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Chapter 5

Ritualization and Control

Symbolic Communication

The findings of the previous chapters invite us to apply a historicizing analysis to a ritual that took on many different usages in the late Republic but is said to be a remnant of a very early layer of Roman religion, surely predating the period analyzed here: the triumph.¹ From the formation of the republican nobilitas onward, 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 acknowledgment of this problem is crucial for any general interpretation of the ritual. In order to prepare the way for a new hypothesis, I now invoke Victor Turner’s principle of contextual meaning and start by addressing the relationship between the triumph and the pompa circensis. The conspicuous parallels in the apparel of the triumphator and the magistrate who led the pompa circensis have provoked several studies that postulate a historical relationship between the two ceremonies.¹⁷ Whereas Versnel argued for the godlikeness of the magistrate who supervised the pompa by way of analogy with the triumphator, and identified an original meaning for the triumph by analyzing the rituals of the Ides of September, I shall reverse his approach and concentrate on differences rather than similarities.

First, it must be pointed out that Versnel’s most convincing arguments in favor of the hypothesis that the triumphator impersonated Iuppiter are based on elements of the costume that he shared with the leading magistrate of the pompa circensis. Leaving aside the dream of Augustus’s father, in which the future Augustus appeared to him with the insignia of Iuppiter,¹⁸ two sources that employ the term ornatus Iovis (or the like) concern the triumphator, while the other two are about the magistrate.¹⁹ The same holds true of the golden crown (corona aurea or Etrusca), which is attested for both, triumphator and magistrate.²⁰ But is there any reason to identify the magistrates in charge of the pompae with Iuppiter?²¹ They were neither victorious nor were they permanently honored, either in life or after death, for having performed this ritual role. They were—and this needs to be stressed—never acclaimed with io triumphe. There is one further argument that makes such an identification highly unlikely. The most important task of the magistrate was to round out a procession of gods to the circus. But IuppiterIuppiter himself had already appeared in the pompa,in the form of a statue that was paraded together with those of the other gods. Why should he appear twice?

All this has important consequences for our interpretation of the triumphator. I submit that we can no longer regard the paraphernalia that the triumphator shared with the procession-leading magistrate as viable evidence of the triumphator’s Iuppiter-like status. That the costume worn by the protagonists in these rituals matched that of Iuppiter,²² in recalling the (temporary? periodic?) clothing of his Capitoline statue, simply does not entail that the Romans regarded other bearers of the tunica palmata, the purple toga, or the gold crown (which was too heavy to be worn on the head and hence—in both cases!—had to be held by a slave instead),²³ as indicators that Iuppiter was being impersonated.²⁴ The same is true of the eagle-crowned scepter, which again was perhaps common to both ritual roles:²⁵ it is too general a symbol of sovereignty to ensure a specific reference to Iuppiter.²⁶ Given the ease with which this combination of symbols was applied to a variety of ritual roles in different ludi, the meaning of these symbols was most likely a generic one, not closely related to the specific contents of these rituals. The easiest way to interpret the costume is to see it as temporarily distinguishing an outstanding, extraordinary magistrate with regal symbols, which, in other ritual contexts, were also used to honor Iuppiter.²⁷

There remain two differences between the triumphator and the game-leading magistrate. First, the triumphator rode on a quadriga, a chariot drawn by four horses, whereas the magistrate was granted only a biga, drawn by two horses.²⁸ The quadriga, being the more prestigious vehicle, elevated the triumphator above the normal magistrate. This might be taken to imply a reference to Iuppiter, as well as to royal status—that is to say, to the highest degree of political power.²⁹ And second, apart from the io triumphe, the triumphator was also colored in red, which is not attested for a game-leading magistrate. Does this mean that the Romans saw Iuppiter at the heart of the triumphal procession, as Versnel maintains?³⁰ Or did they see something else?

Parading a Living Statue

The earliest and principal source for the coloring of the triumphator with red paint is Pliny the Elder:

Iovis ipsius simulacri faciem diebus festis minio inlini solitam triumphanti-umque corpora; sic Camillum triumphasse; hac religione etiamnum addi in unguenta cenae triumphalis et a censoribus in primis Iovem miniandam locari.

On days of festivals the face of the statue of Iuppiter himself was usually smeared with cinnabar, and likewise the body of triumphatores. Camillus was said to have triumphed thus; according to the same scruple it was added even at that time to the unction at the triumphal meal, and the commission of coloring Iuppiter was among the first things censors had to do.³¹

Now why should the face of the statue of Iuppiter be painted red?³² The answer has nothing to do with some protohistoric use of red color, as Versnel suggests,³³ but with material conditions and a cultural code. The statue would have been made out of terra-cotta like the Hercules fictilis of the ara maxima.34 This meant that, instead of the oil used in caring for statues of marble, the freshening up of the natural color (as opposed to colorfully painted parts) was done with red paint.³⁵ Urgency was supported by a cultural code. The faces of terra-cotta male deities—the type of statue for which we have ample evidence—were differentiated from the light faces of female terra-cotta deities by their darker red color.³⁶ A Roman triumphator celebrated the ritual colored in red, not in imitation of Iuppiter, but in imitation of a male statue of terracotta.³⁷ Being carried on a chariot in a frozen pose,³⁸ he additionally applied red coloring to his body (which, I presume, means the visible parts of his skin) to ensure that he was understood as a terra-cotta statue. The ancient Romans who watched a triumph saw a procession during which a “stand-in” terra-cotta statue of a male was carried into the city. They neither saw monarchy returning, even temporarily, nor did they see Iuppiter coming home or being carried around. As has been pointed out in dealing with the pompa circensis, Iuppiter was in any event a familiar figure on Roman streets. Everyone knew what he looked like: he was paraded around town on a stretcher, in the form of a statue or bust, or his insignia, especially the lightning, were carried in a tensa, a special car for a long time drawn by children. No one would have confused him with a triumphator.

Statues for the Nobility

The only form of the triumph known to us—and, indeed, the only form known to the Romans of the late Republic and empire—was an invention of the second half of the fourth century. It was a ritual performed following the (often difficult) decision of the Senate to publicly acknowledge the martial achievements of a returning general. In the face of an increasing display of private statuary on public ground (statuary probably already in marble or bronze)—such displays being described by Demosthenes as a contemporary development³⁹—the Roman nobility as a whole tried to concentrate public prestige on a ritual, which included the publicly decreed concretization of a consciously archaic representation, namely the terra-cotta statue still in use for deities housed in temples. And who better to act the part of the temporary statue than the one who was honored by it? The ritual did not force the honorand to reject later real statuary. Rather, the ritual should be understood as participating at once in the establishment of a monumentalized commemorative culture and in its regulation.⁴⁰ Far from rendering real statues otiose, therefore, the ritual increased their symbolic value and legitimized their public display.

Markus Sehlmeyer observed that the earliest known honorific statues, that is, statues put up for a living person, represented triumphatores. He went on to postulate a regular connection between triumphs and honorific statues.⁴¹ The first recorded instance of this connection is attributed to the year 338 and coincides with the first award of an honorific statue after the dictator Camillus refounded Rome after the Gallic sack. After the successful completion of the war against Pedum, the final phase of the Latin Wars of 340–338, the consuls L. Furius Camillus and C. Maenius “returned to Rome for a triumph decreed by the consensus of all. To the triumph the honor was added that they receive equestrian statues in the Forum, a rare event at that period” (Romam ad destinatum omnium consensu triumphum decessere. additus triumpho honos, ut statuae equestres eis, rara illa aetate res, in foro ponerentur).⁴²

Livy stresses that the statues were equestrian and thereby supposes a conceptual link between the award of a simple statue and the triumph. Does Livy’s Augustan-era construal of his information accurately reflect the situation at the end of the fourth century? Anthropomorphic divine images were frequent before and during that era,⁴³ but the same was not true of honorific statues of living people.⁴⁴ There is no evidence that the honoring of living individuals through the erection of statues became common in Greek states before the late fourth century. In regard to Rome, there are isolated stories of statues being put up before then. Whether these stories are trustworthy is controversial.⁴⁵ Tonio Hölscher and Markus Sehlmeyer are in agreement that, at Rome, the practice of displaying statues in public started in the latter part of the fourth century, and that this practice assumed a variety of forms that surpassed any Greek models.⁴⁶ There are other indications that this same era saw the emergence of new commemorative practices, such as the reorganization of the Forum initiated after 318 during the censorship of Maenius, who had previously been honored by a statue, and who put up the so-called maenianum, a building that featured a gallery for spectators.⁴⁷

We should not assume, however, that this development in respect to public honor through statuary was directed by the Senate. It is more plausible to assume that private initiative was responsible for the pursuit of the possibility that statuary afforded to represent, multiply, and immortalize one’s own body in a form previously reserved for gods. The warrior of Capestrano might be seen as evidence of such experiments. The granting of triumphs by the end of the fourth century might have constituted a reaction—an attempt at systematization—to regulate and bring under senatorial control an exploding private practice, which had begun only slightly earlier. Attempts to control the awarding of powerful honors—such as were attached to statues displayed in public—would continue throughout the rest of Roman (and, indeed, European) history.⁴⁸ The public ritual and the (mostly) private erection of a statue thus interacted. The display of booty could have taken place both during the ritual and at the erection of the statue. Maenius built the famous tribunal for public speakers, the rostra, as the means to display booty, and some of the earliest attested statues represented donors at the side of the divine images that they had dedicated. The triumphator Spurius Carvilius, for example, had his statue on the Capitol, close to a colossal image of Iuppiter.⁴⁹ In the triumph various media interacted in the representation of both the triumphator and booty, and paying attention to this interaction is crucial for a proper understanding of this elevated ritual.

How can we date this development? Some comparatively reliable notices in our literary sources about the display of triumphal statues suggest the late fourth century as the terminus ante quem for the emergence of the triumph in its classical form. Other developments that relate to the question include the rather dimly understood spread of honorific statues in the Mediterranean world of the fifth and fourth centuries and the largely simultaneous process of the formation of the “new” Roman nobility during the fourth century. Decisive steps seem to have occurred in the wake of the constitutional changes marked by the so-called Sextian-Licinian laws, which are traditionally dated to 367.

Another line of argumentation exploits the similarities between the triumph and the pompa circensis. In conjunction with the admission of plebians to the consulship in 367 (or thereabouts), the magistracy of the aediles curules was created, whose task it was to oversee the public games.⁵⁰ As a result, the pompa celebrated during the ludi was no longer led by the supreme officer of the Republic but by lesser magistrates, who, for the time of the ritual only, assumed, by means of their clothing, the role of the “king’s successor,” a role previously performed by the consul. This change in ritual procedure freed up the paraphernalia (and their semantics), rendering them available for use in other rituals as well, as the immediate proliferation of games and the length of the games would seem to evince. It is this semantic development that I claim as a terminus post quem for the creation of the ritual of the triumph in its classical form.⁵¹

If a late fourth-century dating of the triumph can be maintained, the choice of representing the victor by a (fictitious) terra-cotta image that was also in use in other ritual contexts must have been deliberate. It gave prominence to the ritual associations of the statue and thereby stressed the exercise of senatorial control, even as, in a second step, the setting up of, and the choice of material for, a permanent statue left room for differentiation or, perhaps, accommodation to further development in either technical standards or semantic distinctions. Bronze statues became a minimum standard for honorific statues; gilding would be an exceptional honor.⁵² A chryselephantine statue, on the other hand, indicated a definite transgression of the boundary between man and god. It was employed in the final honors for the dictator Caesar.⁵³ Whereas pedestrian statues became regular for magistrates who died during embassies,⁵⁴ a representation on horseback or even on a currus would be given to victorious magistrates or persons who had exceptionally distinguished themselves in service to the res publica. But again it has to be stressed that it was not the public statue that was central. Statues were erected by many individuals and groups. Their status derived from the prior, public ritual, thus blurring the difference between public and private.⁵⁵ Ritualization, forcing private actions into public form and space, must have been seen as a powerful strategy by Roman protagonists of the middle Republic.

Changes in Ritual

As Versnel was able to demonstrate, the honos of the triumph was never seen as an honor for the gods.⁵⁶ Honoring the gods was the function of supplicationes, festivals of thanksgiving that were decreed “in the name of the victor,” as the later formula ran,⁵⁷ once reports of the victory had been received. From a religious point of view, the strict separation of human and divine honors was necessary. While it was possible to deny a triumph to the general, the res publica could not dare to withhold what was due to the gods. Still, problems remain. After all, the triumphal ritual involved the deposition of the laurel wreath to Iuppiter and the sacrifice of oxen on the Capitoline, which would have been owed to the gods. How are these actions related to honoring the general? We have to look for precedents and influences on the “systematized” triumph, apart from the Hellenistic pompae on which it was so clearly modeled in its ostentatious display of booty.⁵⁸

Before the consolidation of the new republican nobility, Rome’s aristocracy engaged in “gentilician warfare.” Gentilician warfare was an enterprise of individual families, perhaps for their personal enrichment, but, at the same time, a public problem.⁵⁹ These wars only gradually became a matter for the entire commonwealth. We may expect that earlier rites of return from military campaigns were understood as religious obligations on the part of the leaders. They had to fulfill their vows and dedicate part of the booty to specific deities. The deities to whom this dedication was made might have been chosen according to the individual inclination of the general, family tradition, or more general rules, a reflection of which we can perhaps still capture in the so-called leges regiae, the royal laws that defined the dedication of spolia opima, the spoils taken from the opposing leader.⁶⁰ It is crucial to note that the Romans understood these regulations to involve the victorious general moving on his feet as he himself carried the spoils during the act of dedication. Of equal importance is the fact that the return to the city and its boundary would have been a highly marked occasion. Rome was completely walled during the early Republic, and entering the city with an armed force must have been restricted or even banned.⁶¹

Augustan historiography and antiquarian research assimilated one to another and all to the triumph: the varied ritual performances of the ovatio, the entering on foot; the triumphus in monte Albano, a triumph at the federal sanctuary, which was celebrated for the first time in 231 and did not require the Senate’s consent; and the special form of dedication associated with the spoils of the hostile general, the spolia opima.⁶² Nonetheless, the “real” triumph decreed by the Senate differed from the Alban triumph as regards location—the Roman Capitol, instead of the federal sanctuary—and from the ovatio and the dedication of the spolia opima in how the general moved during the ritual. He advanced standing on a chariot rather than approaching on foot. The red paint used to assimilate the triumphator to a motionless statue would have further highlighted the difference. Subordinating warfare and its gains to the control of the senatorial nobility at large was important because the successful conclusion of warfare brought enormous material benefits to the victorious general and opened many opportunities for prestigious ritual activity.⁶³ The range of ritual alternatives to the triumph just delineated, the amount of private statuary in public spaces, and the frequent granting of dubious triumphs give an indication of the stakes in this arena, as well as of the Senate’s success in channeling private ambition into approved forms.⁶⁴

So understood, the new processional ritual conforms to the growing importance of the publicity and visibility of Roman rituals as delineated in Chapter 3. It should be pointed out that another military procession, the so-called transvectio equitum, may have been invented only shortly afterward, supposedly in 304.⁶⁵ The gods were honored by the display of booty, too. Other rituals of thanksgiving, called supplicationes, took place before the celebration of the triumph. And the general was expected to discharge his personal obligations to the divinities afterward, beyond the sacrifice to Iuppiter that concluded the triumph and corresponded to the vow taken at the general’s departure.

Finally, the name of the new ritual offers the best indicator of its import: triumphus and triumphator derive from the exclamation triumphe, which must initially have been a cry of mockery, directed at the general forced to stand unmoving on his chariot, playing his own statue. We are dealing with a form of iambizein, which focused its satirizing thrust on the chief protagonist of the triumph, as it did in the pompa funebris with the important and rich deceased.⁶⁶ The mockery of the soldiers was not apotropaic but rather formed a rite of reversal—and offered substantial public critique—in the presence of, and in respect to, a superior who had enjoyed power over the life and death of his inferiors and was now confined to immobility by the rite.

Media of Representation

The triumph was a serious matter. Many members of Rome’s ruling elite vied for the honor. What is more, temporary appearance as a godlike statue endowed other, permanent media with greater symbolic value. To be permanently represented by a statue in a public place, a distinction previously by and large restricted to divinities, was as close to “immortality” as a Roman aristocrat could get.⁶⁷ The prestige was immense, and the Romans devoted considerable ingenuity to enhancing the visual impact of individual statues even further. Some statues demanded attention by being put up next to monuments of colossal size, such as larger-than-life statues of Iuppiter and Hercules.⁶⁸ Others stood out by being elevated on columns or arches.⁶⁹ Dress was an index of difference as well: some chose representation in armor; others preferred the toga.⁷⁰ The statue built or given on the basis of a triumph soon became the pinnacle and center of a much wider practice. If consuls leading a pompa triumphalis were honored with quadrigae, why not give chariots to praetors and aediles leading a pompa circensis? In any case, playing a role in a processional rite functioned as the criterion of legitimacy for the public display of a statue.⁷¹

Still, Roman culture was first and foremost theatrical.⁷² Frequently backed by additional public money, Roman generals of the middle and late Republic often used part of their military booty to build temples, but, as Eric Orlin has pointed out, nineteen out of twenty preferred to spend their booty on games. In contrast to temples, which were owned by deities, the generals themselves could preside over games.⁷³ Likewise, it was the procession of the triumph, rather than the statue, that made the largest impression upon the Roman populace. Even the emperors, at a time when most generals could no longer hope to celebrate their own triumphal procession, did not object to a bronze statue at the center of the ornamenta triumphalia.⁷⁴ By using the term ovans triumphavi in his Res gestae—“I triumphed in ovation”—Augustus employed another strategy to separate triumphal honors and the pompa proper.⁷⁵

The triumph thus reconstructed also affords a new perspective on the history of art. The temporary work of art that consisted in the living statue of the triumphator stood at the apex of a growing number of forms and media of improvised “temporary images” such as paintings, soldiers, or captives.⁷⁶ It is here that we have to look for the Roman origins of triumphal painting.⁷⁷ Henner von Hesberg used the term “temporary images” (temporäre Bilder) to describe nearly contemporaneous practices at Hellenistic courts, such as is documented for us by Callixenus’s lengthy description of a festival arranged by Ptolemaios II.⁷⁸ To judge from the lengthy descriptions that the extraordinary triumphs of Aemilius Paulus and Pompey received, it was this visual element out of the whole complex that drew public interest and afforded any particular celebration the best chances to enter into the literary tradition.⁷⁹ The development of the triumph in the historical period can then be described in terms of increased theatralization: the ritual dress, originally simply denoting unsurpassable authority and hence designated ornatus Iovis,⁸⁰ was gradually elaborated into a tunica palmata and toga picta,⁸¹ and was used on further occasions and in statuary representations. Ultimately the triumph became one among several occasions when military success received public commemoration in the iconography of rituals, victory celebrations, and the public conclusion of treaties.⁸² Ida Östenberg has rightly stressed the character of the triumph as a performance informing a worldview far beyond momentary political constellations.⁸³