Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

The Roman Triumph

The conquering hero as show-off

Mary Beard
Belknap Harvard, 448pp, £14.40,

Frederic Raphael

Wednesday, 14th November 2007

Frederic Raphael

The classicist’s Lewis Namier, Syme’s capacity for digging the dirt, and the tiniest detail, made him impatient with fine writing. He wrote like a prosecutor, his method based on evidence, evidence, evidence. Mary Beard is in the Syme tradition: respect for Roman male achievements does not figure in her index. Its most blatant parade, the ceremony of the Triumph, is (she would have us believe) ripe for deconstruction. In the post-modern style, she extracts subversive elements from the routine itself.

Although the conquering general put on as magnificent a show as his booty could furnish and he was, for a day at least, so close to being a god that the slave who rode with him had to remind him (so we were always taught) that he too was a man, he was subject to the licensed ribaldry of his soldiers (Julius Caesar was famously abused as ‘the bald adulterer’ and the ‘Queen of Bithynia’, whose king he had, supposedly, sexually obliged in his youth). And every triumphant general had to pay a premium, by the generosity of his handouts, and public buildings, to ensure that the whole city benefited from his vainglorious pillaging.

Since there were, by Orosius’ count, 320 triumphs between that celebrated by Romulus (off to a quick start, since he triumphed a month before the official founding of the city) and that of Balbus, in

19 BC, after which only the emperor and his family could figure in triumphal processions, it is hard to believe that celebrating a triumph could be a dubious career move: today’s hero was often favourite to be tomorrow’s consul. Yet it’s true that if the triumphator brought wealth and fulfilled Rome’s sense of manifest destiny, he became an increasing danger to the stability of the Republic. Your victorious general was a man to be watched, in two senses, as Marius, Sulla, Pompey and the divine Julius duly proved.

Thrice-laurelled Pompey, the unluckiest conquering hero of all time, was the prime instance of the man who overdid it. So keen was he to impress that he planned to have his chariot pulled by four elephants (the first to appear in a Roman circus), but the great beasts were too big for the triumphal gate. Later, when the elephants were delivered to slaughter in the arena, the profane crowd was so moved by their pitiful trumpetings that it turned against Pompey, the ringmaster. His vanity had been flattered by the parade of an image of his own big head, made of pearls, among his show-piece trophies. Irony would be served when his actual severed head was handed, by Egyptian bounty-hunters, to Caesar after the latter’s victory at Pharsalus, in the Civil War.