Figure 7:
Soldiers in the triumphal entry of Henri II into Rouen in 1550. As in some Ro-
man triumphs, they carry models of forts captured by the victorious army. Enthusiastic accounts of the procession held these models to be so accurate that the places were “easily recognizable” to the participants in the various battles.
a notable range of different representations of both the processes and the
profits of victory (the placards detailing the money gained and the peo-
ples conquered, the paintings capturing details of Mithradates’ defeat,
the trophy of the whole world). The triumph, in other words, re-pre-
sented and re-enacted the victory. It brought the margins of the Empire
to its center, and in so doing celebrated the new geopolitics that victory
had brought about.
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
33
This is what Pompey himself suggested in a famous quip he is sup-
posed to have uttered before his triumph, at an assembly at which he
detailed his successes to the Roman people: “The very pinnacle of his
glory, as he himself said, was to have found Asia a frontier province and
to have left it at the very center of the state (mediam patriae). ” This was more than showy rhetorical exaggeration. It was a clever play on words;
for as a proper noun, Media means the “country of the Medes,” and so a
part of Asia (“he turned Asia into Media . . . ”). It was also, surely, a
knowing allusion to the nature of Roman victory itself and to its repre-
sentation in the triumph; for Asia did indeed come to the very heart of
Rome.67
Almost equally clear is the fact that the glory of the triumph was
bound up in the rivalry and competition of Roman republican politics.
Each individual ceremony was a celebration in its own right, of course;
it reflected the particularities of an individual campaign and an individ-
ual moment of politics. But, long before the first century bce, it was also
part of the history of the triumph, to be judged against, to upstage or be
upstaged by, the triumphs of predecessors and rivals. True, the hot-
house competitiveness of Roman political life may have been over-em-
phasized by modern scholars; among the hundreds of triumphs cele-
brated through the Republic, many must have been modest occasions
where the victorious general was entirely content with a few cart-loads
of spoils and the regulation plaudits. All the same, this ceremony—as al-
most every other Roman institution—could hardly have escaped being
implicated in the struggles for supremacy between the great dynasts of
the first century. It was certainly written up in these terms by ancient
commentators. Hence the repeated rhetoric of innovation and inflation,
the stress on triumphs which were bigger and better than those that had
gone before or which launched new forms of display. In Pompey’s case
we have already noted the emphasis on the unprecedented size of the
profits and the vast quantity of booty, as well as on the elephants (who
for the first time, albeit unsuccessfully, pulled the triumphal chariot)
and on the novelty of treating exotic trees as spoils of war.
The sense of direct triumphal rivalry is most vividly captured by the
story of his relations with Metellus Creticus, who was also scoring victo-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
3 4
ries over the pirates that threatened to upstage Pompey’s own. In telling
how Pompey stole two of Metellus’ prize captives to adorn his own tri-
umph, Dio prompts us to reflect on how triumphal glory is achieved
and calibrated, and on the fact that in the celebration of victory even
the successful general can be a loser as well as a winner. Plutarch goes
further, claiming that Pompey sent his own men to fight on the pi-
rates’ side against Metellus. Resorting to an extravagant comparison
with the traditional stories of Greek myth, Plutarch suggested that this
was an even more flagrant piece of glory-hunting than that of Achilles in
Homer’s Iliad, who prevented his comrades from attacking his enemy,
Hector, so that no one else should have the honor of the first blow.
Pompey “actually fought on behalf of enemies of the state and saved
their lives, in order to rob of a triumph a general who had worked hard
to achieve it.”68
Losers in the race for triumphal glory, however, were not only those
who were upstaged by their rivals in the lavishness of the spectacle they
could provide. One of the most important lessons of Pompey’s tri-
umphs (and one to which I shall return several times) is the risk and
the danger attached even—or especially—to the most spectacular of cel-
ebrations. Not far under the surface of that image of self-confident
success usually associated with the triumphing general in most modern
writing (“his greatest moment of glory ever”) is the specter of failure and
humiliation.69
It was not just a question of things going wrong, although that must
have been a frequent enough event in even the best-planned ceremo-
nial. Pompey’s discomfiture with the elephants was more than matched
by Caesar’s, when the axle of his chariot broke during the first of his se-
ries of triumphs in 46 bce, ironically enough in front of a Temple of
Felicitas (Good Fortune). Caesar was almost toppled out and had to
wait for a replacement.70 Nor was it primarily a matter of the predictable
sneers of rivals and friends. Sneers and strident satire have always been
an occupational hazard of the successful, and are a fairly reliable marker
of celebrity renown. A much more significant concern in ancient writing
on the triumph is the underlying problem of glory and its representa-
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
35
tions. Did the panoply of triumphal display on the scale launched by
Pompey necessarily risk overplaying its hand? Was true glory to be mea-
sured in terms of luxury or of restraint? Did the pomp and circumstance
invite retribution as well as admiration? In the fullness of time, would
the triumph be remembered as the general’s finest hour or the presage of
his fall?
For Pliny, one notorious object carried in the procession of 61 pro-
voked reflections of this type: the portrait head of Pompey himself made
out of pearls. “That portrait, that portrait was, I repeat, made out of
pearls,” he carped, in full tirade. “This was the defeat of austerity and
the triumph, let’s face it, of luxury. Never, believe me, would he have
been able to keep his title ‘Magnus’ (‘The Great’) among the heroes of
that earlier generation if he had celebrated a triumph like this after his
first victory. To think, Magnus, that it was out of pearls that your fea-
tures were fashioned—things you would never have been allowed to
wear, such an extravagant material, and meant for women. Was that
how you made yourself seem valuable?”
But this portrait was not for Pliny simply a symbol of Pompey’s ex-
travagant effeminization. There was a yet nastier implication, which he
goes on (gleefully, one feels) to insinuate. “It was, believe me, a gross and
offensive disgrace, except that the head on display without the rest of his
body, in all its eastern splendor, ought really to have been taken as a
cruel omen of divine anger; its meaning could easily have been worked
out.” Or, at least, it could have been with hindsight. For Pliny is refer-
ring to Pompey’s murder on the shores of Egypt, where he had fled after
his defeat by Caesar’s forces at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 bce. Decap-