triumph to Romulus' successor, the peaceful king Numa. The Republic Rome's aristocrats expelled their last king as a tyrant and legislated the monarchy out of existence. They shared among themselves the kingship's former powers and authority in the form of magistracies. In the Republic, the highest possible magistracy was an elected consulship, which could be held for no more than a year at a time. In times of crisis or emergency, the Senate might appoint a dictator to serve a longer term; but this could seem perilously close to the lifetime power of kings. The dictator Camillus was awarded four triumphs but was eventually exiled. Later Roman sources point to his triumph of 396 BCE as a cause for offense; the chariot was drawn by four white horses, a combination properly reserved for Jupiter and Apollo – at least in later lore and poetry. The demeanour of a triumphal Republican general, and the symbols he employed in his triumph, would have been closely scrutinised by his aristocratic peers, alert for any sign that he might aspire to be more than "king for a day". In the Middle to Late Republic, Rome's expansion through conquest offered her political-military adventurers extraordinary opportunities for self-publicity; the long-drawn series of wars between Rome and Carthage – the Punic Wars – produced twelve triumphs in ten years. Towards the end of the Republic, triumphs became still more frequent, lavish, and competitive, with each display an attempt (usually successful) to outdo the last. To have a triumphal ancestor – even one long-dead – counted for a lot in Roman society and politics, and Cicero remarked that, in the race for power and influence, some individuals were not above vesting an inconveniently ordinary ancestor with triumphal grandeur and dignity, distorting an already fragmentary and unreliable historical tradition. To Roman historians, the growth of triumphal ostentation undermined Rome's ancient "peasant virtues". Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE to after 7 BCE) claimed that the triumphs of his day had "departed in every respect from the ancient tradition of frugality". Moralists complained that successful foreign wars might have increased Rome's power, security, and wealth, but they also created and fed a degenerate appetite for bombastic display and shallow novelty. Livy traces the start of the rot to the triumph of Gnaeus Manlius Vulso in 186, which introduced ordinary Romans to such Galatian fripperies as specialist chefs, flute girls, and