Triumphing over Dante in Petrarch's Trionfi

Abstract

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. 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. 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.” 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: