A little while ago I went over the concept of the pomerium, which was the invisible line
that legally separated the city of Rome from the rest of the world.
I mentioned how any unauthorized crossing of the pomerium was a death penalty offense,
and how even authorized crossings through one of the city's designated gates automatically
transformed soldiers and generals back into private citizens.
This legal mechanism basically made it impossible for Roman armies to enter the city with any
legitimacy whatsoever.
That is, save for one enormous exception.
Today we're going to talk about that exception.
The Roman Triumph.
The triumph was Rome's highest honour, and to a society absolutely obsessed with honour
and dignity and authority, that's saying a lot.
The triumph represented the apex of a person's career, and a grand public acknowledgement
that they were one of Rome's most powerful politicians.
So what was the Roman triumph?
Put quite simply, it was a big ol' parade.
More specifically, a big ol' parade in which a victorious general and those under his command
were granted special permission to cross the pomerium and enter the city of Rome for one
day.
This was a singular honour.
There were a specific set of conditions that had to be met before a triumph was even on
the table.
First, a general had to conquer new territory for Rome.
Second, that general had to be acclaimed "Imperator" by his soldiers, which was just an honourific
title that means "one who commands."
This acclamation meant that the victorious general was allowed to add the word "Imperator"
to their name until a triumph was held in their honour.
By the way, this is the root of the word "Emperor."
Third, the victorious general who had been honoured with the title of Imperator had to
return to Rome and ask the Senate to meet with him outside the pomerium.
Remember, a general's command authority evaporated whenever they crossed the pomerium, and this
rule also applied to the title of Imperator.
Fourth, if the Senate agreed to exit the pomerium and meet with the general, he would run down
a detailed list of his conquests and accomplishments, and he would end by formally asking the Senate's
permission to cross the pomerium under triumph.
Note the wording here.
The Romans considered the pomerium central to the concept of the triumph.
Fifth, the Senate would vote.
Sixth, if the Senate approved, the general's request would be kicked down to the Plebeian
Assembly, and if they approved, that was pretty much it.
For exactly one day, the general would be authorized to retain his command while he
lead his army across the pomerium and into the city of Rome.
As you would imagine, this approval process could break down at any one of these steps.
Plenty of generals conquered territory but were never acclaimed "Imperator."
Plenty of "Imperators" never got to make their case before the Senate.
Such was the case in the year 60 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar, after conquering some territory
in Spain and being being hailed as Imperator, returned to Rome and asked the Senate to meet
outside of the pomerium.
The Senate, lead by the arch-conservative Cato, responded to this by strategically dragging
their feet until after that year's elections, hoping that the promise of a triumph would
stop Caesar from running for consul that year.
Caesar famously confounded expectations by crossing the pomerium just in time for the
elections, forfeiting his command and his title of Imperator.
He would go on to decisively win his election, although I don't think he ever forgave Cato
for denying him his triumph.
He made up for it later though, it's cool.
With that, let's get into the actual mechanics of the triumph.
The ritual was quite complicated, so we're gonna come at this from two directions.
First, we're going to get our bearings by seeing what the triumph would have looked
like to the average Roman.
Then, we're going to go back and follow the triumphal general from the beginning to the
end of the triumph.
On the big day, the entire city basically shut down, and residents gathered along the
pre-established triumphal route to watch the day's celebrations.
The procession was split up into three distinct stages.
The first stage kicked off the triumph with a long line of wagons.
The first of these wagons carried a bunch of three-dimensional models and billboard-sized
paintings showing off Rome's newly conquered territory.
The average Roman would have been largely ignorant of the outside world, and so before
the triumph got into full swing the public had to be taught what they were triumphing
for.
If possible, these wagons were usually accompanied by every exotic animal from the conquered
territory that the triumphal general could get their hands on.
The weirder, the better.
Elephants and giraffes were always a big hit, which makes sense because they are objectively
the weirdest animals.
This was followed by even more wagons carrying paintings and models depicting key battles
or events from the triumphal general's campaign.
This was equal part education and propaganda, as you would imagine.
Well, maybe a touch more propaganda.
This indoctrination was followed by another series of wagons that proudly displayed the
spoils of war to the public.
Coins, precious metals, expensive clothing, religious artifacts, whatever.
You can kinda piece together the narrative that the Romans were trying to tell themselves
here.
Show an exotic place, then show the Romans conquering that exotic place, then show the
treasure from that exotic place flowing into the city.
It was a very simple piece of propaganda, but people loved it.
Also, not to be a downer, but history is often a downer, the spoils of war portion of the
triumph included human beings.
It was considered a real feather in one's cap to have a foreign monarch dressed in their
full regalia march in one's triumph.
We're not going to linger here, but hold these prisoners in the back of your mind, because
they're going to come up again.
That was it for stage one of the triumph, which, if we want to generalize, was basically
the education/propaganda portion of the day's celebrations.
Stage two was the main event.
This was where the triumphal general, also known as the triumphator - there's your 10
dollar word for the day - made his grand entrance.
The triumphator appeared to the public in a special triumphal chariot, pulled by four
white horses.
This chariot was decorated in gold and purple, and affixed with charms to resist magical
spells.
The triumphator wore a very strange attire.
His toga, which normally would have been white, had for this occasion been dyed completely
purple.
This might not seem that weird to us, but it was to the Romans.
Purple was and is the colour of royalty, and because of this, Rome's highest elected officials
were allowed to wear a little purple stripe on their togas while they were in office,
but any more purple than this was considered gauche and offensively anti-Republican.
And yet, during the triumph the triumphator was permitted to make his grand entrance dressed
head to toe in purple.
The royal symbolism was unmistakable.
And the symbolism didn't stop there.
The triumphator's face would have been painted red, which was a reference to the red statue
of the god Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.
Jupiter was the king of the gods, and the unofficial patron to the city of Rome.
It was said that only the gods could violate Rome's pomerium, which I think explains this
bit of role-playing.
If the triumph was ever considered religiously problematic, it seems that dressing up like
Jupiter solved that problem.
To cap things off, the triumphator also wore a crown made of leaves from a laurel tree.
This was a thing that was loosely associated with the god Apollo, but the Greeks also tradition
of giving these crowns to winners of competitions, so it was also generally associated with the
concept of victory.
In his hands, the triumphator carried a branch from a laurel tree and an ivory sceptre.
Taken as a whole, the triumphator appeared before the public as an almost-king and an
almost-god.
It was quite a thing to see.
Behind the triumphal chariot, men and women from the triumphator's extended family had
their moment in the sun.
The triumph was considered so prestigious that even this brief appearance was usually
enough to kick-start some of the younger male relatives' political careers.
This option was not available to the women, and so if they were introduced to the public
it was usually in the context of them being a virtuous wife or mother.
The third and final stage of the triumph belonged solely to the triumphator's army.
When the Senate and People of Rome gave a general permission to cross the pomerium and
enter the city, they implicitly gave the same permission to the army that had hailed him
Imperator in the first place.
After years on campaign, this army would have been pretty happy to be back in Rome, and
discipline would have been virtually nonexistent.
One fun detail from this stage of the triumph is that as the soldiers marched, they sang
rude or bawdy songs for the crowd.
In an incredible stroke of luck, we actually have the text to one of the songs from Julius
Caesar's triumph in 46 B.C.E.
Every translation of this song is wildly different, but it basically went a something like this:
"Romans, watch your wives, here's the bald adulterous whore / We pissed away your gold
in Gaul and come to borrow more."
Caesar, of course, was the "bald adulterous whore."
Some translations use a different word in the "pissed away your gold" line, implying
that the gold was spent prostitutes, if you know what I mean.
As you can see, the songs were extremely disrespectful to both the triumphator and to the people
of Rome.
But they were also funny, and this kind of open rudeness was tolerated and even expected
when an army returned to Rome under triumph.
So that's the three stages of the triumph as seen by the average person.
Now let's rewind and follow the triumphator step-by-step through their day.
In the early morning, everybody participating in the triumph met outside the pomerium on
the Campus Martius, on a tiny, conveniently located racetrack called the Circus Flaminius.
When the wagons and the animals and the soldiers were all in the right order and ready to go,
the triumphator mounted his gold and purple chariot, and they were off.
There's some fragmentary evidence that suggests that a slave may have rode behind the triumphator
on his chariot for the duration of the triumph.
If this was in fact the case, they may have been responsible for holding a golden crown
above the triumphator's head while they whispered a phrase into their ear.
There are a bunch of different versions of what this phrase may have been, but it would
have been something like "remember, you are human."
The reason I didn't mention this before is because if this was a thing that happened
at all, it was probably a later invention that only existed for like 10% of Rome's triumphs,
and even that evidence is inconclusive.
The triumphal procession exited the Circus Flaminius and made their way onto a street
that was lined with spectators.
From here, the procession headed towards something called the Triumphal Gate, which we think
was located near the southern tip of the Capitoline Hill.
This gate would have been uniquely decorated for the triumph, and it was here, as I've
mentioned before, that Pompey tried and failed to squeeze through the gate in a chariot pulled
by elephants.
This was probably rather embarrassing, and four white horses had to be substituted in
before they could continue.
Inside the pomerium, the triumphal procession slowly snaked its way through the streets,
towards Rome's most famous race track, the Circus Maximus.
When they reached the racetrack, the entire triumphal procession went inside and did a
few laps before an overflowing crowd.
Even the most conservative estimates say that the building probably accommodated at least
150,000 spectators, which means that if the Circus Maximus were still in use today, it
would still be the highest capacity sports arena in the world.
When the triumphator made his entrance, the roar from the crowd would have been audible
throughout the entire city.
From the Circus Maximus, the triumphal procession followed the base of the Palatine Hill, deliberately
tracing the path of Romulus's original pomerium from when he founded the city.
In time, the procession reached the Via Sacra, or the Sacred Road.
This was one of Rome's main arteries, and, as the name implies, home its most significant
religious buildings.
Rome's richest citizens would have waited to see the triumph on the Via Sacra just so
they didn't have to rub elbows with the Plebs down in the Circus Maximus.
This road headed straight into downtown Rome, which is where the procession finally came
to a halt, right in front of a building called the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, which
means exactly what you think it means.
Jupiter the Best and Greatest.
I said earlier that those prisoners from stage one of the triumph were going to come up again,
and that time is now.
When the triumphal procession stopped at the Temple of Jupiter Optimux Maximus, most of
the prisoners from earlier in the triumph were pulled aside and ceremonially strangled
in front of the crowd.
Let's be real.
This was a horrific tradition.
By the standards of today it was a war crime, performed as part of a religious ceremony,
before cheering crowds.
It's repulsive.
Even back in those days, non-Romans considered this aspect of the triumph unusually cruel.
Many people opted to kill themselves just so they wouldn't have to go through the humiliation
of being ceremonially murdered in a Roman triumph.
I don't want to get totally sidetracked here, but Romans usually took care not to execute
people within the pomerium, so it's strange that they didn't even blink an eye at mass
executions during a triumph.
Also, it's awfully suspicious that the executions happened to take place at the foot of the
Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
The Romans liked to say that they didn't believe in human sacrifice, but I don't think it's
going too far to say that this feels a little human sacrifice-y.
Once the senseless killing was over with, the triumphator got down off the chariot and
ascended the steps to the temple.
There, with Rome's highest religious officials, he sacrificed two white bulls to the god Jupiter.
Again, noteworthy that this happened only minutes after the execution of the prisoners
outside.
This animal sacrifice was the climax of the Roman triumph.
By now it would have been pretty late in the day, and so Rome's bigwigs hosted a big formal
feast for the triumphator, while the crowds went home and had feasts of their own with
friends and family.
That night, after way too much eating and drinking, lictors and musicians escorted the
triumphator to his home.
The moment the sun rose the next day, the Senate's permission to cross the pomerium
expired.
Since the ex-triumphator probably lived within the pomerium, that meant that their military
command instantly evaporated, just like it would have for any other general within the
pomerium.
The ex-triumphator was a private citizen again.
But the festivities weren't over.
There would be several more days of feasts, and games, and horse racing, and all kinds
of stuff.
Literal bread and circuses.
Most of this would have been at the ex-triumphator's personal expense, which for this moment made
him the most popular person in Rome.
If we are to believe Rome's internal record-keeping, over the course of 7 centuries, the city celebrated
on average a triumph every 3 or 4 years.
But with the ascension of Rome's first Emperors, this ancient tradition faded away.
It was gradual at first, but over time it became less and less permissible for the most
popular person in Rome to be anybody outside of the Imperial royal family.
This decline of the triumph coincided with a general meritocratic decline, which was
a trend that infected every aspect of public life and lead to greater and greater political
instability.
In short, the triumph was a sign of healthy political competition, and when the triumph
started getting all funky, it was an early indication that the funk was coming from inside
the Republic.