gance of the proceedings had been more off-putting than admirable,
and the wild beast hunts gave “no pleasure at all” to gentlemen of taste.
“What pleasure can there be for a man of refinement when some feeble
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
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human being is being torn to pieces by a mighty beast, or a noble beast
run through with a hunting spear?” he asked, in that tone of carefully
contrived superiority sometimes adopted by the Roman elite in discuss-
ing the bloodier aspects of the games. But in fact, the elite were not
alone in feeling some disquiet at the fate of the animals. Pompey’s bad
luck with elephants came back to haunt him: a group of twenty that had
been assembled for the show attempted a mass break out from the arena,
causing (as Pliny rather calmly puts it) “trouble in the crowd,” and
finally—thwarted in the escape attempt—trumpeted pitifully to the
spectators as if making a plea for release. Just as the noble prisoners in
the triumphal procession itself were (as we shall see) always liable to up-
stage the victorious general himself in the play for the audience’s atten-
tion, so here it was animal victims who stole the show.59
But more than that, some of the chosen spectacles raised particularly
uncomfortable questions. It was one thing for the theatrical programme
to showcase the return of Agamemnon and so inevitably to cast Pompey’s
eastern victories in the light of the mythical Greek victory over Troy. But
how could the rest of Agamemnon’s story be kept out of the frame, no-
tably his murder immediately after that triumphant arrival home at the
hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus? It may be that
the image of Agamemnon as the great western conqueror of the East was
powerful enough, for most of the people, most of the time, to keep the
other associations at bay. But Suetonius, in his biography of Caesar, re-
ports the story that Pompey divorced his wife on his return from the
East “because of Caesar” and that he used to call Caesar “Aegisthus.”
This is as clear a hint as you could wish that the subversive potential of
the mythical stories on display was not lost on all Romans.60
Other attempts to memorialize the triumph, or to extend its display
beyond the day of the procession itself, had a more personal focus—and,
in some cases, were no less double-edged. Triumphal spoils were not
only displayed in major building projects; they also adorned the private
houses of victorious generals. Pliny stressed the permanence of the tri-
umphal message entailed by such displays. He explained that, as the
spoils were not removed with a change of owner, the “houses themselves
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went on triumphing for ever, even when they changed hands” and that
for new owners the spoils acted as an incentive to glory (“Every day the
walls of the house reproach an owner who has no taste for war for in-
truding on someone else’s triumph”).61
Pliny may have had in mind here a famous passage in one of Cicero’s
attacks on Mark Antony, who occupied Pompey’s house after his death
(having bought it for, no doubt, a knock-down price during the civil
wars). The rams of ships captured by Pompey, probably in his campaign
against the pirates, still stood in its entranceway; and these spoils could
hardly believe, as Cicero imagines it, that the drunken and dissolute An-
tony was really their new owner. In this case the captured weapons re-
mained—maybe for centuries—as the carriers (and protectors) of the
glory of the triumphing general, and as an incentive to follow his exam-
ple. Even in late antiquity, Pompey’s house (or a house that was believed
to be Pompey’s) went under the name of the “House of the Rams”
(domus rostrata). 62
The special costume worn by the triumphing general offered the pos-
sibility of a different type of permanent honor. Traditionally this had
been worn on the day of the triumph alone. But Pompey in 63 bce, be-
tween his second and third triumphs, was granted the almost unprece-
dented right to wear various elements of the dress on particular public
occasions—including, according to the historian Velleius Paterculus, the
right to “the golden crown and full triumphal costume at all circus
games.” This grant probably accounts for the presence of the mysterious
fourth wreath, or crown, on the coin of Faustus Sulla, and its implica-
tions are clear to us: the temporary glory of the triumphal procession
was being turned into a permanent mark of status and prestige. The im-
plications were also clear to (and resisted by) some Romans, including, if
we are to believe Velleius, Pompey himself: “He did not have the nerve
to use this honor more than once; and that was once too often.”63
Even so, in January 60 bce, in a letter to his friend Atticus, Cicero
could pillory Pompey’s obsession with the baubles of triumphal glory.
While the senatorial heavyweights were preparing to gang up to defeat a
bill that would have distributed land to his veteran soldiers, Pompey
Pompey’s Finest Hour?
31
himself was keeping his head down; or, as Cicero put it, “He’s safeguard-
ing that dinky little triumphal toga of his by keeping quiet.”64 What
does this exactly mean? That Pompey was unwilling to do anything to
jeopardize his rights to triumphal dress, voted in 63 bce? Or, more
loosely, that he wanted above all to hang on to the fleeting renown of his
third triumph, celebrated only a few months earlier? Either way, the at-
tributes of triumphal glory are here cast as an unworthy obsession, the
trinkets of honor rather than the real thing.
THE HEART OF THE TRIUMPH
This story of Pompey exposes many of the issues that lie at the heart of
Roman triumphal culture. Some of these need very little exposing. It
would be hard to overlook the role of the ceremony, and its memorials,
in the celebration of Roman military prowess and imperial expansion,
and in the glorification of the victorious general himself; this is why,
after all, kings, dynasts, and autocrats have chosen to imitate it ever
since, parading their power and their conquests in recognizably Roman
style. In fact, the triumphal entry of the French king, Henri II, into the
city of Rouen in 1550 was explicitly likened in contemporary records to
Pompey’s ceremony: “No less pleasing and delectable than the third tri-
umph of Pompey . . . seen by the Romans as magnificent in riches and
abounding in the spoils of foreign nations” (Fig. 7).65
The triumph was about display and success—the success of display
no less than the display of success. As the Greek historian Polybius put it
in his analysis of Roman institutions in the second century bce, it was “a
spectacle in which generals bring right before the eyes of the Roman
people a vivid impression of their achievements.” The general was, in
other words, the impresario of the show and almost (as Polybius’ lan-
guage strongly hints) a consummate artist, restaging his own achieve-
ments in front of the home crowd.66 So it certainly must have seemed in
61. Some of Pompey’s conquests were, quite literally, brought to Rome
(the booty and treasure, the beaks of wrecked pirate ships, the exotic
trees, the captives all paraded through the streets). But also on show was
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