The Roman Triumph and the Arch of Constantine
by Marco Manuel
Today we met at Trajan’s Forum and then made the trek over to the Arch of Constantine where Matt told us about the Roman Triumph and the Arch of Constantine. The Roman Triumphs were the celebrations of Rome’s victories over their enemies for various conflicts and wars. A triumph was usually held in the honor of a specific general or emperor (magistrate) who led the campaign. It was a senate sanctioned event. Upon returning to Rome the general and or emperor would be honored and celebrated with a long parade like procession that would last all a day. Usually commemorative monuments would often be built in honor and remembrance of the military victory, often times in the form of an Arch such as the Arches of Severus, Titus, and the largest, Constantine. These monuments and processions would show that the military campaigns were not in vain and would propagate a message of success and accomplishment that demonstrated the war was all worth it and really not that bad.
The Arch of Constantine specifically is interesting in that it was built ten years after his return to Rome and that his Arch steals/borrows portions from other pieces of architecture at the time. This arch contains rather large friezes from works dedicated to Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius and a relatively smaller portion of the arch depicts Constantine’s campaign. The smaller rectangular pieces above the small arches are depictions and the two round pieces on the East and West ends are depictions of Constantine.
After Matt’s presentation we took a spontaneous trip up the hill behind il Colosseo to La Chiesa dei Quattro Corinati. This was actually a really cool excursion and despite the misleadingly longer walk up hill than anticipated it was worth the hike because we were able to see the Cloister of the church and a chapel which had some frescos about Constantine’s legendary conversion to Christianity as told by the Christians that we had discussed in Mary’s history class a few days before.
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