This contribution focuses on the triumphal procession of the Roman general Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus after the Third Macedonian War (171–168 BCE). In his Life of Aemilius Paullus, Plutarch states that the main purpose of this triumph was to show to the Roman people ‘the Macedonian king taken alive, and the glory of Alexander and Philip made spoil by Roman arms’.1 The various spoils presented to the Roman public are indeed all connected to the monarchy of Perseus, the last king of the Antigonid Dynasty, rather than the country of Macedonia as such. They comprise arms and armor, court objects, votive offerings, and human captives. The triumph offers a clear case of objects entering Rome in a conspicuous, meaningful way by means of an orchestrated public event. This contribution seeks to clarify what these objects signified in their original, dynastic context; and what they came to signify in the new, Roman context into which they were introduced though Paullus’ triumph. It examines the objects through the four stages of appropriation as described by the anthropologist Hans Peter Hahn, and discussed by Versluys in this volume: material appropriation > objectification > incorporation > transformation.2
The Third Macedonian War was fought between on the one hand the Romans and their Greek allies, and on the other hand the Antigonid king, Perseus, and his Thracian, Epeirote, Illyrian, and Greek allies.3 The war broke out in 171 BCE. In 168 the consul Aemilius Paullus assumed command of the Roman forces in Greece and on June 22 defeated the Antigonid army in the Battle of Pydna, which brought an end to the war – and to the Macedonian kingdom.4 King Perseus and his family were taken captive and brought to Rome, together with numerous Macedonian aristocrats. Before returning to Italy, Paullus organized a festival at Amphipolis in Chalkidike, assuming the role of a Hellenistic king in his attempt to attract envoys from the Aegean poleis.5
Paullus’ triumphal entry into Rome probably took place in September 167 and lasted for three days. It was not his first triumph,6 but it was his most magnificent, which is reflected by the attention it received from ancient writers. Accounts of the procession are given by Diodoros (31.8.9–12) and Plutarch (Aemilius Paullus 32–33),7 with some additional information provided by Livy (45.40). Diodoros’ account is the most extensive and differs in some places significantly from Plutarch’s, which is more dramatic and immersive.8 Livy’s narrative is marred by a substantial lacuna, but it nonetheless contains some useful information, especially on the gold and silver bullion captured by the Romans, and the humiliation of King Perseus (see below). Unfortunately, the account in book 30 of Polybios’ Histories has been entirely lost,9 which is a real pity because Polybios is our best source for Roman history in this period. An additional, pictorial source for the spoils taken by Paullus’ Romans are the marble reliefs on the Pydna Monument, now in the Delphi Archaeological Museum, which depicts Antigonid soldiers being killed or captured by the Romans and their Italian socii, showing their equipment.10
The ritual of triumphus in the Roman Republic has attracted much scholarship.11 My aim here is not to analyze the triumphus as a public ritual but merely to understand the significance of the booty brought from Macedonia, and its impact in Rome. I will first discuss the spoils carried in the triumph from the perspective of Hellenistic monarchy and court culture. Second, I will offer my thoughts on the meaning and agency of these objects in the Roman context.
Before turning to the triumphal procession, it is imperative to first look at two associated events that preceded it: the festival that Aemilius Paullus organized at Amphipolis, mentioned by Livy; and his return to Rome on an Antigonid ‘royal ship’ as recorded by Plutarch. It is with these events – especially the Amphipolis festival – that the ‘objectification’ of the Antigonid spoils begins.
1 Paullus’ Victory Celebrations at Amphipolis and His Return to Rome
The festival at Amphipolis probably took place in the spring of 167. Religious festivals had previously been a powerful instrument of imperialism for Hellenistic kings, who often participated in, or even set up, Pan-Hellenic events that would attract representatives of lesser kingdoms and local communities to their courts.12 The best-known example is the Ptolemaia festival, celebrated (at an uncertain date) by Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II at Alexandria.13 The processions during such royal festivals were not only cultic occurrences but also spectacles that presented an image of world empire and universal peace by putting the entire oikoumene on a stage.14 In this respect they resembled, or even provided a model for, the Late Republican triumphus, as shown especially by the adoption of Hellenistic (Ptolemaic) Dionysiac imagery in the triumphs of Pompey and Caesar.15 Earlier, Philip II had used the Isthmian Games at Corinth to establish the Hellenic League, and also later Macedonian kings attended this festival where representatives of the Greek poleis would assemble.16 It was at the Isthmian Games that Flamininus after the Second Macedonian War had assumed the role of a Hellenistic king by proclaiming the freedom of the Greeks. The Amphipolis festival likewise aimed at bringing together sacred embassies to participate in the sacrificial rites and negotiate with the victorious Roman general.17 Drawing on Polybios, Livy writes that at this ‘gathering of Europe and Asia’,
[t]he spectacle that the crowd had come for was no more the drama or contests among men or chariot races than it was the spoils of Macedonia. Everything was put on display: sculptures and paintings and tapestries and vases, which were made in the palace with great care, from gold, silver, bronze, and ivory. […] The items were loaded on the fleet and entrusted to Gnaeus Octavius to take them back to Rome.18
Livy furthermore reports that before the festival bronze shields taken from the Macedonians had already been shipped to Rome, and non-metal arms and armor had been burned as offerings to Mars, Minerva, and other gods.19
When Paullus returned to Rome with his victorious legions, he himself approached the city on board of what probably was the most spectacular piece of plunder that was brought to Rome after the Third Macedonian War – an object too big to be carried along in his triumph. This was the Antigonid ‘royal galley’ (
[he] sailed up the river Tiber on the royal galley, which had sixteen banks of oars and was richly adorned with captured arms and cloths of scarlet and blue purple, so that the Romans actually came in throngs from out the city, as it were to some spectacle of triumphant progress whose pleasures they were enjoying in advance, and followed along the banks as the splashing oars sent the ship slowly up the stream.20
Giant warships were no longer used by Hellenistic navies in the second century BCE; Thomas Rose therefore recently suggested that the ship captured by Paullus was the famous ‘sixteen’ commissioned more than a century before by Perseus’ illustrious ancestor, Demetrios I Poliorketes.21 Demetrios was the first Antigonid to become King of the Macedonians, the captured king Perseus the last. This ship – the largest single-hulled galley constructed in antiquity, as far as we can tell – had survived, Rose argues, as a votive offering in a dockyard (neōrion) in or near a sanctuary, perhaps in Demetrias where Demetrios I was buried. Together with other royal ships taken from the Antigonids – all ‘of a scale never seen before’ in Rome – the ‘sixteen’ was hauled out of the water and put on display on the Campus Martius.22 Plutarch’s account of Paullus’ return on the royal galley emphasizes the theatricality of his sailing up the Tiber, comparable to the ritual entries of Hellenistic royals.
Diodoros, writing in the second half of the first century BCE, is our earliest source for Paullus’ triumphus. He also offers the most detailed inventory of what was shown in the triumph. Based on his account (with a little help from Plutarch), six categories can be distinguished:
arms and armor
gold and silver
votive gifts and other offerings
court objects, tableware
regalia
human captives
I will here concentrate on these objects’ significance as symbols of Antigonid monarchy and empire, and their place within the context of the Antigonid royal court and army. I prefer to write ‘Antigonid’ rather than ‘Macedonian’ as the polity that the Romans fought was centered on the dynasty and its network of alliances.23 Being the religious and military leaders of the Macedonian ethnos rather than the country of Macedonia, the Antigonids had for generations aimed at establishing hegemonial rule over Greece, the Balkans, and the Aegean.24 The objects brought into Rome were primarily associated with the Antigonid court and military, and it is from this perspective that I will discuss them. Tomb painting gives a good impression of the splendor of Antigonid elite armament, for instance a fresco in the Macedonian Tomb of Lykon and Kallikrates at Lefkadia (mid-third century BCE) shows brightly painted helmets and a richly adorned shield showing the so-called Star of Vergina – in fact an image of the sun and a symbol of monarchical rule throughout the Hellenistic world (fig. 11.1). However, since the Antigonid dynasty participated in a larger, East Mediterranean koine of interconnected dynasties, including the Seleukids and Ptolemies, which mutually influenced each other,25 I also sometimes use the adjective ‘Hellenistic’ to denote this wider world of imperial and royal courts.26
Macedonian helmets and shield with sun emblem. Wall painting in the Tomb of Lykon and Kallikrates, Lefkadia, mid-third-century BCE
Wikimedia Commons2 Hellenistic Military Objects Entering Rome
Triumphs are spectacles. Like other processions, they were sensory and emotional experiences, that may be described as ‘all-encompassing works of art’.27 The messages we tend to read into them, probably were put there deliberately. It is most of all Plutarch who emphasizes the theatrical nature of Paullus’ three-day triumph, an event that was meticulously orchestrated for maximum effect on the audience. He describes how ‘the people erected scaffoldings in the theatres for equestrian contests, which they call circuses, and round the forum, [and] lined the other parts of the city which afforded a view of the procession’.28 Indeed, the Plutarchian account reads like an eyewitness report itself.29
Diodoros describes how on the first day captured arms and armor were displayed to the Roman public. The procession opened with no less than 1,200 carts with white shields and a further 1,200 carts with bronze shields.30 Because of the equal number of carts, it is usually assumed that the Macedonian phalanx under the later Antigonids consisted of two divisions of heavy pikemen equipped with bronze shields, known respectively as the White Shields, or Leukaspides, and the Bronze Shields, or Chalkaspides. Recently, Nicholas Sekunda argued that the white shields, which Diodoros describes as ‘white and rough’ (
Thracian warriors carrying thureoi on a fresco from the Kazanlăk Tomb, fourth-third century BCE; the figure on the left is wearing the mushroom-shaped headdress worn by Thracian and Macedonian warriors during the Hellenistic period (after Zhivkova 1975, pl. 14)
With the carts carrying bronze shields we are on firmer ground. There can be little doubt that these belonged to the Chalkaspides, the main fighting force of the Antigonid infantry, known to have numbered 10,000 at the Battle of Sellasia in 222.33 Their precise number at Pydna is unknown. Livy says that at the beginning of the battle the entire phalanx of Perseus consisted of c.20,000 men.34 The Chalkaspides had a strong bond with the king.35 Regiments known as chalkaspides have also been attested for Seleukid and Pontic armies,36 and such units must have been seen by Romans as extravagant ‘eastern’ elite infantry.37
Most significant for the present discussion is the fact that these standard shields were issued by the monarchy, perhaps at each new accession or at the beginning of a major campaign.38 In other words, this equipment was directly connected to the Antigonid monarchy, which was most of all a military institution. Being symbols of the Antigonid monarchy, Macedonian shields were often depicted on reliefs, frescoes and especially on coins.39 We may actually have images of the bronze shields carried in Paullus’ triumph: the marble reliefs of the monument erected for Aemilius Paullus at Delphi to celebrate his victory in the Battle of Pydna shows Macedonian infantrymen carrying large shields decorated with an image of the sun surrounded by stars (fig. 11.3a and 11.3b).40 The connection with the spoils shown in Paullus’ triumphal procession and then dedicated to Jupiter on the Capitol, follows from the fact that the Delphic monument accompanied the dedication to Apollo of spoils taken from Perseus’ army – as an inscription on its base acknowledges: L. Aemilius L. f. imperator de rege Perse Macedonibusque cepet (‘L. Aemilius, son of Lucius, commander, took [this booty] from King Perseus and the Macedonians’).41 Robin Waterfield notes that Plutarch, ‘long a priest at Delphi, would have known the monument well’.42 In addition to the Chalkaspides, the battle scenes on the Pydna Monument depict other infantrymen as well as mounted nobles, the so-called Companions of the Kings; the friezes thus show the ethnic and military diversity of the defeated.43
A Macedonian cavalryman (foreground) and Argyraspid infantryman shown on the Pydna Monument from Delphi
Archaeological Museum of Delphi; photograph by authorA Macedonian Argyraspid shown on the Pydna Monument from Delphi
Archaeological Museum of Delphi; photograph by authorIn 63/62 BCE, a silver denarius commemorating Paullus’ victory over Perseus was minted by L. Aemilius Lepidus Paullus, a Roman moneyer who claimed to descend from Lucius Aemilius Paullus. The coin showed on its obverse the veiled head of Concordia, and on its reverse an image of Paullus with the captured king Perseus and his two sons. The king is wearing a kausia, the traditional beret-like headdress of the Macedonian nobility.44 In the center of the image stands a trophy bearing a Macedonian shield decorated with astral images (fig. 11.4). These coins show how the Chalkaspides’ ‘Macedonian shield’ was still considered a symbol of the Macedonian monarchy a century after its abolishment.45
Silver Denarius of L. Aemilius Lepidus showing the captured king Perseus and his sons in front of a trophy adorned with Macedonian armor
© Heritage AuctionsAfter the carts with shields came 300 carts with spears, pikes, bows, and javelins – representing the main components of the Antigonid army: cavalry, phalanx, (‘Cretan’) archers, and light troops – and ‘many more’ carts carrying arms of various sorts; ‘as in war’, Diodoros writes, ‘trumpeters led the way’.46 The last thing Diodoros mentions for day one, are 800 panoplies mounted on poles.47 Plutarch associates the arms and armor with the second day of Paullus’ triumph. The weaponry that he mentions includes a lot that is not Macedonian but rather ‘barbaric’, including the peltai of Cretan archers, Thracian wicker shields, and quivers.48 Many of these weapons, including the pikes of Perseus’ crack soldiers, the phalangites, were ‘artfully and aesthetically positioned’ upon carts – perhaps to suggest that they had been randomly left by the fleeing enemy troops, a sign of their utter defeat, and cowardice.49
Diodoros’ account in particular may read like a dull enumeration of arms and armor at first sight. But on closer scrutiny, it appears that several interesting choices were made in the presentation of the weaponry. The procession highlighted two types of enemies that the Romans had overcome in the Battle of Pydna: (1) Perseus’ ‘barbaric’ allies (Thracians, Paeonians, Agrianians), and (2) Perseus’ elite infantry force, the Bronze Shields. The whole set-up is reminiscent of two famous literary texts denouncing the fighting abilities of respectively wild barbarians and fancy Hellenistic guard regiments as compared to the Romans: the speech that Livy puts into the mouth of the consul Manlius Vulso before his defeat of the Galatian Celts in 189 – ‘“of all the peoples who inhabit Asia [Minor] the Galatians stand first in reputation for war [but] if you bear up under their first onset, into which they rush with glowing enthusiasm and blind passion, […] you need not use arms against them”’ (Liv. 38.17) – and the speech that Plutarch has Flamininus utter before the Battle of Thermopylai in 191, demeaning the army of the ‘degenerate’ Seleukids – ‘“all these pikemen, cataphracts and pezhetairoi are but Syrians differing from one another only in their paraphernalia”’ (Mor. 197c–d; cf. Flam. 17).50
3 Objects Associated with Hellenistic Court Culture Entering Rome
Diodoros assigns to the second day the display of riches. He begins with 1,000 talents of coined silver and 2,200 talents of silver bullion.51 Probably using a different source, the quantity of the coins is confirmed by Plutarch, who mentions 2,250 talents of coined silver (but not the silver bullion);52 he does say however that on Day 3 coined gold was carried around in 77 vessels, containing three talents each.53 Livy claims that there was more than 120,000 sesterces worth of gold and silver.54
As with the enumeration of endless heaps of weapons, there is more than meets the eye here, too. The gold and silver on display is more than just rich booty. Hellenistic kings, like the Persian kings before them, in anticipation of campaigns hoarded coins and bullion in strategically located citadels, and the gold and silver carried in the procession must have been Perseus’ war treasures confiscated from Macedonian strongholds such as Pydna and Pella.55 The gold and silver thus represented the Antigonids’ ability to wage war (and their inability to do so again in the future).
In addition to the gold and silver, there were many other riches, including ‘a great number’ of drinking-cups. Plutarch, too, mentions men carrying silver mixing-bowls, drinking horns, bowls, and cups.56 This tableware can be classified as court objects. Hellenistic courts are known to have produced many of them, meant not only for use during the ritualized feasting that was central to court life, but also to be distributed among the guests at the king’s table. Such gifts were what the Greeks called symbola: material tokens of philia or xenia relations between individuals.57 These were tangible symbols of royal favor and thus of high status; an impression of the lavishness of such gifts is given by the tableware found in Tomb II at Vergina, and other grave gifts from aristocratic tombs dating to the Hellenistic period (fig. 11.5a and 11.5b). It was partly through the distribution of gifts in ritualized settings that status was awarded, and power relations were organized.58 As gifts, these status objects were intended to be objects in motion. To be sure, given the long-standing relations between members of the Roman aristocracy and the Macedonian imperial houses – the Antigonids, Seleukids, and Ptolemies – as well as minor non-Macedonian dynastic houses such as the Attalids, Hellenistic court objects certainly had already reached Rome as gifts in substantial quantities at various earlier occasions.
Status gifts represented the Antigonids’ ability to create alliances and bind military leaders to themselves. In Diodoros’ and Plutarch’s accounts of the third day of the triumph, objects associated with the Antigonid court and its feasting practices interestingly are associated with the captured bodies of Perseus and his courtiers, as well as with Perseus’ regalia:
a ten-talent bowl of gold set with jewels, gold-work of all sorts to the value of ten talents, two thousand elephant tusks three cubits in length, an ivory chariot enriched with gold and precious stones, a horse in battle array with cheek-pieces set with jewels and the rest of its gear adorned with gold, a golden couch spread with flowered coverlets, and a golden palanquin with crimson [i.e., purple-dyed] curtains. Then came Perseus, the hapless king of the Macedonians, with his two sons, a daughter, and two hundred and fifty of his commanders (hegemones), four hundred garlands presented by the various cities and monarchs, and last of all, in a dazzling chariot of ivory, Aemilius himself.59
Silver kylix from Tomb II at Vergina, Macedonia; late fourth century BCE (Archaeological Museum of Vergina; photograph M. Harrsch)
Wikimedia CommonsSilver and gold oinochoe from the Kazanlăk Tomb in Thrace (after Zhivkova 1975, pl. 9)
Plutarch gives much the same impression as Diodoros. The procession again starts with a herd of sacrificial oxen, followed by objects associated with court feasting and the practice of gift distribution, the royal regalia, and finally the royal family
There followed […] those who displayed the bowls known as Antigonids and Seleukids and Therakleian together with all the gold plate of Perseus’ table. These were followed by the chariot of Perseus, which bore his arms, and his diadem lying upon his arms. Then, at a little interval, came the children of the king, led along as slaves, and with them a throng of foster-parents, teachers, and tutors, all in tears, stretching out their own hands to the spectators and teaching the children to beg and supplicate.60
Then came Perseus himself, walking on foot: stripped of his weapons and regalia. He wore a dark robe and soldiers’ boots (krepides) in Plutarch’s account, and is led in chains in Livy’s.61 As in Diodoros’ account, cited above, the king was followed by his philoi (courtiers) and ‘intimates’ (
There followed 400 gold crowns (
In Paullus’ triumph, valuable furniture and tableware from the Hellenistic royal courts entered Rome as war booty for the first but certainly not the last time. Roman authors sometimes retrospectively framed these objects as expressions of ‘eastern’ luxury. But for Hellenistic kings and their entourages these objects had a very practical function: they had a role to play in the ritualized feasting and associated gift distribution that was central to the court’s function as a place where political power was constructed, negotiated, and distributed.
In addition, the ostentatious display of luxury and wealth in Hellenistic royal processions had the purpose of showing the infinite wealth of kings,68 and thereby assure onlookers of their ability to protect and take care of their subjects. Hellenistic royal pageantry never concealed the violent foundations of imperialism but rather sublimated these to ceremonial displays of the king’s victoriousness, and the wealth gained through conquest (to paraphrase Brilliant’s assessment of the Roman triumph).69 From this perspective, it was not just weapons and wealth that the Romans took: they appropriated the very instruments of Hellenistic imperialism.
4 Historical Analysis
When the objects associated with the Antigonid court and monarchy were brought into Rome, Rome was already fully entangled in a wider, ‘globalizing’ Hellenistic world. Hellenistic objects like the ones described by Diodoros and Plutarch had been part of Rome’s objectscape from the early third century.70 They had entered as gifts or as booty from earlier campaigns in Greece and the Aegean,71 or had been purchased through trade. If Macedonian court objects were on display in elite circles, they probably were not thought of as ‘Macedonian’ and foreign in the first place, but associated with the individuals or families that they originated from, symbolizing (in the case of gifts) the personal ties between them and Roman families.72 Indeed, Philip V and Perseus themselves are known to have maintained xenia bonds with Roman patrician families, bonds that required the exchange of material gifts.73 Perseus had repeatedly sent envoys to Rome, which would have involved the distribution of gifts, too; it is also highly unlikely that Roman envoys who visited the courts of Philip V and Perseus returned empty-handed. To be sure, Roman elite members also maintained bonds with members of the Seleukid and Ptolemaic dynasties and their courts. Objects that had previously entered Rome as booty moreover were selectively on display in temples and other public places such as the Forum Romanum.74 And as Roman armies had on earlier occasions defeated Hellenistic kings’ armies and taken booty from them, the military objects shown in Paullus’ triumph were not new, either. To appreciate the special significance of Paullus’ triumph, it should however be remembered that this was the first time that a person of royal status had been brought into Rome as a captive: Perseus, the last heir of the basileia of Philip II and Alexander.
Plutarch, as we have seen, emphasized the exchange of roles between Perseus and Paullus. Though the topos of Perseus’ role reversal from king to nobody is implicit in Diodoros and Livy as well, the opposition between on the one hand the haughty and overconfident Macedonian king, and the modest, restrained Roman consul on the other, is a key component in Plutarch’s Life of Aemilius Paullus.75 Paullus enters Rome in regal style on board the Antigonid royal galley and in his triumph is dressed in the purple and gold normally associated with Hellenistic kingship. The use of this topos as a literary device by Plutarch and others, of course was permitted by the triumphator’s traditional role as king-for-a-day, a ritual revival of the traditional Roman rex.76 But the role reversal is perhaps best illustrated by Plutarch’s account of Paullus’ visit to the sanctuary of Delphi, where he saw a monument in front of the temple of Apollo bearing a statue of Perseus, and decided to transform it into a monument for himself, celebrating his victory over Perseus in the Battle of Pydna, ‘for it was appropriate for the conquered to make way for the conquerors’.77
While many of the Macedonian court objects in Paullus’ triumphal procession originally symbolized royalty and empire, they now became symbols of defeat and submission, corresponding to the phase of ‘transformation’ in Hahn’s four-phase model. The captured objects and bodies indicated also a wider form of appropriation: the appropriation of Hellenistic royal pageantry and imperial ideology. A century earlier, the Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphos had put the world on a stage and thereby marked Alexandria as the symbolic center of a world empire.78 Claiming world rule may not yet have been the main message of Paullus’ procession, but soon enough the ritual of triumphus would acquire precisely that function.79 What had already been achieved by Paullus’ time, however, was the Roman adoption of the Hellenistic kings’ role as benefactors and protectors of cities, bestowing upon them eleutheria and autonomia – a role played with verve by Flamininus at the Isthmian Games of 196 and by Paullus at Amphipolis in 167. The triumphus of Aemilius Paullus could therefore be reconstructed by later generations as a key moment in the transition of world empire from the Macedonians to the Romans.
The idea that history is a succession of empires, each one characterized by a similar development of rise, apex, and decline, until the establishment of a final golden age of eternal empire was a key concept in the ideology of the Hellenistic empires.80 Having influenced the development of Roman imperial ideology in the later Republic, Hellenistic concepts of empire return as, e.g., imperium sine fine and pax Romana in the Augustan Age.81 The notion of translatio imperii serves as an ordering historiographical principle in Diodoros’ world history,82 as well as other Augustan-era world historians such as Trogus and Velleius Paterculus.83 Though the concept is not very present in Livy, that Roman author interestingly traces the rise of Rome to world dominance through a succession of increasingly magnificent triumphal entries of Rome’s returning generals and armies.84
This is more than literary construction from hindsight. As Edmondson has argued, it was most of all in the period of the Roman-Macedonian wars that in the eastern Mediterranean military conflict intensified cultural competition among empires.85 Paullus’ triumph of 167 BCE may thus be seen as a key moment in the development of Rome’s assumption of an imperial mantle, for it was not long afterwards that Polybios famously declared that Rome had become the supreme power that had united the entire world.86 It is very unfortunate indeed that Polybios’ account of the triumph has been lost.
Paullus’ triumph, as we have seen, emphasized the ethnic diversity of the defeated enemy. In the next century, the triumphs celebrated by, successively, Pompey, Caesar, and Octavian, all heralded the conquest of the world by displaying objects associated with specific vanquished peoples, or with the three continents Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the oikoumene in general.87 This clearly was a borrowing from the Hellenistic empires that the Romans had conquered.88 But the spoils thus presented, and then permanently displayed on the inside or outside of temples, not only signaled the subjugation of foreign peoples, but also their incorporation into the Roman Empire. At Paullus’ funeral, representatives of the peoples he had conquered came to Rome voluntarily to pay their respect, and reportedly even carried his bier, calling him their benefactor.89
5 Conclusion
This contribution has discussed the Antigonid spoils that were publicly brought into Rome during Paullus’ triumph in 167 BCE. These objects could be subdivided into six categories – arms and armor; gold and silver; votive gifts and sacrificial animals; court objects; regalia; and captives – but for convenience were discussed in two parts: weaponry and objects associated with the court.
Diodoros’ account of arms and armor carried in the procession at first sight seems a dull enumeration. But on closer inspection, it can be shown that the presentation of the military spoils was deliberately arranged to convey specific messages. The emphasis that is placed in the triumph on Perseus’ barbarian allies and his outwardly magnificent guard troops present him as an excessively extravagant barbaric king. We may now connect this to this volume’s overall objective, and raise the question whether H.P. Hahn’s four phases of appropriation – material appropriation, objectification, incorporation, transformation – are applicable to the material discussed in this paper.90
There is no direct trajectory of transfer from Macedonia and Greece to Rome, as the Roman appropriation and objectification of Antigonid weaponry and court objects started in Greece itself with Paullus’ festival in Amphipolis and his dedication of part of the spoils in Olympia and Delphi. Here Paullus appropriated most of all a role: the role of a Hellenistic military leader showing his victoriousness and thus his ability to protect the Greek cities. In Rome itself the objects associated with Hellenistic monarchy and empire underwent a change of meaning in that they were transformed from symbols of power into symbols of powerlessness, as they now were used deliberately to evoke the downfall of the Antigonids (what Hahn calls ‘objectification’). As such they were incorporated into the Roman context as booty. But the principal appropriation was of an ideological nature: the translation of empire by right of victory from the Macedonians to the Romans – a translation that centuries later Plutarch from hindsight would describe as ‘the glory of Alexander and Philip made spoil by Roman arms’.91
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Plu. Aem. 31.3:
See e.g. Hahn 2004, and Versluys, this volume.
Rome’s war was with Perseus, not with Macedonia (the country of Macedonia was not a political entity).
For the location of the battlefield, see now Morelli 2021. On the war, see Derow 2003: 67–69; Burton 2017. The Kingdom of the Macedonians was eventually replaced by four republics but the Romans at this stage did not attempt to control Macedonia directly (Gruen 1982); on Macedonia after the fall of the kingdom, see Daubner 2018.
See below.
See Östenberg 2009: 284n.109: the Fasti Triumphales Capitolini list an earlier triumph over the Ligurians (in 181 BCE), while a memorial inscription declares that Paullus triumphed three times (ILLRP 13:3, no. 71b, 50–1). The third triumph may relate to his victory over the Lusitanians as praetor or propraetor in 190–189, cf. Vell. 1.9.3; see however Beard 2007: 79–80, doubting the historicity of a third triumph (a view earlier expressed by Ridley 1983: 375).
For a literary-linguistic analysis of these texts, see the contribution by Michel Buijs to this volume.
More on the disparities in style and literary quality in the chapter of Buijs.
The fragmentarily preserved book 30 is dedicated to the 153rd Olympiad (168/167–165/ 164 BCE). As Paullus is the principal protagonist of books 29–30, and book 30 contained detailed descriptions of the victory celebrations organized by L. Anicius (30.22.1–12) as well as the festival of Antiochos IV in Daphne, held in competition with Paullus’ Amphipolis festival (30.25.1–26) – both passages are preserved incompletely in Athenaios’ Deipnosophistai – Polybian accounts of Paullus’ Amphipolis festival and his triumphus in Rome likely existed (see the useful outline of the Histories in McGing 2010: 223–239, esp. 237–238). On the Amphipolis festival, briefly described by Livy, see below.
See Taylor 2016.
For the ritualistic origins and religious meanings of the triumph, Versnel 1970 remains the essential study; see also the contribution by Versluys to this volume. Östenberg 2009 illuminates the political messages conveyed by triumphs in the light of developing imperial ideology in the later Republic. Beard 2007 is critical of the veracity of the sources that modern interpretations of the triumph are based upon. Itgenshorst 2005, too, focuses on the historiographical context of triumph narratives.
Strootman 2013 and 2018.
Kallixeinos of Rhodes, FHG III 58 apud Athenaios 5. 197c–203b; Dunand 1981: 21–26; Rice 1983; Moevs 1993; Hazzard 2000; Thompson 2000.
Strootman 2014a: 247–263.
Hölbl 2001: 289–293.
Strootman 2018.
Liv. 45.33.5. Amphipolis – a well-connected port city and a major Aegean contact zone – had strong bonds with the kingdom of the Macedonians (as is confirmed by the recent excavation of a rich Macedonian tomb in its vicinity), and harbored a temple of Artemis that was one of the sanctuaries singled out in Alexander’s posthumous hypomnemata for major investments, next to such sites as Delphi and Delos (D.S. 18.4.4–5); on Amphipolis’ association with the Macedonian kings, see Mari 2018.
Liv. 45.33.3–7; transl. Chaplin. The ‘Roman’ games at Amphipolis provoked the celebration of a rival festival by Antiochus IV at Daphne in Syria, where Seleukid claims to world empire were emphasized (Plb. 30.25.1/31.3.1; on the ideological significance of the Daphne festival, see Strootman 2019).
Liv. 33.1.
Plu. Aem. 30.1; transl. Perrin, with adjustments.
Rose 2020. Demetrios I’s sixteen, built between 306 and 301, is described as an innovation by Plu. Demetr. 43.4–5. On the military use of big battleships in the Diadoch period, see Murray 2012: 142–170. It is possible however that this very big ship with its purple sails was built for ceremonial purposes, viz., for the ritual entries of the king into Aegean harbors (as is suggested by Plu. Demetr. 53.1–3; cf. Ant. 26.1–3).
Liv. 45.42.12; cf. Plb. 36.5.8, mentioning a ‘dockyard of the sixteen’ (
That the Romans were at war with Perseus rather than with ‘Macedonia’ is stressed by Livy particularly in books 41 and 42, in which the causes of the Third Macedonian War are related (see e.g., 41.23.10 and 42.45.2, cf. 45.8.1). As already noted by Bickerman 1945, the preceding Second Macedonian War likewise was called ‘Macedonian’ only in retrospect: the contemporary Roman name was the War with Philip (V), Bellum Philippicum (e.g., Fasti Capit., CIL. I, p. 25; cf. Plb. 3.32.7) or Bellum cum rege Philippo (e.g., Ennius, Annal. 327 V; cf. Liv. 31.5.1).
Discussing the exploits of Perseus’ predecessor, Philip V, Polybios never calls him the king of Macedonia but repeatedly speaks of ‘[King] Philip and the Macedonians’ (e.g., Plb. 4.16.5 and 4.34.10) or ‘the Macedonians […] and their king’ (4.22.10). This is reminiscent of the title ‘King of the Macedonians’ (
On the exchanges between imperial courts in the Hellenistic world, see Strootman 2014a.
Like the Antigonids, the Seleukids and Ptolemies, too, usually self-identified as Macedonians – not as ‘Egyptians’ or ‘Syrians’.
Stavrianopoulou 2014: 350; cf. Versluys in this volume.
Plu. Aem. 32.1.
See Buijs, this volume.
Beard 2007: 102, rightly believes the figure of 2,400 carts to be ‘wildly exaggerated’.
Sekunda 2013: 108–127.
Liv. 42.51.3–11.
Plb. 2.65.2–4.
Liv. 42.51.3; cf. 42.6.9, where it is said that 8,000 Macedonians were slaughtered in the aftermath of the battle and 2,800 captured alive (the remainder presumably escaped). Sekunda 2013: 96 assumes that the 20,000+ phalangites were all Chalkaspides.
Plb. 4.67.6 (on Philip V’s army).
J. AJ 12.9.4 (372); Plu. Sull. 16.327 and 19.2.
In the Seleukid army, the principal elite phalanx consisted of an even more prestigious royal infantry guard, the Argyraspides (Silver Shields), a legacy from the army of Alexander; see Bar-Kochva 1976: 58–66. The Antigonid army did not comprise any Argyraspides. On Antigonid heavy infantry, see Juhel 2017: 94–160.
Archaeological evidence shows that the shields used by Antigonid phalangites had a wooden core covered with a thin plate of bronze, with a diameter of c.74 cm. These shields were smaller and lighter than the shields used by Greek hoplites; see Pandermalis 2000; Sekunda 2013: 82–83 with n.7.
Liampi 1998. The decorations on the shields tended to change with each new issue, stressing the close association between the army and the reigning king; Sekunda 2013: 85–87 traces the development of decorative designs on the phalanx shields issued by the dynasty; some infantry shields were decorated with portraits of the king or the initials of the king’s name.
Kähler 1965: pl. 7 and 22.
CIL I2 622 = ILLRP 323 = ILS 884. Note that the inscription is in Latin: an interesting (and innovative) act of implanting Roman imperial presence on the Greek landscape.
Waterfield 2008: 447.
For the identification of the units on these reliefs, see Taylor 2016, citing earlier interpretations in n.11 on p. 561.
Strootman 2014a: 203–209.
Crawford RRC no. 415; I owe this information to Yuri Kuzmin. On (purple) kausiai as aristocratic and royal headdresses, see Strootman 2014a: 203–209.
D.S. 31.8.10; the organization of the Antigonid army at Pydna is given in Liv. 41.51.1–11.
D.S. 31.8.10.
Plu. Aem. 32.3. Archery could be seen as barbaric and unmanly, and was sometimes associated by Greeks and Romans with an alleged ‘eastern’ way of war.
Plu. Aem. 32.3; transl. Waterfield.
Compare Plutarch’s remark about the false impression of fearfulness disseminated by the arms on display in Paullus’ triumph: ‘they smote against each other as they were borne along and gave out a harsh and dreadful sound, and the sight of them, even though they were spoils of a conquered enemy, was not without its terrors’ (Aem. 32.4; transl. Perrin).
D.S. 31.8.11.
Plu. Aem. 32.5.
Plu. Aem. 33.2.
Liv. 45.40, citing Valerius Antias.
Cf. Liv. 45.40.2: ‘All this money had been accumulated during the thirty years from the close of the war with Philip [V] (in 197 BCE) either as profits from the mines or from other sources of revenue, so that while Philip was very short of money, Perseus was able to commence his war with Rome with an overflowing treasury.’
Plu. Aem. 32.5. The remainder of this paragraph is based on Strootman 2014a: 152–159.
See e.g. Lys. 19.25; IG 22 141 = Tod 139.
The Achaemenid kings had used the distribution of tableware to a similar effect, which accounts for the wide distribution of luxury drinking cups and horns throughout central and western Eurasia (Bivar 1999; Ebbinghaus 2010; Kistler 2010). For a reflection of this use in Herodotus, see De Jong’s chapter in this volume.
D.S. 31.8.12; transl. Walton.
Plu. Aem. 33.1–3. The ‘foster-parents, teachers, and tutors’ (
Plu. Aem. 34.1; Liv. 45.40.6.
Plu. Aem. 34.1; in Liv. 45.40.6, the king more dramatically walks immediately in front of Paullus’ chariot.
Liv. 45.32.3–6. Daubner 2018: 122 estimates that a total of around 2,000 people were deported from Macedonia. The Achaian League was an ally of Perseus during the war, and around a thousand high-ranking Achaians, including Polybios, were also brought to Italy (Plb. 32.5.7; Liv. 45.34.9, 45.35.2).
Kuzmin 2011 and 2017; see also Kuzmin 2021: 609–610, on the discontinuity of burials in the so-called Tomb of Lyson and Kallikles in Lefkadia.
Plu. Aem. 34.3; see Versnel 1970: 384–396.
Liv. 45.40.6.
Plu. Aem. 34.4.
Stavrianopoulou 2014: 356.
Brilliant 1999: 222.
See generally Gruen 1992; for an alternative view, see McDonnell 2006.
In particular the Second Macedonian War against Philip V (200–197) and the Roman- Seleukid War of 191–188.
See Plu. Aem. 28.7, where Paullus gifts his son-in-law Aelius Tubero ‘a (silver) phiale of five pounds weight’ taken from the royal treasury.
Liv. 42.38.8.
Östenberg 2009: 19–20, with the references in notes 6–10.
Waterfield 2008: 38–39, pointing out the relevant passages.
See Versnel 1970: 393–396; the consuls’ significance as the ‘leading actors’ in key events of the Roman year is discussed by Hölkeskamp 2011.
Plu. Aem. 28.2. On Paullus’ travels through Greece, see Russell 2012.
On Alexandria as an imperial cosmopolis, see Strootman 2011.
Östenberg 2009: 262–292.
Strootman 2014b; Kosmin 2018.
Verg. A. 1.279; cf. 6.791–797; Ecl. 4.5–9; Res Gestae 13, 25 and 26. On imperial ideology in Virgil, see e.g., Hardie 1986; the ideology of abundance is also expressed on the Ara Pacis (see Castriota 1995).
Stronk 2016: 535.
Van Wickevoort Crommelin 1993: 223–227; Gotter 2019; pace Hofmann 2018: 165–222.
Miles 2014: 181.
Edmondson 1999: 86–88.
Plb. 1.1.5; cf. Miles 2014, emphasizing how with Paullus’ triumphus, triumphs became occasions for the development of new visual display documenting the Republic’s ventures abroad.
Östenberg 2009: 285–287, pointing out that Pompey and Octavian each celebrated three triumphs that were associated with the three continents; Caesar during his career as a warmaker celebrated a total of five triumphs.
On the Late Republican triumph as an announcement of world conquest, see Östenberg 2009: 283–292, who sees no such universalistic messages in Paullus’ triumph, and assumes that these were introduced a century later by Pompey. Gisborne 2005, however, argues that Hellenistic royal imagery was first adopted in the Roman triumph by Sulla; Itgenshorst 2005: 219–226, on the other hand, argues that it was only with Augustus that the Roman triumph was transformed into a grand celebration of monarchy and empire. See also Versnel 1970: 384–396, arguing that the earliest triumphs in Archaic Rome had already been influenced by the Hellenistic kings’ emulation of Dionysos as ‘bringer of good fortune’.
Plu. Comp. Tim. Aem. 39.8–9; V. Max. 11.10.3.
Summarized, with bibliography, by Versluys, this volume.
See above, note 1. In due time, Roman imperial ideology would downplay the influence that Hellenistic kingship had on Roman imperial ideology and claim direct succession from Alexander III, whom the Romans called ‘the Great’; see Bichler 2016.