INTRODUCTION

In 197 B.C., the Roman consul Q. Minucius Rufus celebrated an unofficial triumphal procession on the Alban Mount about thirty kilometers southeast of Rome. This triumphus in monte Albano, “unofficial” because the Senate of Rome had not voted him this honor, celebrated victories over the Ligurians and Gallic Boi. According to Livy, Minucius's triumph might not have been condoned by the Senate, but it equaled in standards, wagons, and spoils the triumph voted by the Senate that C. Cornelius celebrated that same year in the city of Rome itself. Over 150 years later, after capturing the Armenian king Artavasdes in 34 B.C., Mark Antony celebrated a sort of triumphal procession even farther afield: in Alexandria. According to Cassius Dio, this procession, replete with spoils, captives, and Antony in a triumphal chariot, made its way into Alexandria to Cleopatra herself.

What did these two processions, so far apart in time and space, have in common? Both men who celebrated them envisioned them as triumphal processions – but ancient authors criticize both processions as inferior to the real triumph. According to Livy, “[Minucius's] triumph was of lesser note because of the place where it was held…. ” As for Antony, Plutarch writes of his Alexandrian “triumph” that “ … herein particularly did he give offense to the Romans, since he bestowed the honorable and solemn rites of his native country upon the Egyptians for Cleopatra's sake.” These triumphal processions were inferior or, in Antony's case, dishonorable even, because they had taken place outside the city of Rome. Place – the cityscape of Rome – was critical to the Roman triumph. Yet the monuments that came to shape the triumphal route in Rome often get lost in the shuffle of scholarship on the triumph, despite their centrality to understanding the triumph and its place, both literal and figurative, in ancient Rome.

The triumph – an elaborate ritual celebrating Rome's military victories over foreign peoples – was one of ancient Rome's most important institutions, a ritual at once religious and political, military and spectacular. One of the absolute highest honors a Roman man could achieve, the triumph traversed the city of Rome from the early republican through the imperial periods. It was a quintessentially Roman institution, embodying fundamental aspects of Rome's evolving view of itself in terms of military might and world dominance.