Pompey’s Finest Hour?
25
temple, theater, and porticoes.50 This has launched a variety of theories:
that the sculptural decoration was themed around Greek poetesses,
courtesans (hetairai), and extraordinary mothers (fitting neatly with
Pliny’s Alcippe, of course); that it offered a “quintessentially Roman
formulation” of the equation of “libido with tyranny,” within an artistic
programme that put on show a particularly loaded version of the union
of Greek and Roman culture; or, taking a more cerebral turn, that it
recreated in stone the theological theories of that most influential first-
century polymath Varro, under perhaps the directly guiding hand of
Varro himself.51 Whether these scholarly fantasies are just that or whether
they reflect in part the fertile imagination of the Romans themselves is a
moot point. But, either way, it should not cloud the fact that this was, or
was also, a monument of Pompey’s triumph.
With its array of treasures from the conquests, any walk through
Pompey’s porticoes must also have entailed a re-viewing of the spoils
first seen on September 28 and 29, 61—the procession being re-enacted
in the movement of each and every visitor, as they passed the objects on
display.52 But more than that, some individual works of art explicitly
evoked Pompey’s triumphal moment. Pliny refers to a portrait of Alex-
ander the Great by the painter Nikias (prompting recollections of the
cloak said to have been worn by Pompey in the procession), as well as to
a group of statues of “fourteen nationes” or “peoples” that stood “around
Pompey” or (depending on the exact reading of a possibly corrupt text)
“around the porticoes/theater of Pompey.”53 These were presumably new
commissions, personifications of the peoples conquered in his cam-
paigns; significantly or not, the number fourteen coincides with the to-
tal number of nations whose names, according to Plutarch, were carried
at the front of the triumphal parade itself (or, alternatively, with the list
of conquests that Pliny quotes from the “announcement” of the tri-
umph). The statues certainly continued to make an impression well into
the Empire: Suetonius claims that, after he had murdered his mother,
the emperor Nero dreamed that was he was being menaced by them; it
was a nightmare that foreboded provincial uprising from the peoples
whom Pompey had once conquered.54
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
2 6
One surviving statue may even represent Pompey in his role as trium-
phant conqueror: a colossal statue of a nude male, some three meters
tall, which since soon after its discovery in the sixteenth century has
stood in the Roman mansion now known as the Palazzo Spada (Fig. 6).
In the mid-seventeenth century it was identified as the very statue be-
neath which Caesar was assassinated. The arguments were based on its
findspot in the right area of the city, the presumed likeness of its head to
other portraits, and (for those with vivid imaginations) the red stains in
the marble of his left leg—traces of Caesar’s blood. This identification
appeared to crumble when the head was shown to be entirely modern, a
sixteenth-century restoration.
Nonetheless, leaving the blood aside, the findspot does make some
connection with Pompey’s theater complex plausible, as does the scale of
the piece and some of its attributes: the figure is supported by a palm
trunk (a plant strongly connected with victory and triumph), while in
his hand he holds a globe, the symbol of world conquest. True, these are
also well-known attributes of Roman emperors, and a detailed case has
been made for seeing here a figure of the emperor Domitian. But it is no
less likely that the seventeenth-century scholars had it right (albeit for
the wrong reasons): that this is what is left of the triumphant Pompey
from his senate house.55
The triumphal aspects of this whole building complex were empha-
sized even more starkly in the celebrations that marked its inauguration
in 55 bce—a characteristic Roman combination of tragic theater, music,
and athletics, horse racing and wild beast hunts (the hunts alone lasted
for five days). The date chosen for the festivities is itself significant. Al-
though not explicitly recorded in any surviving ancient evidence, it was
almost certainly the closing days of September (shortly after Cicero de-
livered his speech In Pisonem [Against Piso], as that speech makes clear).56
In other words, the inauguration of the buildings took place over the
anniversary of the third triumph—making in the process another stu-
pendous birthday celebration for Pompey.
The plays chosen for the occasion, too, could be seen as an imag-
inative re-performance of the triumph. According to Cicero, two re-
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Figure 6:
Colossal statue of Pompey, now in the Palazzo Spada, Rome. The head was
shown to be modern, when the statue was moved in 1798 to provide a backdrop in a performance of Voltaire’s Death of Caesar; but the rest may be what is left of the general that once stood in the senate house that was part of his theater-and-portico complex.
Th e
R o m a n Tr i u m p h
2 8
vivals featured prominently in the theatrical programme: Accius’
Clytemnestra and the Equus Troianus (Trojan Horse) of either Naevius or Livius Andronicus. We can do no more than guess at the details of their
plots, but Clytemnestra certainly focused on the return of Agamemnon
to Greece after his victory at Troy, the Equus Troianus on the devious
Greek scheme to bring that victory about. Cicero, in a letter written
shortly after the event, strongly suggests that the spoils of war played a
starring role in both productions: he writes of the “six-hundred mules”
that tramped across the stage in the Clytemnestra (no doubt carrying Ag-
amemnon’s returning army, its baggage, and its treasure) and the “three-
thousand kraters” in the Equus Troianus (presumably a parade of booty
the Greeks stripped from the Trojans). It may be fanciful to imagine
that Pompey’s Mithradatic booty came back on stage to act the part of
Agamemnon’s spoils. But where else did those “three-thousand kraters”
come from?57
As with the triumph itself, however, despite its lavishness (or perhaps,
rather, because of it), Pompey’s inaugural celebration prompted cyni-
cism and disapproval as well as admiration. This was, no doubt, partly
because Pompey’s political pre-eminence had been eroded in the six
years since his third triumph. The kind of razzmatazz that accompanied
the triumphal procession of the Roman Alexander risked appearing
faintly ridiculous when it was revived to celebrate the triumphal monu-
ment of a man who had been forced to protect his own position through
an uneasy alliance with Julius Caesar, who had been the butt of abuse—
and worse—from all sides, and whose third consulship in the very year
of 55 bce had only been achieved by even more obvious corruption and
violence than usual.58
Cicero’s “memorably dyspeptic letter” describing the events threw
some predictable cold water on quite how successful the spectacles had
been. An elderly star actor brought out of retirement specially for the oc-
casion had apparently dried up at a key moment, the general extrava-