Pompey’s Finest Hour?
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[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 2:
Bronze vessel, late second–early first century bce. Originally a gift from King
Mithradates to a group of his own subjects (as an inscription around the neck records), it may have reached Italy as part of the spoils of Pompey—a solitary survivor of the treasures on display in his triumphal procession in 61?
The connection with Mithradates is proclaimed by an inscription
pricked out in Greek around the rim: “King Mithradates Eupator [gave
this] to the Eupatoristae of the gymnasium.” In other words, this was
a present from Mithradates to an association named after him
“Eupatoristae” (which could be anything from a drinking club to a
group involved in the religious cult of the king). It must originally have
come from some part of the Eastern Mediterranean where Mithradates
had power and influence, and it could have found its way to Antium by
any number of routes; but there is certainly a chance that it was one tiny
part of Pompey’s collection of booty. It offers a glimpse of what might
have been paraded before the gawping spectators in September 61.12
A triumph, however, was about more than costly treasure. Pliny, for
example, stresses the natural curiosities of the East on display. “Ever
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since the time of Pompey the Great,” he writes, “we have paraded even
trees in triumphal processions.” And he notes elsewhere that ebony—by
which he may well mean the tree, rather than just the wood—was one of
the exhibits in the Mithradatic triumph. Perhaps on display too was the
royal library, with its specialist collection of medical treatises; Pompey
was said to have been so impressed with this part of his booty that he
had one of his ex-slaves take on the task of translating it all into Latin.13
Many other items had symbolic rather than monetary value. Appian
writes of “countless wagonloads of weapons, and beaks of ships”; these
were the spoils taken directly from the field of conflict, all that now re-
mained of the pirate terror and Mithradates’ arsenal.14
Further proof of Pompey’s success was there for all to contemplate on
the placards carried in the procession (see Figs. 9 and 28). According to
Plutarch, they blazoned the names of all the nations over which he tri-
umphed (fourteen in all, plus the pirates), the number of fortresses, cit-
ies, and ships he had captured, the new cities he had founded, and the
amount of money his conquests had brought to Rome. Appian claims to
quote the text of one of these boasts; it ran, “Ships with bronze beaks
captured: 800. Cities founded: in Cappadocia 8; in Cilicia and Coele-
Syria 20; in Palestine, the city which is now Seleucis. Kings conquered:
Tigranes of Armenia, Artoces of Iberia, Oroezes of Albania, Darius of
Media, Aretas of Nabatea, Antiochus of Commagene.”15
No less an impact can have been made by the human participants in
the show: a “host of captives and pirates, not in chains but dressed up in
their native costume” and “the officers, children, and generals of the
kings he had fought.” Appian numbers these highest ranking prisoners
at 324 and lists some of the more famous and evocative names: “Tigranes
the son of Tigranes, the five sons of Mithradates, that is, Artaphernes,
Cyrus, Oxathres, Darius, and Xerxes, and his daughters, Orsabaris and
Eupatra.” For an ancient audience, this roll-call must have brought to
mind their yet more famous namesakes and any number of earlier con-
flicts with Persia and the East: the name of young Xerxes must have
evoked the fifth-century Persian king, best known for his (unsuccessful)
invasion of Greece; Artaphernes, a commander of the Persian forces at
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
13
the battle of Marathon. The names alone serve to insert Pompey into
the whole history of Western victory over Oriental “barbarity.”16
An impressive array of captives made for a splendid triumph. By some
clever talking, Pompey is said to have managed to get his hands on a
couple of notorious pirate chiefs who had actually been captured by one
of his Roman rivals, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus, who had been
hoping to show them off in his own triumphal parade. At a stroke,
Pompey had robbed Metellus’ triumph of two of its stars, while en-
hancing the line-up in his own.17 Even so, some of the defeated were
unavoidably absent. Tigranes père of Armenia, Mithradates’ partner in
crime, had had a lucky escape. Thanks to a well-timed surrender, he
was restored by Pompey as a puppet ruler on his old throne and did not
accompany his son to the triumph. (In the treacherous world of Ar-
menian politics, young Tigranes had actually sided with the Romans,
before disastrously quarreling with Pompey and ending up a prisoner.)
Mithradates himself was already dead. He was said to have forestalled
the humiliation of display in the triumph by his timely suicide; or rather
he had a soldier kill him, his long-term precautionary consumption of
antidotes having rendered poison useless.18
In place of Tigranes and Mithradates themselves, “images”— eikones
in Appian’s Greek—were put on display. Almost certainly paintings
(though three-dimensional models are known in other triumphs), these
were said to capture the crucial moments in the conflict between
Romans and their absent victims: the kings were shown “fighting, beaten
and running away . . . and finally there was a picture of how Mithradates
died and of the daughters who chose to die with him.” For Appian,
these images reached the very limits of realistic representation, depicting
not only the cut and thrust of battle and scenes of suicide but even, as he
notes at one point, “the silence” itself of the night on which Mithradates
fled. Thanks to triumphal painting of this type, art historians have often
imagined the triumph as one of the driving forces behind the “realism”
that is characteristic of many aspects of Roman art.19
Pompey himself loomed above the scene, riding high in a chariot
“studded with gems.” Parading his identification with Alexander the
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Great, he was said to have been wearing a cloak that had once belonged
to Alexander himself. We are not told how he combined this with the
traditional costume of the triumphing general, which included an or-
nate purple toga and tunic that modern studies have traced back vari-
ously to the costume of the early kings of Rome or to the cult image of
the god Jupiter himself. In any case, Appian on this occasion chooses to
be skeptical (“if anyone can believe that,” he writes), although he does
go on to offer an implausibly plausible account of just how Pompey
might have got his hands on this heirloom of a king who had died some
250 years earlier: “He apparently found it among the possessions of
Mithradates—the people of Cos having got it from Cleopatra.” This
Cleopatra, like her more famous later name-sake, was a queen of the
Ptolemaic royal house of Egypt and a direct descendant of Alexander’s
general Ptolemy. The treasure she had left on the Greek island of Cos
had come into Mithradates’ possession in 88 bce; it is just possible
(though not very likely) that this included some genuine memorabilia of
Alexander, for Ptolemy was not only a close associate of the king but had
also taken charge of his corpse and burial.20