You’ll burn the crowd up, break hearts galore all round:
With the best will in the world, dear, you can’t keep your arrows
idle—
They’re so hot, they scorch the crowd as you go by.
Your procession will match that of Bacchus, after he’d won the
Ganges
Basin (though he was drawn by tigers, not birds).
So then, since I am doomed to be part of your— sacré triumph,
Why waste victorious troops on me now?
Take a hint from the campaign record of your cousin, Augustus
Caesar— his conquests became protectorates.8
Captives on Parade
113
This is a wonderfully evocative image of a triumph: the roaring crowds;
the victims chained and bound; the general’s mother looking on, proudly
applauding as she scatters rose petals over his head; the soldiers and
comrades on whom the success depended; and of course the victor him-
self in his splendid chariot and rich ceremonial dress. (Cupid here sports
not triumphal laurel but a wreath of myrtle, as worn in the “lesser” cere-
mony of ovatio—appropriately enough, as myrtle was the sacred plant of
Venus, and perhaps a hint that the erotic victory over Ovid had anyway
been too easy to deserve a full triumph.)
At the same time, the poem is, as many critics have pointed out,
dazzlingly subversive in a variety of ways. The most public celebration of
Roman military prowess is playfully (and pointedly) conscripted into
the celebration of private passion. The role of the lover, often presented
in Latin poetry as a soldier in Love’s army ( militat omnis amans, “every lover is a soldier,” as Ovid’s own slogan from later in this book has it) is
overturned, to make the lover the defeated victim, not the comrade, of
Cupid.9 And as the final couplet must prompt us to reflect, the relation-
ship of this imaginary triumph to the military celebrations of the em-
peror himself raises awkward questions: how far are we to see the figure
of the triumphant Augustus (“Caesar”) in this Cupid? Augustus and Cu-
pid were, after all, as Ovid insists, following the logic of the emperor’s
claimed descent from Venus herself— cognati, “cousins.”10
But the poem offers something rather more unexpected. Frustrating
as it is to admit it, this clever allegorizing, this manipulation of the con-
ventions of the ceremony to explore the idea of erotic capture, must
count as the closest we get to a surviving first-person account from a tri-
umphal victim. Of course, that is not very close at all. Ovid’s attempt
here to rethink the predicament of the poet-lover by imagining what it
might have felt like on the wrong side of the triumph was a quin-
tessentially Roman fantasy; it was one of the games only victors could
play. The same goes, and even more so, for the motivations and reac-
tions ascribed to bona fide historical captives by various Roman writers.
However tempting it might be to read these as if they gave us the vic-
tim’s own perspective on the triumph, they are inevitably Roman proj-
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 1 4
ections of those motivations and reactions onto the mute victim. They
are more an exercise in ventriloquism than reportage—a different angle
on the ceremony, maybe, but still the victor’s story. Characters such as
Thusnelda and the rest did not find their own triumphal voice, in sur-
viving literature at least, until centuries after the Roman Empire had
collapsed.
THE CLEOPATRAN SOLUTION
The classic case of this ventriloquism is the reported reaction of that
most famous of all triumphal refuseniks, Cleopatra. Her suicide, after the death of Mark Antony, was the stuff of ancient, no less than modern,
legend. Plutarch’s account of the deadly asp(s) hidden in the basket of
figs has—despite Plutarch’s own doubts about the story and thanks,
in large part, to Shakespeare’s reworking of it in Antony and Cleopatra—
become canonical. And the motive for the suicide has become equally
enshrined in ancient and modern literary tradition. As Horace insisted
in his “Cleopatra Ode,” written soon after the event, the Egyptian
queen killed herself because she was not prepared to face the humiliation
of appearing in a Roman triumph; she preferred to cheat her enemy
Octavian (later Augustus) of the pleasure of parading her through the
streets of Rome.
Fiercer she was in the death she chose, as though
she did not wish to cease to be a queen, taken to Rome
on the galleys of savage Liburnians
to be a humble woman in a proud triumph.11
We read the same explanation in Plutarch, Florus, and Dio, and it pro-
vided Shakespeare with Cleopatra’s memorable line to the dying An-
tony: “Not th’imperious show / Of the full-fortuned Caesar ever shall /
Be brooch’d with me.” Livy too put similar defiant words in her mouth.
Though this portion of his history of Rome no longer survives in full, an
ancient commentator on Horace quotes from its account of the queen’s
Captives on Parade
115
final days: “She used to repeat, again and again, ‘I shall not be led in tri-
umph.’”12 These are vivid vignettes and memorable slogans. And it is
tempting indeed to imagine, as many modern critics have, that they of-
fer us some direct insight into the psychopathology of a notable captive
and her reactions to the victory and its parade.
But it is not so simple as that. Partly, the bizarre details of the suicide
account are decidedly unlikely: Plutarch and Dio were not the only writ-
ers to have had their doubts about the asp—or the “Egyptian cobra,” in
modern zoological terminology—and to suggest alternative versions;
modern scholars too have queried the plausibility of many aspects of the
tale. “The Egyptian cobra is about two metres long and hard to conceal
in a basket (especially if there were two of them),” as one recent com-
mentator on Plutarch puzzles.13 Cleopatra may not, in any case, have
been as eager to take her own life as the standard story suggests. As many
military victors at all periods have found, some of the most prominent
captives are much more trouble than they are worth to keep alive, too
“hot,” glamorous, or disruptive to risk bringing back home. Octavian
may have publicly regretted the absence of the queen from his triumphal
parade; but many modern historians have suspected that, at the very
least, he gave her every opportunity to take her own life, even if he did
not actually arrange her murder.14
Even more to the point, however, is the fact that the tale of suicide
preempting the appearance in the triumphal procession is not restricted
to this one famous incident. It is one of the commonest tropes of Ro-
man triumphal narratives. When Mithradates decided to die rather than
face Pompey’s Roman triumph, he said to the officer chosen for the task,
so Appian reports: “Your strong arm has done me great service in strug-
gles against my enemies. It will do me the greatest service if you would
now make an end of me, in danger as I am of being led off to a trium-
phal procession after being for so many years the absolute monarch of so
great a realm.”15
Likewise runs the story of Vibius Virrius, rebel leader in the city
of Capua, which had rashly sided with Hannibal during Rome’s war
against Carthage. When defeat appeared inevitable, Virrius persuaded