itated by a treacherous welcoming party, his head “without the rest of his
body” was eventually presented to Caesar, who reputedly wept (croco-
dile tears?) at the sight. The head of pearls in his greatest triumphal pro-
cession already presaged Pompey’s humiliating end.71
Other ancient writers also drew an unsettling connection between
Pompey’s death and his moments of triumphal glory. Lucan’s mag-
nificently subversive epic on the civil war between Pompey and Caesar,
the Pharsalia, written a hundred years later during the reign of Nero
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(and with a cynical eye on the imperial autocracy that stemmed from
Pompey’s defeat), repeatedly plays on ideas of triumph. Its opening
verses herald the subject of the poem as “wars that will win no tri-
umphs,” an oxymoron pointing to the illegitimacy of the civil conflict
that is Lucan’s theme.72 Throughout, Pompey himself is both defined
and dogged by his triumphal career. The “Fortune” who brought him
victory over the pirates has abandoned him, because she is “exhausted by
his triumphs.”73 And after his humiliating death, what is burnt on the
funeral pyre by his widow is not his body at all but his weapons and
clothes, in particular his “triumphal togas” and “the robes thrice seen by
Jupiter supreme.”
Lucan seems to be hinting not only at the close identification of
Pompey with his triumphs (to cremate Pompey is also to cremate his tri-
umphs), but also—as Cicero once saw it—at his solipsistic obsession
with the superficial trappings of triumphal glory (to cremate Pompey is
only to cremate this fancy dress).74 The most pointed scene, however, oc-
curs in his camp on the night before the disastrous battle of Pharsalus it-
self, when Pompey dreams that he has returned to Rome: he is sitting in
his own theater—his triumphal monument—and is being applauded to
the skies by the Roman people; this, in turn, takes him back to the cele-
bration of his first triumph and to the applause of the senate and people
on that occasion. Once again the triumph (or its memory) accompanies
and directly presages defeat.75
There is a final uncanny twist. As Dio emphasizes, Pompey was mur-
dered “on the very same day as he had once celebrated his triumph over
Mithradates and the pirates”; or, in Velleius’ formulation, “in his fifty-
eighth year, on the eve of his birthday.” In Roman cultural memory
Pompey’s whole life—his death no less than his birth—was tied to his
moment of triumph.76
THE TRIUMPH OF WRITING
Pompey’s triumph of 61 was one of the most memorable—or, at least,
the most remembered and, for us, the best documented—in the whole
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
37
history of Rome. For all the undoubted importance of the memorials in
marble, bronze, and gold, it was writing, more than anything else, that
inscribed the occasion in Roman memory; it was recalled, rethought,
and resignified through the tales in Pompey’s biographers, the poetic
imagination of Lucan, the sometimes grinding narratives of ancient
historians, the encyclopedic curiosity (and moralizing fervor) of the
elder Pliny, and more.77 These are the accounts that underlie the story
of Pompey’s triumph told in this chapter. Yet even the least suspicious
of readers must by now have felt a few reservations about just how
plausible some of the descriptions are. Did the procession really feature
such extravagant quantities of precious metals as we read? A statue of
Mithradates eight cubits high (that is some three and a half meters) in
solid gold? Do the figures for cash acquired, captives on parade, or en-
emy defeated (more than 12 million, according to the dedication to Mi-
nerva that Pliny quotes) make any sense? Has not a good deal of exag-
geration, or wishful thinking, crept into these ancient accounts, and so
too into our own story of the triumph? After all, Appian himself was
skeptical enough to sound a warning note about that unlikely story of
Alexander’s cloak.
There are obvious reasons for being suspicious. For a start—with the
exception of Cicero’s sarcasm on the inauguration of Pompey’s theater—
not one of the surviving ancient accounts is from the pen of an eyewit-
ness to the ceremonies; and the fullest descriptions of the triumph it-
self were written at least a century (and in Dio’s case almost three centu-
ries) later. They are almost bound to be, in part at least, the product
of years of anecdote, hyperbole, and popular myth-making, of later
reformulations of Pompey’s image and importance, and of their authors’
experience of triumphal ceremonies in their own day, projected back—
even if indirectly—onto the parade of 61 bce. Of course, some good
“primary” evidence, even archival records, may lie behind some of these
accounts, but that is harder to pin down than we might imagine.
We can be fairly certain that Plutarch’s bibliography included the
(now lost) account of the Mithradatic wars by Pompey’s own tame his-
torian, Theophanes of Mytilene, and that Appian made use of the his-
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3 8
tories of Pompey’s contemporary Asinius Pollio. But we do not know
whether either of these men were present at the triumph of 61 or
whether they included a description of it in their books; and even if they
did, we could not be sure that the triumphal details in Plutarch and
Appian were drawn directly from them.78 Besides, there is also the ques-
tion of the intellectual and ideological agenda of the ancient writers.
Pliny, for example, was not setting out to offer a historical description of
Pompey’s triumph. His various references to the ceremony all serve quite
different aims, whether to exemplify the consequences of excess, the
characteristics of extraordinary human beings, or the history and use of
ebony. This will inevitably have affected the selection and adaptation of
the material at his disposal.
Scratch the surface of the surviving ancient accounts and all kinds of
particular difficulties emerge. Sometimes we find awkward inconsisten-
cies between writers. It was reassuring to note that Pliny and Plutarch
both offer a list of fourteen peoples conquered by Pompey. It was reas-
suring, too, to be able to match this figure to the number of statues of
the nationes who formed that notable group of sculpture in Pompey’s
theater. Far less reassuring is the fact that the names of the countries
cited are significantly different in each case, that they do not exactly
match any other list we have of Pompey’s conquests, fourteen or not,
and that we have no reliable way now of establishing which peoples were
officially the object of Pompey’s triumph.79
Sometimes it is a matter of detecting clear hints of literary embel-
lishment and invention. So, for example, when Appian reports that
Mithradates’ reason for suicide was his desire not to appear in Pompey’s
triumphal procession, we can be almost certain that he is not relying on
any evidence for the king’s motives but exploiting what was by then a
well-known cliché of the triumph (seen most famously in the story of
the suicide of Cleopatra) that foreign rulers would do anything rather
than suffer the humiliation of a Roman triumph. Even the quotations
of, or from, various official documents are not necessarily quite what
they seem. We do not know whether the ancient writers saw and tran-