Mediaevalia

In his biographical account of famous Greeks and Romans (ca. 100–120), Plutarch reveals a competitive aspect of the Roman triumph: a military procession in which a victorious, laureled general enters the city on a chariot led by his captives. While Romulus celebrated his triumph on foot, Plutarch notes, the Etruscan kings proceeded in a chariot drawn by four white horses.¹ Not to be outdone, Pompey went so far as to attempt to ride into Rome on a chariot pulled by four elephants. He could not fit the elephants through the gates, however, and had to settle for the customary outfit of a horse-drawn chariot.²

Plutarch's account of these sequential, progressively more elaborate processions into the city suggests that the Roman triumph operated in ancient Rome as an exercise in allusive rivalry. Victors authorized their triumphs by placing them in the context of previous triumphal processions, meanwhile striving to outperform their predecessors by riding into Rome on even grander mounts. As Mary Beard explains, it was "part of the history of the triumph to be judged against, to upstage or be upstaged by, the triumphs of predecessors and rivals."³ This allusive rivalry carried over into poetic descriptions of military triumphs, which would often include a statement of superiority over previous authors or processions, with the poet suggesting in some cases that other writers are prisoners in his personal triumph. This function of the triumph has its roots in antiquity. Describing his muse's chariot riding forth in victory, for example, Propertius draws on features of the triumph to suggest the superiority of his elegiac subject over poems and poets of war:

ah valeat, Phoebum quicumque moratur in armis!exactus tenui pumice versus eat,quo me Fama levat terra sublimis, et a menata coronatis Musa triumphat equis,et mecum in curru parvi vectantur Amores, [End Page 89] scriptorumque meas turba secuta rotas.quid frustra immissis mecum certatis habenis?

[Begone the man who detains Phoebus with themes of war! Let my verse run smoothly, perfected with fine pumice, whereby soaring Fame uplifts me from the earth, and the Muse that is born of me triumphs with garlanded steeds; with me in the chariot ride little Loves, and a throng of writers follows behind my wheels. Why do you loosen rein and vainly compete with me?]⁴

Calling for the laurel crown (3.1.19), the prize given to military victors and poets alike, Propertius portrays himself as a triumphant general riding on a chariot with his muse and subject, while other writers hang at his wheels in defeat.

The practice of using the triumph to engage previous writers in contest continued in the Middle Ages. Describing the triumph of the church, Dante compares the chariot he sees approaching to those of Scipio Africanus, Augustus, and even the Sun. None equal the spectacle of his poetic subject, he notes, nor can compare to the glory of what he witnesses:

Non che Roma di carro così bellorallegrasse Affricano, o vero Augusto,ma quel del Sol saria pover con ello.

[Not only did Rome never gladden Africanus or Augustus with so glorious a chariot, but that of the Sun would be poor beside it.]⁵

In Book 9 of the Africa, Francesco Petrarca implicitly counters Dante's claim. Far from being inferior to any procession, he insists, the triumph of Scipio Africanus is more magnificent than any triumph held in Rome. In a scene of triple triumph, Petrarch recounts how Scipio, Ennius, and he himself are rewarded with laurel crowns and processions greater than any Rome has ever witnessed (9.387–88). Like Propertius, Dante and Petrarch invoke the poetic triumph as a mode of intertextual commentary, to suggest the superiority of their own material over that of their predecessors.⁶ Establishing the splendor of his poetic subject in relation to previous writings, each author uses the triumph as a literary trope, first to recall earlier works, and then to assert the comparatively greater importance of the scene he alone describes. [End Page 90]

The allusive rivalry of the poetic triumph plays out on a grand scale in Petrarch...