The Triumphator's Prayers: Towards a Reception History

Descriptions, depictions and of imitations of the Roman triumph were ubiquitous in the early modern period, beginning in the mid-fifteenth century. Accounts of the triumph (with the prayers) were given in dissertations, encyclopedias, surveys of antiquity, lexica and treatises, mostly written in Latin. Despite the considerable attention that has been paid to many facets of this topic, a curious detail has gone (almost) unnoticed: the prayers (taken as genuine for centuries) the triumphing general was supposed to have pronounced at the beginning and end of the ritual procession. Following the trail through erudite scholarship from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century I look into the prayers’s mysterious origins and highlight some less predictable instances of their re-use over the centuries. Particular attention will be paid to Book X of Biondo Flavio’s Roma triumphans (1459). This book is entirely devoted to the triumph and related topics, and initiated the scholarly study of the triumph, with its important legacy remaining to be fully traced.