The triumph as a rite

What is attested

The triumph is one of the very few Roman rites for which we possess an official state list. The Fasti Triumphales — inscribed marble panels recovered in fragments from the Roman Forum in 1546 and reassembled in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitol — register triumphs by the name and office of the celebrant, the enemy defeated, and the date, running from a legendary Romulus down to 19 BC. The list was probably cut in the late 20s or teens BC. It tells us that the Roman state kept, curated and monumentalised a register of triumphators; it does not tell us what happened on the day. Its early entries are not contemporary records but the version of the past that Augustan Rome chose to carve in stone.

What the ceremony looked like is known chiefly from images and from one long contemporary description. The two relief panels inside the passage of the Arch of Titus on the Sacra Via in Rome — erected after Titus's death in AD 81 — show, on one side, spoils from the Jerusalem Temple, including a seven-branched lampstand and a table, carried on litters with placards, and on the other the triumphator in a four-horse chariot with a winged Victory behind him. Josephus was in Rome when Vespasian and Titus triumphed in AD 71, and describes that triumph at length; he does not say that he watched it, and whether he did cannot be established. His account covers the pre-dawn muster, the display of spoils and tableaux of captured cities, the captives, the procession's arrival on the Capitol, and the pause there until news came that the enemy commander had been executed. It is the fullest surviving account of a specific triumph by a contemporary, and it is an account of one triumph under one dynasty, not a description of standard procedure.

The route is a modern reconstruction assembled from scattered incidental mentions, not from any ancient itinerary. Its least contested elements are the muster of the army outside the sacred boundary of the city, the passage along the Sacra Via through the Forum, and the Capitoline terminus, where sacrifice was made at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The entry gate, the Porta Triumphalis, has never been located and has been argued over for more than a century, and the leg through the Circus Flaminius is itself disputed: an alternative reconstruction brings the procession by way of the Forum Boarium instead. The order of the procession — spoils, placards, animals, captives, magistrates, the general, then the soldiers — is a composite drawn from several authors describing several different occasions.

The triumph was also a legal and political event, and this is where the evidence is comparatively good. The senate voted the honour and the money; the celebrant had to hold imperium and, because imperium lapsed at the sacred boundary, required specific authorisation to exercise it inside the city on the day. Livy's narratives of the second century BC preserve extended senatorial arguments about who deserved a triumph and on what grounds, which is direct evidence that no automatic entitlement existed. The Fasti record a distinct category of triumph celebrated on the Alban Mount, associated in the sources with commanders who did not obtain a senatorial grant. Valerius Maximus, writing under Tiberius, states a threshold of five thousand enemy killed; this is a single antiquarian assertion about earlier practice, not a preserved statute, and the triumphs actually recorded do not obviously conform to it.

The famous colourful details each belong to a named author writing at a particular moment, and they do not corroborate each other. Pliny the Elder, reporting on the authority of Verrius Flaccus, states that on festival days the face of the cult statue of Jupiter was coloured with cinnabar and that the bodies of men going in triumph were coloured the same way, instancing Camillus as having triumphed so coloured — and adds, candidly, that he cannot explain the practice. Tertullian, a Christian apologist writing in Carthage around AD 197, is the source for the figure behind the triumphing man telling him to look behind him and remember he is human; Tertullian deploys it to argue that even an emperor is mortal, which is precisely the point he needs it to make, and no earlier surviving narrative of a triumph mentions either the figure or the reminder. Suetonius reports the obscene and mocking verses sung by Caesar's soldiers in his triumphs. Against all this stands one piece of ritual language preserved in an inscription rather than in a book: the archaic hymn of the Arval Brethren, cut in AD 218, which ends in a repeated cry of triumpe — and does so in a rite of fields and Mars rather than in a victory procession.

How the rite worked

The sequence began well before the day. A returning commander who wanted a triumph halted outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary, since to cross it dissolved his military command, and applied to the senate, which debated the request and voted funds. Refusal was common and is visible in the sources as a live political fight; the alternatives were an ovatio, a lesser ceremony on foot or horseback with a myrtle rather than laurel wreath, or a self-funded triumph on the Alban Mount, which the Fasti record as a distinct category.

On the day the army and the spoils assembled in the Campus Martius. On the usual modern reconstruction the procession enters the city, passes the Circus Flaminius and the Circus Maximus — which offered seated viewing — then goes along the Sacra Via and up the Capitoline to sacrifice at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The Circus Flaminius leg is disputed, with an alternative running by way of the Forum Boarium, and no ancient source states the itinerary or the reason for it. Carried in the procession were captured objects and money, painted boards and models identifying places and events, sacrificial animals with gilded horns, prisoners of rank, the magistrates and senate, and the celebrant in a four-horse chariot wearing purple-and-gold ceremonial dress. His soldiers followed. Josephus's account of AD 71 shows the Capitoline arrival functioning as the ceremony's hinge: the procession waited there for a specific piece of news before the sacrifice proceeded.

Cost and personnel were substantial and are recorded only in fragments. The senate voted a sum; the commander also disposed of manubiae, the proceeds of the sale of booty, from which triumphators built temples and made donatives to their troops — Livy gives per-head payments for particular triumphs. Public feasting and games could follow.