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Claiming Victory: the Early Roman Triumph Jeremy Armstrong the Roman Triumph Is Perhaps the Best Known Example of an Ancient

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Claiming Victory: the Early Roman Triumph Jeremy Armstrong the Roman Triumph Is Perhaps the Best Known Example of an Ancient CLAIMING VICTORY: THE EARLY ROMAN TRIUMPH Jeremy Armstrong The Roman triumph is perhaps the best known example of an ancient society’s desire to celebrate victory in war. This ritual, supposedly per- formed by victorious military leaders from Rome’s regal period through to the late Empire, represented a clear, physical manifestation of Rome’s military might and, by the late Republic, offered one of the only methods by which Rome’s increasingly far-flung conquests could be made tangible for the population of the city. It was recognized, even in antiquity, as a powerful tool for political propaganda and the granting or withholding of a triumph by the Senate represented an important area of influence over the increasingly independent generals of this period.1 During the Empire the triumph maintained its position as an important statement of military and political power, being reserved for members of the imperial family and serving as an outlet by which the Emperor could continue to claim military victories as his own.2 However, as the numerous regulations and conventions which surround this institution attest, the triumph was much more than a simple victory celebration, or parade in honor of a success- ful general. At its core, the triumph was a powerful religious and political institution, with strong economic associations, whose origins lay not in the grand conquests of the mid to late Republic, but in the small-scale, localized warfare of Rome’s earliest periods. Indeed, beneath the pomp and incredible wealth displayed in later triumphs can still be seen the victorious entry of a small war-band into the rural and only recently uni- fied community of sixth-century BC Rome. The fundamental ideology of the early triumph is therefore inextricably connected to the style of warfare present in Latium and Central Italy dur- ing the sixth and fifth centuries BC. This was traditionally assumed, by both later Roman writers and early modern scholars, to be roughly similar 1 See Miriam Ruth Pelikan Pittenger, Contested Triumphs: Politics, Pageantry, and Perfor- mance in Livy’s Republican Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 33–53. 2 Robert Palmer, The Archaic Community of the Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1962), 155. 8 jeremy armstrong to the style of warfare present in the middle and late Republic in its use of a state-based army to accomplish goals dictated by the needs of the com- munity.3 But in recent years early Roman and Central Italian warfare has seen a move away from this rigid, state-oriented approach and towards a more flexible model where the importance of the gens and other more localized socio-political groups has increasingly been emphasized. First fully enunciated by Cornell and Rawlings, who in turn based their ideas on the studies of scholars like Ampolo, this new model for early military activity has increasingly become part of the generally accepted model of early Roman warfare, although the exact position and role of the gentes relative to the community of Rome has yet to be firmly established.4 This shift in the view of early warfare is in part the result of more critical reinterpretations of the literary sources for early Rome, often done in the light of recent work in the fields of sociology and anthropology, along with important advances in archaeology where there is a growing corpus of evidence suggesting the presence of a powerful, highly individual, mobile, warlike elite active in Central Italy during the period. Perhaps best exem- plified by figures like Macstarna and the Vibenna brothers, warlords who were supposedly active in Central Italy in the sixth century BC, these war- like elites, dubbed condottieri by modern scholars, seem to have exhibited a high level of influence on Central Italian warfare and society well into the early Republic.5 Indeed, despite the supposedly community-centered character of Rome’s military forces during the period, as laid out in the so-called “Servian Constitution,” much of the warfare which is recorded 3 This view is implicit in the ancient sources. See for instance Livy 1.38.2–3, where the triumph is used to conclude a diplomatic exchange between the Roman state/people and captured communities. 4 See Timothy John Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars: c. 1000–264 BC (London: Routledge, 1995), 143–150; and Louis Rawlings, “Condottieri and Clansmen: Early Italian Raiding, Warfare and the State,” in Organized Crime in Antiquity (ed. K. Hopwood; London: Duckworth, 1998), 97–127. Carmine Ampolo, “Demarato: Osservazioni Sulla Mobilita Sociale Arcaica,” Dialoghi di archeologia 9–10 (1976–1977): 333–345. For various hypotheses see Rawlings, “Condottieri and Clansmen,” 115–116; John Rich, “Warfare and the Army in Early Rome,” in A Companion to the Roman Army (ed. P. Erdkamp; Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 15–16; and Christopher John Smith, The Roman Clan: The Gens from Ancient Ideology to Modern Anthropology (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2006), 208–210, 281–294. 5 Other titles have been applied to these enigmatic figures, most notably Momigliano’s “band leaders”; see Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Origins of Rome,” in CAH 7.2 (ed. F. W. Wal- bank et al.; Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), 52–112..
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