wife for arranging contracts for “kings’ cloaks, auburn wigs, chariots
(esseda) and big models of the Rhine.”99 Much the same story is told of
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the triumphs of Domitian, but he is credited also with a bright idea
for the fake spoils: according to Dio, he raided the palace furniture
store, presumably for the kind of royal couches, thrones, and dinner ser-
vices that featured in accounts of blockbuster triumphs during the late
Republic.100
True or not, these stories raise crucial questions about the practice of
imperial rule, and the nature of that bigger charade that cynical Roman
observers saw as the heart of the imperial political system. Here the
sham is exposed in the fake victories celebrated with a display of fake
victims. But it reflects more specifically on the culture of triumphal rep-
resentation, too. In Roman imperial ideology, one of the characteristics
of monstrous despots is that they literalize the metaphors of cultural pol-
itics, to disastrous effect: Elagabalus is said to have responded to the
loaded metaphors of ambivalent gendering in his Eastern religion by “re-
ally” attempting to give himself a vagina; Commodus is supposed to
have sought the charisma of the arena by literally jumping over the bar-
rier to make himself a gladiator.101 In the stories of despotic triumphs,
transgressive rulers play out “for real” the mimetic games of the proces-
sion by faking the captives and the spoils that validated the whole show.
Despots’ triumphs, in other words, literalize triumphal mimesis into
sheer pretense; the culture of representation is turned into (or is exposed
as) the culture of sham.
c h a p t e r
VI
Playing by the Rules
THE FOG OF WAR
In 51 bce Cicero—Rome’s greatest orator but not, by a long way, its
greatest general—began to nurture hopes of being awarded a triumph.
He had been appointed, much against his will, to the governorship of
the province of Cilicia, a large tract of land in what is now southern Tur-
key (with the island of Cyprus tacked onto its jurisdiction). For a man of
untried military mettle, it was uncomfortably close to the kingdom of
Parthia, which had inflicted a devastating defeat on the Roman forces
under Crassus just two years earlier. The Parthian victory celebrations
had, according to Plutarch, included a parody of a Roman triumph,
with a prisoner dressed in women’s clothes taking the part of the tri-
umphing Crassus; and they had ended with the general’s severed head
used as a prop in a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae, standing in for
that of the dismembered king Pentheus.1
It was not so much a sense of danger that put Cicero off his overseas
posting but rather the enforced absence from the city of Rome. He kept
up with the gossip and political in-fighting by letter, giving his friends
and colleagues news, in return, of his work in the province. Some of this
correspondence survives.2 It offers the most vivid glimpse we have of Ro-
man provincial government and of the frontline military activity that of-
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R o m a n Tr i u m p h
1 8 8
ten went with it. In fact, it represents the only day-to-day first-person
account of campaigns to have survived from antiquity. It also sheds im-
portant light on the run-up to the celebration of a triumph. In what cir-
cumstances might a general decide to seek the honor? How might he
best support his case? On this occasion at least, the award (or not) hung
on a complex combination of demonstrable military achievement, ener-
getic behind-the-scenes negotiation, and artful persuasion.
In one of these letters, written probably in September 51, a month or
so after Cicero had arrived in Cilicia, one of his younger correspondents,
the smartly disreputable Marcus Caelius Rufus, trailed the hope that he
might secure just enough military success to earn a triumph: “If we
could only get the balance right so that a war came along of just the
right size for the strength of your forces and we achieved what was
needed for glory and a triumph without facing the really dangerous and
serious clash—that would be the dream ticket.”3 It was a characteristi-
cally naughty piece of subversion on Caelius’ part to cast a military vic-
tory as merely a useful device in the pursuit of a triumph, rather than
seeing a triumph as due honor for military victory; and how seriously
Cicero was supposed to take it, we do not know.
But in his reply, sent in mid-November (it could take a couple of
months for letters to travel between Rome and Cilicia), he was able to
tell Caelius that everything had worked out as he had wanted: “You say
that it would suit you if only I could have just enough trouble to earn
a sprig of laurel; but you are afraid of the Parthians because you don’t
have much confidence in my troops. Well that is exactly what has hap-
pened.” In the face of a Parthian incursion into the neighboring prov-
ince of Syria, Cicero had moved into the Amanus mountain range, be-
tween the two provinces, and terrorized the inhabitants who had long
resisted Roman takeover. “Many were captured and slaughtered, the
rest scattered. Their strongholds were taken by our surprise attack and
torched.” Cicero himself was hailed imperator by his men, a customary
acknowledgment of a significant victory (which went back probably to
the late third century bce) and often seen as a first step in the award of a
triumph.4
Playing by the Rules
189
By a happy coincidence, this ceremony took place at Issus, where in
333 the Persian king Darius had been defeated by Alexander the Great—
“a not inconsiderably better general than either you or I,” as Cicero re-
marked to Atticus, in a mixture of wry self-deprecation and misplaced
self-importance. The campaign culminated in more slash and burn
(“stripping and plundering the Amanus”) and a long siege of the fortress
town of Pindenissum. It was from here that Cicero wrote to Caelius, an-
ticipating the “immense glory” that this success would bring him, “ex-
cept for the name of the town.” No one had heard of it.5
The main outlines of Cicero’s campaigns in his province are clear
enough.6 But the details—from the structure of command to the iden-
tity of the enemy and the significance of Roman victories—are murky
and confused now, as they were at the time. The letters often give sig-
nificantly different stories to different people, not to mention the fact
that information was slow to travel and hard to interpret. When Cicero
arrived in Cilicia, his predecessor Appius Claudius Pulcher was still in
the province and (despite Cicero’s arrival, on which he may not have
been fully informed) continued to act as governor by holding assize
courts in one of its remoter parts. Cicero even suspected that his prede-
cessor was hanging onto three cohorts of the provincial army; at least,
Cicero had no clue where these detachments of his forces were.7
In the next-door province of Syria, exactly the reverse was the prob-
lem. The new governor, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, had not arrived be-
fore the Parthians had invaded and the response was left to the second in
command, Caius Cassius Longinus (best known as one of the assassins
of Julius Caesar). One version of the story, as Cicero tells it to Caelius, is
that Cassius scored a notable success in driving the Parthians out of