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Rome’s triumph was the ancient world’s most effective piece of propaganda

Mary Beard uncovers the spectacle of the Ancient Roman parade, the Roman Triumph. Simultaneously a declaration of Roman supremacy and an admission that conquest may be theft at scale, these Roman propaganda events were so terrifying that Cleopatra famously chose death over appearing in one.

MARY BEARD: Triumphs differed hugely in scale and spectacle. Gradually, it seems they got more and more lavish as Roman conquest reached into places that were really rich, and in Roman terms, really exotic. I think the main function of the triumph is for Romans to think about what it is to be Roman, but it has another side to it, which is, it puts fear into the enemy. but it certainly provided the model in Europe for celebrations of royal or military power ever after. I'm Mary Beard, and I've worked on the Ancient Romans for 50 years, and I've written quite a lot of books about them. I've just started a new podcast called "Instant Classics," which is about Greece and Rome.

- The Roman triumph: the greatest celebration of all time?

- A Roman triumph or a triumphal procession was awarded to a super successful Roman general. It's not clear whether there were any exact rules for this. Some ancient writers said, "Oh, you had to have killed 5,000 of the enemy to be awarded a triumph." We don't know if that's entirely true. What it was was a vast procession through the streets of Rome leading up to the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitoline Hill, with the general, the successful general, standing in a very elaborate ceremonial chariot, dressed up in an extraordinary purple outfit with a purple cloak and silver stars, which apparently mimicked the statue of Jupiter, the God himself, on the Capitoline Hill. He processed through the city, up to the temple to make a sacrifice to Jupiter in honor really of his victory. But it wasn't just that. In front of the general's chariot, you find the captives that he'd taken in the course of the war, and the spoils of victory. Those captives, we have some descriptions of them, and they seem to be most impressive when they're of the highest rank and the most exotically dressed. And what a general really wants is to have a king walking before his chariot, a king in his regal outfit, but shackled and captured by the power of Rome. Some of them we can see from the sculptures that we have depicting this procession, some of them seem to have been actually carried in this procession, not walking. Some certainly did walk, but some were kind of put onto platforms, and bound hand and foot, were carried along for people to look at. And we know that the audience of the triumph were drawn to see what the people were like the Romans had now conquered. Now it could sometimes rebound, they sometimes felt very sorry for them actually. But the general is really parading his power over the dynasts and the ordinary soldiers that he had conquered. There was the booty, some of the best bits of loot that he'd taken in the course of his campaign. We often think of the spoils of victory in a rather limited way actually. We think of sculptures, precious works of art, coin coming into Rome and being on display to the people in the procession, and there were certainly plenty of those. But it goes much further than that. And what they were wanting to do was to, as it were, kind of exemplify what the conquered territory was. Triumphs differed hugely in scale and spectacle. Gradually, it seems they got more and more lavish as Roman conquest reached into places that were really rich, and in Roman terms, really exotic. And I think that what you have to see the triumph as, in part, is literally something that brings the Roman audience, who might have never been outside a radius of 30 miles of the city of Rome or certainly not Italy, it brings them face to face with the kind of stuff and creatures that they had never ever seen. I mean, they've not got picture books of what it looks like when you go abroad. There are some representations of the foreign places you find in painting, a mosaic, that's true, but this is literally bringing the Roman people face to face with the world, and I think it's likely uneasily from our point of view, the world that they believe they've conquered. So you could find animals on display, you could find plants, trees on display. In one triumph of 71 CE by the Emperor Vespasian and his son, Titus, they had balsam trees brought from Judea. So what you are seeing is not just the elaborate brica-brac, and sometimes it is very elaborate, this extraordinary stories of, you know, seeing the king's throne encrusted with jewels carried along in precession, but it's also the flora and fauna of the captured place. And that combines sometimes in a strange way with boasts on the part of the general, so that you get placards carried along with that, which list the places that the general conquered, the individual town, placards which depict the victories happening, the destroyed thoughts of the enemy. And behind the general came at least some of his victorious troops. They interestingly were said to have sang lewd songs slightly at the expense of the general, so he didn't get above himself. And just in case he should get above himself, there he is dressed as Jupiter Optimus Maximus, you don't want him to think that he really is a god. It said that there was a slave in the chariot with him saying, "Remember you're a man, remember you're a man, remember you're a man" the whole time. But they go through the city like that. It's now I think very hard to get a sense of the size and the excitement of it. We know they put up special stands, so people could get a good view. I suppose I tend to think of this as a Brit as something like what you might see in the coronation of a British monarch. But I think the coronation of a British monarch is a rather feeble comparison. You know, I think people were coming to see what the general had done, they were coming into the center of Rome to see what Roman conquest meant. So it's hugely impressive, but it's also very, very ideologically rooted. I think the main function of the triumph is for the local Roman audience, it's for Romans to think about what it is to be Roman, but it has another side to it, which is, it puts fear into the enemy. It's a ceremony news, of which I suspect, travels that enacts the humiliation of the defeated. And we know that there are several defeated monarchs and generals who kill themselves rather than be displayed in the triumph. The most famous of those I think is Queen Cleopatra who probably heard all about triumphs from her lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. When Octavian, the future emperor, Augustus wants to take her back to parade as, you know, the key bit of booty in his triumphal procession, she is said to have said, "I will not be triumphed over," and that accounts for her suicide. And I think that you can see that the eyes of the Roman people and, you know, the she humiliation of becoming a piece of spoil is something that you might think, and we know some did, "I am not going to do that, I am simply not." You know, Cleopatra is a refusenik, Mithridates is another refusenik. It's a ceremony of celebration, it's also a ceremony of humiliation. The triumph must have been at its biggest, it must have been quite extraordinary. It's hard to imagine that there was any Roman celebration that was more, you know, confident in some ways of its own spectacle. And the root of a triumphal procession, we don't exactly know where it goes, but it must have been able to accommodate thousands, hundreds of thousands. It is really, really big news. Whether it's the biggest kind of procession of its type in human history, it's impossible to say, but it certainly provided the model in Europe for celebrations of royal or military power ever after. Successful generals in a Renaissance imitating the Roman triumph to celebrate their own kinds of victory. So I think in many ways it provides a model for what it is like to celebrate conquest. It's a template for how the city puts its might on display. We have a very good idea of the number of triumphs that took place, because Romans recorded it as accurately as possible to be fair, not entirely accurately, because they attribute one triumph to Romulus, the founder of Rome, and he probably didn't exist. So there's some fuzzy edges, but, basically, they've got a list of triumphs and they add up to more than 200. What is interesting, there is a real big break in the kind of triumphal procession that you get in the reign of the first emperor Augustus in 19 BCE, because after 19, no one who is not either the emperor himself or a prince of the royal house, no ordinary general receives a triumph. So up to 19 BC through the Republic of Rome, it is for ordinary or rather the extraordinary generals to claim their triumph. Under Augustus, it becomes a royal ritual. The logic is that all wars after that point are fought as if they were the emperor's wars. So when a triumph comes, it is the emperor who gets the honor of the triumph. So they become very, very monarchical, which they hadn't been up to that point. It's very hard to say which is their grandest or the most extravagant, over the top lavish, or bad taste of these ceremonies, but the ceremony that people pick out and that Romans picked out was the two-day ceremony that Pompey the Great held in 61 BCE for his conquest of the pirates, and also his conquest of the Eastern King Mithridates. Now this starts out by being extraordinary, because triumphs by and large are one day affairs. You know, you load everything up, you process through the city of Rome, you get to the Temple of Jupiter, Optimus Maximus, you do a sacrifice, and you have a great dinner, and that's it. Now what Pompey does, he says that he cannot squash all his stuff into a procession that lasts just one day, so it's a two-day procession. It is full of really, really extravagant spoils, particularly from the court of Mithridates. Actually one of these we have one bronze pot, which almost certainly goes back to Pompey's triumph and still survives. It's in the Capitoline Museums at Rome, and it's clearly came from Mithridates' kingdom, and it's very, very likely was one of the things that was actually carried in the procession. It is not by any means the grandest, it's a rather elegant plain bronze picture about 70-centimeters high. But we read of most fantastic ornamented sundials, we read kind of barrels load of coin, we read even of an image of Pompey himself presumably made out of the spoils, where his head carried in this procession as part of the fruits of conquest. His head is made entirely out of pearl, it must have been a colossal head made of pearl. It has to be said that this is one of the cases where in a sense Pompey got it a bit wrong. I mean people are always looking at the triumph, both wanting to admire it, be impressed, but also wanting to say, "I think this is a bit over the top, I think this is a bit vulgar actually, I think this is too luxurious." So there's always that counterpoint. And the head of Pompey in pearl was one of the objects that really captured that critical tendency, 'cause people said two things about it, they said this is a very effeminizing thing to do. Pearls in the Roman imagination were very, very much associated with women. So the critics of Pompey said "How could he have his head represented in that female material?" But there were also, I'm afraid, rather nastier insinuations made later because Pompey, in the end, he's the major adversary of Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar and Pompey fight it out in the 40s BC basically for who's going to run the Roman world. Caesar wins, Pompey flees to Egypt. When he gets to Egypt, he thinks he's getting out of the boat to safety, actually, but the Egyptians on the shore cut his head off, and people looked back at this head, that is just the head of Pompey carried in the procession, and they wagged their fingers and said, "Hmm. That was an omen of what was going to happen to him in the end." So there is always this saying that huge luxury, and Romans are very moralizing about this, huge luxury is always a bit dangerous. The moment of the general's, the acme of his career, you know, the triumph is kind of thing you'd say what little Roman boys dream of as being the biggest success they could ever achieve: a triumphal procession. And yet, it's very often slightly tainted with potential disaster, potential overreach. Any number of stories of, for example, triumphing generals who very soon after found that their sons died. Now kind of the success of the triumph comes back to haunt you. There was always a question of how far you really were as the triumphing general, the star of the show, and it was obviously extremely desirable if you are a general to have a great king in front of you, marching along in front of you to show that you had conquered a king, there was uncomfortably often a sense that the crowd were actually more interested in the king and the princesses and the sad captains, than they were in the general himself. So, it's not all win if you have a triumph. There is a wonderful quote from the Roman philosopher, Seneca, who was also the tutor of the Emperor Nero, I'm thinking in part about triumphs, and it says, "Petty sacrilege gets punished. Sacrilege on a grand scale, that is what gets you a triumph." It's a quote which Seneca is partly drawing and adapting from a famous story about Alexander the Great who captures a pirate and asks a pirate, this is in the 4th century BC, he says to the pirate, "Why did you take other people's property, what? Why did you steal things?" And the pirate replies, "If you steal things and you've only got one ship, you're called a pirate. If you steal things and you've got a whole army and a navy, you are called a king," right? Seneca, in a way, is adapting that, and having one eye on the triumph. And I think it's quite I very much like, because it shows the Romans really reflecting on reward, morality, on who makes it big, who doesn't, who gets blamed, and we do have, or much of the modern world I think has a tendency, to think of Romans as if they had, you know, no problem about any of this, they went off and they conquered things, and they came back with their booty and their loot, and they didn't bat an eyelid, they thought it was holy to their good, they had no morals group. What Seneca's saying is that, you know, if you rip things off, you go to temple and you take all the sacred objects from the temple, and you're just a single guy, you'll find yourself punished. If you do that on a grand scale, Rome honors you. And the question, of course, is that he's raising about Roman imperialism and the Roman Empire is it actually different, you know? Is it just theft on a very big scale? Now it's those kind of worries I think that the Romans are negotiating when they talk about triumph.

Mary Beard uncovers the spectacle of the Ancient Roman parade, the Roman Triumph. Simultaneously a declaration of Roman supremacy and an admission that conquest may be theft at scale, these Roman propaganda events were so terrifying that Cleopatra famously chose death over appearing in one.

MARY BEARD: Triumphs differed hugely in scale and spectacle. Gradually, it seems they got more and more lavish as Roman conquest reached into places that were really rich, and in Roman terms, really exotic. I think the main function of the triumph is for Romans to think about what it is to be Roman, but it has another side to it, which is, it puts fear into the enemy. but it certainly provided the model in Europe for celebrations of royal or military power ever after. I'm Mary Beard, and I've worked on the Ancient Romans for 50 years, and I've written quite a lot of books about them. I've just started a new podcast called "Instant Classics," which is about Greece and Rome.

- The Roman triumph: the greatest celebration of all time?

- A Roman triumph or a triumphal procession was awarded to a super successful Roman general. It's not clear whether there were any exact rules for this. Some ancient writers said, "Oh, you had to have killed 5,000 of the enemy to be awarded a triumph." We don't know if that's entirely true. What it was was a vast procession through the streets of Rome leading up to the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitoline Hill, with the general, the successful general, standing in a very elaborate ceremonial chariot, dressed up in an extraordinary purple outfit with a purple cloak and silver stars, which apparently mimicked the statue of Jupiter, the God himself, on the Capitoline Hill. He processed through the city, up to the temple to make a sacrifice to Jupiter in honor really of his victory. But it wasn't just that. In front of the general's chariot, you find the captives that he'd taken in the course of the war, and the spoils of victory. Those captives, we have some descriptions of them, and they seem to be most impressive when they're of the highest rank and the most exotically dressed. And what a general really wants is to have a king walking before his chariot, a king in his regal outfit, but shackled and captured by the power of Rome. Some of them we can see from the sculptures that we have depicting this procession, some of them seem to have been actually carried in this procession, not walking. Some certainly did walk, but some were kind of put onto platforms, and bound hand and foot, were carried along for people to look at. And we know that the audience of the triumph were drawn to see what the people were like the Romans had now conquered. Now it could sometimes rebound, they sometimes felt very sorry for them actually. But the general is really parading his power over the dynasts and the ordinary soldiers that he had conquered. There was the booty, some of the best bits of loot that he'd taken in the course of his campaign. We often think of the spoils of victory in a rather limited way actually. We think of sculptures, precious works of art, coin coming into Rome and being on display to the people in the procession, and there were certainly plenty of those. But it goes much further than that. And what they were wanting to do was to, as it were, kind of exemplify what the conquered territory was. Triumphs differed hugely in scale and spectacle. Gradually, it seems they got more and more lavish as Roman conquest reached into places that were really rich, and in Roman terms, really exotic. And I think that what you have to see the triumph as, in part, is literally something that brings the Roman audience, who might have never been outside a radius of 30 miles of the city of Rome or certainly not Italy, it brings them face to face with the kind of stuff and creatures that they had never ever seen. I mean, they've not got picture books of what it looks like when you go abroad. There are some representations of the foreign places you find in painting, a mosaic, that's true, but this is literally bringing the Roman people face to face with the world, and I think it's likely uneasily from our point of view, the world that they believe they've conquered. So you could find animals on display, you could find plants, trees on display. In one triumph of 71 CE by the Emperor Vespasian and his son, Titus, they had balsam trees brought from Judea. So what you are seeing is not just the elaborate brica-brac, and sometimes it is very elaborate, this extraordinary stories of, you know, seeing the king's throne encrusted with jewels carried along in precession, but it's also the flora and fauna of the captured place. And that combines sometimes in a strange way with boasts on the part of the general, so that you get placards carried along with that, which list the places that the general conquered, the individual town, placards which depict the victories happening, the destroyed thoughts of the enemy. And behind the general came at least some of his victorious troops. They interestingly were said to have sang lewd songs slightly at the expense of the general, so he didn't get above himself. And just in case he should get above himself, there he is dressed as Jupiter Optimus Maximus, you don't want him to think that he really is a god. It said that there was a slave in the chariot with him saying, "Remember you're a man, remember you're a man, remember you're a man" the whole time. But they go through the city like that. It's now I think very hard to get a sense of the size and the excitement of it. We know they put up special stands, so people could get a good view. I suppose I tend to think of this as a Brit as something like what you might see in the coronation of a British monarch. But I think the coronation of a British monarch is a rather feeble comparison. You know, I think people were coming to see what the general had done, they were coming into the center of Rome to see what Roman conquest meant. So it's hugely impressive, but it's also very, very ideologically rooted. I think the main function of the triumph is for the local Roman audience, it's for Romans to think about what it is to be Roman, but it has another side to it, which is, it puts fear into the enemy. It's a ceremony news, of which I suspect, travels that enacts the humiliation of the defeated. And we know that there are several defeated monarchs and generals who kill themselves rather than be displayed in the triumph. The most famous of those I think is Queen Cleopatra who probably heard all about triumphs from her lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. When Octavian, the future emperor, Augustus wants to take her back to parade as, you know, the key bit of booty in his triumphal procession, she is said to have said, "I will not be triumphed over," and that accounts for her suicide. And I think that you can see that the eyes of the Roman people and, you know, the she humiliation of becoming a piece of spoil is something that you might think, and we know some did, "I am not going to do that, I am simply not." You know, Cleopatra is a refusenik, Mithridates is another refusenik. It's a ceremony of celebration, it's also a ceremony of humiliation. The triumph must have been at its biggest, it must have been quite extraordinary. It's hard to imagine that there was any Roman celebration that was more, you know, confident in some ways of its own spectacle. And the root of a triumphal procession, we don't exactly know where it goes, but it must have been able to accommodate thousands, hundreds of thousands. It is really, really big news. Whether it's the biggest kind of procession of its type in human history, it's impossible to say, but it certainly provided the model in Europe for celebrations of royal or military power ever after. Successful generals in a Renaissance imitating the Roman triumph to celebrate their own kinds of victory. So I think in many ways it provides a model for what it is like to celebrate conquest. It's a template for how the city puts its might on display. We have a very good idea of the number of triumphs that took place, because Romans recorded it as accurately as possible to be fair, not entirely accurately, because they attribute one triumph to Romulus, the founder of Rome, and he probably didn't exist. So there's some fuzzy edges, but, basically, they've got a list of triumphs and they add up to more than 200. What is interesting, there is a real big break in the kind of triumphal procession that you get in the reign of the first emperor Augustus in 19 BCE, because after 19, no one who is not either the emperor himself or a prince of the royal house, no ordinary general receives a triumph. So up to 19 BC through the Republic of Rome, it is for ordinary or rather the extraordinary generals to claim their triumph. Under Augustus, it becomes a royal ritual. The logic is that all wars after that point are fought as if they were the emperor's wars. So when a triumph comes, it is the emperor who gets the honor of the triumph. So they become very, very monarchical, which they hadn't been up to that point. It's very hard to say which is their grandest or the most extravagant, over the top lavish, or bad taste of these ceremonies, but the ceremony that people pick out and that Romans picked out was the two-day ceremony that Pompey the Great held in 61 BCE for his conquest of the pirates, and also his conquest of the Eastern King Mithridates. Now this starts out by being extraordinary, because triumphs by and large are one day affairs. You know, you load everything up, you process through the city of Rome, you get to the Temple of Jupiter, Optimus Maximus, you do a sacrifice, and you have a great dinner, and that's it. Now what Pompey does, he says that he cannot squash all his stuff into a procession that lasts just one day, so it's a two-day procession. It is full of really, really extravagant spoils, particularly from the court of Mithridates. Actually one of these we have one bronze pot, which almost certainly goes back to Pompey's triumph and still survives. It's in the Capitoline Museums at Rome, and it's clearly came from Mithridates' kingdom, and it's very, very likely was one of the things that was actually carried in the procession. It is not by any means the grandest, it's a rather elegant plain bronze picture about 70-centimeters high. But we read of most fantastic ornamented sundials, we read kind of barrels load of coin, we read even of an image of Pompey himself presumably made out of the spoils, where his head carried in this procession as part of the fruits of conquest. His head is made entirely out of pearl, it must have been a colossal head made of pearl. It has to be said that this is one of the cases where in a sense Pompey got it a bit wrong. I mean people are always looking at the triumph, both wanting to admire it, be impressed, but also wanting to say, "I think this is a bit over the top, I think this is a bit vulgar actually, I think this is too luxurious." So there's always that counterpoint. And the head of Pompey in pearl was one of the objects that really captured that critical tendency, 'cause people said two things about it, they said this is a very effeminizing thing to do. Pearls in the Roman imagination were very, very much associated with women. So the critics of Pompey said "How could he have his head represented in that female material?" But there were also, I'm afraid, rather nastier insinuations made later because Pompey, in the end, he's the major adversary of Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar and Pompey fight it out in the 40s BC basically for who's going to run the Roman world. Caesar wins, Pompey flees to Egypt. When he gets to Egypt, he thinks he's getting out of the boat to safety, actually, but the Egyptians on the shore cut his head off, and people looked back at this head, that is just the head of Pompey carried in the procession, and they wagged their fingers and said, "Hmm. That was an omen of what was going to happen to him in the end." So there is always this saying that huge luxury, and Romans are very moralizing about this, huge luxury is always a bit dangerous. The moment of the general's, the acme of his career, you know, the triumph is kind of thing you'd say what little Roman boys dream of as being the biggest success they could ever achieve: a triumphal procession. And yet, it's very often slightly tainted with potential disaster, potential overreach. Any number of stories of, for example, triumphing generals who very soon after found that their sons died. Now kind of the success of the triumph comes back to haunt you. There was always a question of how far you really were as the triumphing general, the star of the show, and it was obviously extremely desirable if you are a general to have a great king in front of you, marching along in front of you to show that you had conquered a king, there was uncomfortably often a sense that the crowd were actually more interested in the king and the princesses and the sad captains, than they were in the general himself. So, it's not all win if you have a triumph. There is a wonderful quote from the Roman philosopher, Seneca, who was also the tutor of the Emperor Nero, I'm thinking in part about triumphs, and it says, "Petty sacrilege gets punished. Sacrilege on a grand scale, that is what gets you a triumph." It's a quote which Seneca is partly drawing and adapting from a famous story about Alexander the Great who captures a pirate and asks a pirate, this is in the 4th century BC, he says to the pirate, "Why did you take other people's property, what? Why did you steal things?" And the pirate replies, "If you steal things and you've only got one ship, you're called a pirate. If you steal things and you've got a whole army and a navy, you are called a king," right? Seneca, in a way, is adapting that, and having one eye on the triumph. And I think it's quite I very much like, because it shows the Romans really reflecting on reward, morality, on who makes it big, who doesn't, who gets blamed, and we do have, or much of the modern world I think has a tendency, to think of Romans as if they had, you know, no problem about any of this, they went off and they conquered things, and they came back with their booty and their loot, and they didn't bat an eyelid, they thought it was holy to their good, they had no morals group. What Seneca's saying is that, you know, if you rip things off, you go to temple and you take all the sacred objects from the temple, and you're just a single guy, you'll find yourself punished. If you do that on a grand scale, Rome honors you. And the question, of course, is that he's raising about Roman imperialism and the Roman Empire is it actually different, you know? Is it just theft on a very big scale? Now it's those kind of worries I think that the Romans are negotiating when they talk about triumph.

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