepticism, to confessing our ignorance about the precise details of this
colourful and iconic ritual, and acknowledge that we don’t know where it
came from and what it meant? Beard argues that ritual is not like that –
invariable, monolithic and tied to an original meaning. Ritualized behaviour
is distinguished by its participants as separate from everyday non-ritual
practice, but it may be improvisatory and variable. Rules, origins and
traditions (almost always less ancient than we suppose) are retrospectively
crystallized under the pressure of contemporary need. The meaning of a
ceremony lies “as much in the recollection and re-presentation of the
proceedings as in the transient proceedings themselves. Its story is always
in the telling. The exaggerations, the distortions, the selective amnesia
are all part of the plot”. A good example of how origins are retrospectively
invented for customs is the ancient theory that the god Dionysos invented
the triumph (as so often, linking Rome with Greece). Stories of Dionysos’
arrival in Greece from the Far East date back at least to Euripides’ Bacchae
(c408 bce). But in the context of Alexander’s campaigns in India (326 bce),
Dionysos’ return from spreading his rites in the Far East was remodelled as
a victorious return from India, complete with troops and captives, so
supplying Alexander with a divine precedent. Then, after Rome conquered
Greece and assimilated much of Alexander’s Empire, the Return of Dionysos
became the Triumph of Dionysos, Roman style, and Dionysos was credited with
inventing the Roman triumph. This development provides a nice demonstration
of how the flow of influence may run backwards rather than forwards, as
Beard argues in this and many other cases.
So much for the origins of the triumph, but what about its end? Modern
tradition has it that the last triumph was celebrated in Constantinople,
rather than Rome, by the general Belisarius in 534 CE, after a victory over
the Vandals in Africa. Appropriately, it was a very unconventional affair.
No Christian celebration, after all, could end with the customary sacrifice
in the Temple of Jupiter. Beard cites a number of triumphs that might,
depending on what view you hold of the triumph, be considered the last, but
she is rightly more interested in the decisive change which came about with
the rule of Augustus. From Augustus on, only the emperor or members of his
family were allowed to celebrate a triumph, and the triumph came to serve
almost as the equivalent of a coronation ritual. An equally important
development was the fact that Augustus adopted the insignia and symbols of
the triumph to mark his novel status. Among his titles was imperator (origin
of our word emperor), that title with which a victorious general was
acclaimed by his troops as the first step towards a triumph. With Augustus,
the triumph moved into the symbolic realm.
Early in her book Beard asks, “Can we get beyond the easy . . . conclusion
that such rituals . . . acted to reaffirm society’s key values? Or beyond
the more subtle variant that sees them rather as the focus of reflection and
debate on those values . . . ?”. Mary Beard certainly gets us beyond the
easy conclusion, though by the end it’s still not clear what might lie
“beyond” the more subtle variant, or whether we want to go there, given that
this rich and provocative book offers such a full account of what it means
to call ancient Rome “a triumphal culture”.
William Fitzgerald is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge. His most recent books include Slavery and the Roman Literary
Imagination, 2000, and Martial: The world of the epigram, 2007.
