Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke
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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.