Triumphus in Palatio

Abstract

As one of the many tokens of its symbolic centrality in Roman cul? ture, the Capitoline Hill received the triumphator at the end of his ceremonial return to Rome. For centuries generals who had been granted a triumphus concluded the elaborate sacral procession through the city with a sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the god most intimately associated with this religious institution.1 The strongly local character of Roman cults made it nearly unthinkable to celebrate the solemn event anywhere else in Rome, but artistic imagination feels itself less bound by religious scruples. Two such ingenious revisions of the triumphal parade displace its endpoint to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill. Virgil imagines Octavian's great triple triumph of 29 b.c. taking place there, while other ancient evidence leads us to believe that the victor really proceeded to the Capitoline like countless imperatores triumphantes before him.2 The poet sets the celebration at the shrine of the deity credited with the victory at Actium, the shrine which Octavian built adjacent to his own house. The Palatine was becoming the imperial palace complex, the triumph a prerogative of the imperial family.3 When these developments had been fully realized, Nero in De? cember a.d. 674 staged an eccentric victory procession which likewise climaxed at Apollo's Palatine temple. As returning victor in the festi-