Aulus Cossus and the Spolia Opima, 437 BC (ROM0268)

Aulus Cossus and the spolia opima, 437 BC

Three times in the whole of Roman history a commander killed an enemy commander in single combat and carried off his armour to dedicate it in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. The offering was called the spolia opima. Romulus was the first, Marcellus the last, and between them stands Aulus Cornelius Cossus, who in 437 BC cut down Lars Tolumnius, king of Veii, during the fighting at Fidenae.

An honour that almost nobody could win

The conditions were strict enough to make the prize nearly unobtainable: the man who struck the blow had to be the Roman commander holding his own auspices, and the man who fell had to be the enemy commander. That excludes every officer acting under someone else’s authority — which is to say, in a mature Roman army, almost everybody. Three cases in seven centuries is not an accident of record-keeping. It is the design.

Fidenae, 437 BC

Fidenae had gone over to Veii, and the envoys Rome sent to ask why were killed. In the campaign that followed Cossus, a military tribune, saw Tolumnius conspicuous in the fighting, rode him down, unhorsed him and killed him. Livy tells the encounter in detail — the spear, the fall, the stripping of the body — and this plate reconstructs it with the equipment of early fifth-century Latium, an age still closer to Etruscan practice than to the legions Rome would later build.

The problem with the linen corslet

Then Livy admits a difficulty. The corslet dedicated with the spoils carried an inscription naming Cossus as consul, not military tribune, which does not fit the year of the battle. The discrepancy would be a footnote if it had not been produced by Augustus himself, who said he had read the inscription in the restored temple.

Why an emperor cared about a piece of linen

Because in 29 BC Marcus Licinius Crassus, campaigning in the Balkans, had killed an enemy king in single combat and wanted to dedicate the spolia opima — and Augustus had no intention of letting anyone else claim the third-rarest honour in Rome. The rule that only a commander under his own auspices qualified was decisive, and so was the evidence of what Cossus had been when he won it. It is a rare case where an archaeological object, a legal argument and a political need all arrive at the same moment, and the historian tells us so.