VELABRUM | Romantriumph

Velabrum

The Triumph's Shortcut?

The Velabrum refers to the low valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills, crossed by the Vicus Tuscus along the foot of the Palatine. This area has become associated with the triumphal route thanks to a passage from Suetonius’ Life of Caesar, which describes an embarrassing mishap for the triumphing Julius: “"As he rode through (praetervehens) the Velabrum on the day of his Gallic triumph, the axle of his chariot broke, and he was all but thrown out." (Trans. J.C. Rolfe)

This colourful anecdote, perhaps surprisingly, has led to a lot of scholarly debate over the triumphal route. The first question modern historians must ask is whether Caesar was travelling north or south across the Velabrum. If it was north, then presumably Caesar would have continued to the Forum, and then skirted round to ascend the Capitoline - a considerably shorter route than expected. As this site’s map indicates, almost every scholar wishes to place the route in a circuit around the Palatine hill. Given our ancient references to triumphs passing through the city’s circuses, most tacitly assume that the procession must have passed through the Circus Maximus, and since our next point of reference is along the Via Sacra, this circuit makes sense.

Whether a scholar wishes to accept this northerly passage across the Velabrum therefore depends on how comfortable he or she is with the idea of a changeable triumphal route. Makin, for one, accepts the idea of a highly adaptable route, based on the whims of the individual triumphator. For her, it is unproblematic that Caesar might have opted for an abbreviated route, and Künzl would later agree with this assessment. Coarelli, on the other hand, is militantly against the idea that the triumph could change routes for anybody. Appealing to the trope of Roman religious conservatism, he instead fits Caesar’s triumph into the general plot by arguing that he was going southward, towards the Forum Boarium, where then he would have turned into the Circus Maximus. In order to fit in this southerly passage across the Velabrum, Coarelli argues that the triumph entered the city walls, then passed along the Vicus Iugarius that runs along the southeast foot of the Capitoline, meeting eventually with the Vicus Tuscus. Makin, incidentally, posed this as another possible route that triumphators might have taken.

Beard’s solution, by contrast, is philological. She takes issue with the usual translation of Suetonius’ Latin praetervehens, here rendered as ‘riding through’, citing that it is more commonly meant to convey ‘skirting’ or ‘going past’ (see Suetonius, Aug. 98,2; Cicero, Cael. 51). By this reading, Suetonius meant to say that Caesar was avoiding the Velabrum altogether, and as a consequence Beard prefers to place the conventional route straight through the Forum Boarium and into the Circus Maximus.