Roman triumph

Republican morality required that the general conduct himself with dignified humility, as a mortal citizen who triumphed on behalf of Rome's Senate, people, and gods.

By the Late Republican era, triumphs were drawn out and extravagant, motivated by increasing competition among the military-political adventurers who ran Rome's nascent empire.

He wore the regalia traditionally associated both with the ancient Roman monarchy and with the statue of Jupiter Capitolinus: the purple and gold "toga picta", laurel crown, red boots and, again possibly, the red-painted face of Rome's supreme deity.

From the time of Scipio Africanus, the triumphal general was linked (at least for historians during the Principate) to Alexander and the demi-god Hercules, who had laboured selflessly for the benefit of all mankind.

From there, all unforeseen delays and accidents aside, it would have managed a slow walking pace at best, punctuated by various planned stops en route to its final destination of the Capitoline temple, a distance of just under 4 km (2.48 mi).

Their captured weapons, armour, gold, silver, statuary, and curious or exotic treasures were carted behind them, along with paintings, tableaux, and models depicting significant places and episodes of the war.

Once disposed, this portable wealth injected huge sums into the Roman economy; the amount brought in by Octavian's triumph over Egypt triggered a fall in interest rates and a sharp rise in land prices.

One is an aureus (a gold coin) that has a laurel-wreathed border enclosing a head which personifies Africa; beside it, Pompey's title "Magnus" ("The Great"), with wand and jug as symbols of his augury.

Augustus, Caesar's heir and Rome's first emperor, built a vast triumphal monument on the Greek coast at Actium, overlooking the scene of his decisive sea-battle against Antony and Egypt; the bronze beaks of captured Egyptian warships projected from its seaward wall.

In 211 BCE, the Senate turned down Marcus Marcellus' request for a triumph after his victory over the Carthaginians and their Sicilian-Greek allies, apparently because his army was still in Sicily and unable to join him.

This scarcity allows only the most tentative and generalised (and possibly misleading) reconstruction of triumphal ceremony, based on the combination of various incomplete accounts from different periods of Roman history.

Roman etymologists thought that the soldiers' chant of triumpe was a borrowing via Etruscan of the Greek thriambus (θρίαμβος), cried out by satyrs and other attendants in Dionysian and Bacchic processions.

[40] Ovid projected a fabulous and poetic triumphal precedent in the return of the god Bacchus/Dionysus from his conquest of India, drawn in a golden chariot by tigers and surrounded by maenads, satyrs, and assorted drunkards.

Later Roman sources point to his triumph of 396 BCE as a cause for offense; the chariot was drawn by four white horses, a combination properly reserved for Jupiter and Apollo – at least in later lore and poetry.

[46] The demeanour of a triumphal Republican general, and the symbols he employed in his triumph, would have been closely scrutinised by his aristocratic peers, alert for any sign that he might aspire to be more than "king for a day".

Cicero remarked that, in the race for power and influence, some individuals were not above vesting an inconveniently ordinary ancestor with triumphal grandeur and dignity, distorting an already fragmentary and unreliable historical tradition.

[53] Moralists complained that successful foreign wars might have increased Rome's power, security, and wealth, but they also created and fed a degenerate appetite for bombastic display and shallow novelty.

Livy traces the start of the rot to the triumph of Gnaeus Manlius Vulso in 186, which introduced ordinary Romans to such Galatian fripperies as specialist chefs, flute girls, and other "seductive dinner-party amusements".

[56] Roman conservatives disapproved of such precocity[57] but others saw his youthful success as the mark of a prodigious military talent, divine favour, and personal brio; and he also had an enthusiastic, popular following.

For his second triumph (71 BCE, the last in a series of four held that year) his cash gifts to his army were said to break all records, though the amounts in Plutarch's account are implausibly high: 6,000 sesterces to each soldier (about six times their annual pay) and about 5 million to each officer.

[62][63] Pliny's narrative of this triumph dwells with ominous hindsight upon a gigantic portrait-bust of the triumphant general, a thing of "eastern splendor" entirely covered with pearls, anticipating his later humiliation and decapitation.

Only the year before, he had blocked the senatorial award of a triumph to Marcus Licinius Crassus the Younger, despite the latter's acclamation in the field as Imperator and his fulfillment of all traditional, Republican qualifying criteria except full consulship.

Augustan ideology insisted that Augustus had saved and restored the Republic, and it celebrated his triumph as a permanent condition, and his military, political, and religious leadership as responsible for an unprecedented era of stability, peace, and prosperity.

[71] Christian emperor Constantius II entered Rome for the first time in his life in 357, several years after defeating his rival Magnentius, standing in his triumphal chariot "as if he were a statue".

[74][75] Emperor Honorius celebrated it conjointly with his sixth consulship on January 1, 404; his general Stilicho had defeated Visigothic King Alaric at the battles of Pollentia and Verona.

The procession did not end at Rome's Capitoline Temple with a sacrifice to Jupiter, but terminated at Hippodrome of Constantinople with a recitation of Christian prayer and the triumphant generals prostrate before the emperor.

[83] Italian poet Petrarch's Triumphs (I triomfi) represented the triumphal themes and biographies of ancient Roman texts as ideals for cultured, virtuous rule; it was influential and widely read.

[84] Andrea Mantegna's series of large paintings on the Triumphs of Caesar (1484–92, now Hampton Court Palace) became immediately famous and was endlessly copied in print form.

The Triumphal Procession commissioned by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1512–19) from a group of artists including Albrecht Dürer was a series of woodcuts of an imaginary triumph of his own that could be hung as a frieze 54 metres (177 ft) long.

[88] The extravagant triumphal entry into Rouen of Henri II of France in 1550 was not "less pleasing and delectable than the third triumph of Pompey ... magnificent in riches and abounding in the spoils of foreign nations".