that justified comparison with King Alexander himself (hence the title
“the Great”). First, in 67, he had dispatched the pirates who had been
terrorizing the whole Mediterranean, with the support of “rogue states”
in the East. Their activities had threatened to starve Rome of its sea-
borne grain supply and had produced some high-profile victims, includ-
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8
ing the young Julius Caesar—who, so the story went, managed to raise
his own ransom and then proceeded to crucify his captors. Pompey is re-
puted to have cleared the sea in an impressively (and perhaps implausi-
bly) short three months, before resettling many of the old buccaneers in
towns at a safe distance from the coast.
His next target was a more formidable opponent, and another imita-
tor of Alexander, King Mithradates Eupator of Pontus. Some twenty
years earlier, in 88 bce, Mithradates had committed an atrocity that was
outrageous even by ancient standards, when he invaded the Roman
province of Asia and ordered the massacre of every Italian man, woman,
or child that could be found; unreliable estimates by Greek and Roman
writers suggest that between 80,000 and 150,000 people were killed. Al-
though rapidly beaten back on that occasion, he had continued to ex-
pand his sphere of influence in what is now Turkey (and beyond) and to
threaten Roman interests in the East. The Romans had scored a few no-
table victories in battle; but the war had not been won. Between 66 and
62 Pompey finished the job, while restoring or imposing Roman order
from the Black Sea to Judaea. It was a hugely lucrative campaign. One
account claims that Mithradates’ furniture stores (“two thousand drink-
ing-cups made of onyx inlaid with gold and a host of bowls and wine-
coolers, plus drinking-horns and couches and chairs, richly adorned”)
took thirty days to transfer to Roman hands.2
Triumphal processions had celebrated Roman victories from the very
earliest days of the city. Or so the Romans themselves believed, tracing
the origins of the ceremony back to their mythical founder, Romulus,
and the other (more or less mythical) early kings. As well as the booty,
enemy captives, and other trophies of victory, there was more light-
hearted display. Behind the triumphal chariot, the troops sang ribald
songs ostensibly at their general’s expense. “Romans, watch your wives,
see the bald adulterer’s back home” was said to have been chanted at Jul-
ius Caesar’s triumph in 46 bce (as much to Caesar’s delight, no doubt, as
to his chagrin).3 Conspicuous consumption played a part, too. After the
ceremonies at the Temple of Jupiter, there was banqueting, occasionally
on a legendary scale; Lucullus, for example, who had been awarded a tri-
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
9
umph for some earlier victories scored against Mithradates, is reputed to
have feasted the whole city plus the surrounding villages.4
At Pompey’s triumph in 61 the booty had flowed in so lavishly that
two days, instead of the usual one, were assigned to the parade, and
(superfluity always being a mark of success) still more was left over:
“Quite enough,” according to Plutarch, in his biography of Pompey,
“to deck out another triumphal procession.” The extravagant wealth on
display certainly prompted murmurings of disapproval as well as en-
vious admiration. In a characteristic piece of curmudgeon, the elder
Pliny, looking back on the occasion after more than a hundred years,
wondered exactly whose triumph it had been: not so much Pompey’s
over the pirates and Mithradates as “the defeat of austerity and the tri-
umph, let’s face it, of luxury.” Curmudgeon apart, though, it must
count as one of the most extraordinary birthday celebrations in the his-
tory of the world.5
GETTING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD
Ancient writers found plenty to say about Pompey’s triumph, lingering
on the details of its display. The vast quantity of cash trundled through
the streets was part of the appeaclass="underline" “75,100,000 drachmae of silver coin,”
according to the historian Appian, which was considerably more than
the annual tax revenue of the whole Roman world at the time—or, to
put it another way, enough money to keep two million people alive for a
year.6 But the range of precious artifacts that Pompey had brought back
from the royal court of Mithradates also captured the imagination.
Appian again notes “the throne of Mithradates himself, along with his
scepter, and his statue eight cubits tall, made of solid gold.”7 Pliny, al-
ways with a keen eye for luxury and innovation, harps on “the vessels of
gold and gems, enough to fill nine display cabinets, three gold statues of
Minerva, Mars and Apollo, thirty three crowns of pearl” and “the first
vessels of agate ever brought to Rome.” He seems particularly intrigued
by an out-sized gaming board, “three feet broad by four feet long,” made
out of two different types of precious stone—and on the board a golden
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1 0
moon weighing thirty pounds. But here he has a moral for his own age
and a critical reflection on the consequences of luxury: “The fact that no
gems even approaching that size exist today is as clear a proof as anyone
could want that the world’s resources have been depleted.”8
In some cases the sheer mimetic extravagance of the treasures on dis-
play makes—and no doubt made—their interpretation tricky. One of
the most puzzling objects in the roster of the procession was, in Pliny’s
words, “a mountain like a pyramid and made of gold, with deers and
lions and fruit of all kinds, and a golden vine entwined all around”; fol-
lowed by a “musaeum” (a “shrine of the Muses” or perhaps a “grotto”)
“made of pearls and topped by a sun-dial.” Hard as it is to picture these
creations, we might guess that they evoked the exotic landscape of the
East, while at the same time instantiating the excesses of oriental luxury.9
Other notable spectacles came complete with interpretative labels. The
historian Dio refers to one “trophy” carried in the triumph as “huge and
expensively decorated, with an inscription attached to say ‘this is a tro-
phy of the whole world.’”10 This was a celebration, in other words, of
Pompey the Great as world conqueror, and of Roman power as world
empire.
Almost all of these treasures have long since been lost or destroyed:
the agate broken, gems recycled into new works of art (or monstrosi-
ties, depending on your taste), precious metals melted down and re-
fashioned. But a single large bronze vessel (a krater) displayed in the
Capitoline Museum at Rome might possibly have been one of the many
on view in the procession of 61 bce—or if not, then a close look-alike
(Fig. 2). This particular specimen is some 70 centimeters tall, in plain
bronze, except for a pattern of lotus leaves chased around its neck and
inlaid with silver; the slightly rococo handles and foot are modern resto-
rations. It was found in the mid-eighteenth century in the Italian town
of Anzio, ancient Antium, and given to the Capitoline Museum—where
it currently holds pride of place as the center of the “Hall of Hannibal”
(so-called after its sixteenth-century frescoes depicting a magnificently
foreign Hannibal perched on an elephant but showing also, appropri-
ately enough, a triumphal procession of an allegorical figure of “Roma”
over a captive “Sicilia”).11