This Roman ritual made conquered kings beg to die | Mary Beard

0:00 Triumphs differed hugely in scale and spectacle.

0:03 Gradually, it seems they got more and more lavish as Roman conquest

0:09 reached into places that were really rich and in Roman terms really exotic.

0:16 I think the main function of the triumph is

0:19 for Romans to think about what it is to be Roman.

0:24 But it has another side to it which is it puts fear into the enemy.

0:31 It certainly provided the model in Europe for uh

0:37 celebrations of royal or military power ever after.

0:43 I'm Mary Beard and I've worked on the ancient Romans for 50

0:48 years and I've written quite a lot of books about them.

0:52 I've just started a new podcast called Instant Classics,

0:58 which is about Greece and Rome.

1:02 The Roman triumph, the greatest celebration of all time.

1:07 A Roman triumph or a triumphal procession

1:10 was awarded to a super successful Roman general.

1:13 It's not clear whether there were any exact rules for this.

1:18 Some ancient writers said, "Ah, you had to have killed 5,000 of the enemy to be

1:24 awarded a triumph." We don't know if that's entirely true.

1:28 What it was was a vast procession through the streets of Rome leading up

1:34 to the temple of Jupiter best and greatest

1:37 on the capital line hill with the general,

1:41 the successful general standing in a very

1:46 elaborate ceremonial chariot dressed up in an extraordinary

1:51 purple outfit with a purple cloak and silver

1:55 stars which apparently mimicked the statue of Jupiter,

1:59 the god himself on the capital line hill.

2:04 He processed through the city up to the temple to make

2:09 a sacrifice to Jupiter in honor really of his victory.

2:12 But it wasn't just that.

2:14 In front of the general's chariot,

2:17 you find the captives that he'd taken in the course

2:22 of the war and the spoils of victory.

2:26 Those captives, we have some descriptions of them.

2:30 Uh, and they are seen to be most impressive when

2:34 they're of the highest rank and the most exotically dressed.

2:37 I mean, what a general really wants is

2:41 to have a king walking before his chariot.

2:44 A king in his regal outfit, but shackled and captured by the power of Rome.

2:53 Some of them we can see

2:55 from the sculptures that we have depicting this procession.

2:59 Some of them seem to have been actually carried in this procession.

3:03 Not walking.

3:04 Some certainly did walk,

3:06 but some were kind of put on on onto platforms and bound

3:10 hand and foot were carried along for people to look at.

3:15 And we know that that the audience of the triumph

3:19 were drawn to see what the people were like.

3:23 The Romans had now conquered.

3:25 Now it it could sometimes rebound.

3:27 They sometimes felt very sorry for them actually.

3:31 But the general is really parading his power over

3:37 the the dynasts and the ordinary soldiers uh that he had conquered.

3:43 There was the booty,

3:44 some of the best bits of loot that he'd taken in the course of his campaign.

3:51 We often think of the spoils of victory in a rather limited way.

3:57 Actually, we think of sculptures, precious works of art,

4:02 um coin coming in to Rome and being on display to the people in the procession.

4:09 And there were certainly plenty of those.

4:12 But it goes much further than that.

4:15 Um what they were wanting to do was to as it

4:20 were kind of exemplify what the conquered territory was.

4:24 Triumphs differed hugely in scale and spectacle.

4:29 Gradually it seems they got more and more lavish as Roman conquest

4:34 reached into places that were really rich and in Roman terms really exotic.

4:40 And I think that what you have to see the triumph

4:45 as in part is literally something that brings the Roman

4:50 audience who might have never been outside a radius of 30

4:55 miles of the city of Rome or certainly not Italy.

4:58 It brings them face to face with the kind

5:02 of stuff and creatures that they had never ever seen.

5:06 I mean, they've not got picture books of what it looks like when you go abroad.

5:13 There are some representations of of the foreign

5:16 places you find in painting and mosaic.

5:20 That's true.

5:21 But this is a literally bringing the Roman people face to face with the world

5:28 and I think slightly uneasily from our point

5:32 of view the world that they believe they've conquered.

5:36 So you could find animals on display.

5:40 You could find plants, trees on display.

5:44 In one triumph of 71 CE by the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus,

5:51 they had balsam trees brought from Judea.

5:54 So you're what you're seeing is not just

5:59 the elaborate brick and sometimes it is very elaborate.

6:04 this extraordinary stories of, you know,

6:07 seeing the king's throne encrusted with jewels carried along in procession,

6:12 but it's also the flora and fauna of of the captured place.

6:19 And that combined sometimes in a strange way

6:23 with boasts on the part of the general.

6:26 So that you get placards carried along with that which

6:32 list the places that the general conquered the individual town.

6:38 Placards which depict the uh the victories happening,

6:43 the destroyed forts of the enemy.

6:47 And behind the general came at least some of his victorious troops.

6:53 They interestingly were were said to um have sang

6:58 lewd songs slightly at the expense of the general

7:02 so he didn't get above himself and just in case he should get in above himself.

7:08 Um there he is dressed as Jupiter Optimus Maximus you

7:11 don't want him to think that he really is a god.

7:16 It said that there was a slave

7:18 in the chariot with him saying remember you're a man.

7:22 remember you're a man.

7:23 Remember you're a man the whole time.

7:25 But they go through the city like that.

7:28 It it's now I think very hard to get

7:31 a a sense of the the size and the excitement of it.

7:36 We know they put up special stands so people could get a good view.

7:40 I suppose I tend to think of this as a Brit as something

7:44 like what you might see in the um the coronation of a British monarch.

7:49 But I think the coronation of a British

7:51 monarch is is is a rather feeble comparison.

7:54 You know, I think people were coming to see what the general had done.

8:00 They were coming into the center of Rome to see what Roman conquest meant.

8:07 So it's hugely impressive, but it's also very very ideologically rooted.

8:12 I think the main function of the triumph is for the local Roman audience.

8:18 It's for Romans to think about what it is to be Roman.

8:22 But it has another side to it, which is it puts fear into the enemy.

8:29 It's a a ceremony news of which I suspect

8:34 travels that that enacts the humiliation of the defeated.

8:38 And we know that there are several uh defeated monarchs

8:43 and generals who kill themselves rather than be displayed in the triumph.

8:50 The most famous of those, I think, is Queen Cleopatra,

8:55 who probably heard all about triumphs

8:57 from her lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony.

9:01 when Octavian the future emperor Augustus wants to take her back to parade

9:10 as you know the key bit of booty in his triumphal procession.

9:16 She is said to have said I will not

9:20 be triumphed over and that accounts for her suicide.

9:24 And I think that you can see that the eyes

9:29 of the Roman people and your the sheer

9:35 humiliation of becoming a piece of spoil is something

9:41 that you might think and we know some did.

9:44 I am not going to do that.

9:46 I am simply not.

9:48 You know Cleopatra is a refusnic.

9:50 Mithridates is another refusnic.

9:52 It's a ceremony of celebration.

9:54 It's also a ceremony of humiliation.

9:56 The triumph must have been at its biggest,

10:00 it must have been quite extraordinary.

10:03 It's hard to imagine that there was any Roman celebration that was more,

10:11 you know, confident in some ways of um of its own spectacle.

10:17 And the root of a triumphal procession, we don't exactly know where it goes,

10:23 but it must have been able to accommodate thousands, hundreds of thousands.

10:28 It is really, really big news.

10:31 Whether it's the biggest kind of procession of its type in human history,

10:37 it's impossible to say, but it certainly provided the model in Europe

10:44 for uh celebrations of royal or military power ever after.

10:51 Um successful generals in the Renaissance imitating um

10:56 the Roman triumph to celebrate their own kinds of victory.

11:00 So I think in many ways it provides

11:03 a model for what it is like to celebrate conquest.

11:08 Uh it's a template for how the city puts its might on display.

11:14 We have a very good idea of the number of triumphs

11:19 that took place because um Romans recorded it as accurately as possible.

11:23 to be fair, not entirely accurately

11:26 because they attribute one triumph to Romulus,

11:28 the founder of Rome, and he probably didn't exist.

11:32 So, there's some fuzzy edges, but basically, they've got a list of triumphs,

11:36 and they add up to more than 200.

11:39 What is interesting,

11:40 there is a real big break in the kind of triumphal procession

11:45 that you get in the reign of the first emperor Augustus in 19 B.CE.

11:52 Because after 19 no one who is not either

11:56 the emperor himself or a prince of the royal house,

12:01 no ordinary general receives a triumph.

12:04 So up to 19 BC through the republic of Rome,

12:09 it is for ordinary or rather the extraordinary generals to claim their triumph.

12:15 Under Augustus, it becomes a royal ritual.

12:19 The logic is that all wars after that point are

12:24 fought as it were as if they were the emperor's wars.

12:29 So when a triumph comes, it is the emperor who gets the honor of the triumph.

12:35 So they become very very monarchical which they hadn't been up to that point.

12:41 It's very hard to say um which is which is the grandest

12:46 or the most extravagant over-the-top lavish or bad taste of these ceremonies.

12:52 But the the ceremony that people pick out and that Romans

12:58 picked out was the two-day ceremony that Pompy the Great

13:03 held in 61 B.CE E for his conquest of the pirates

13:08 and also his conquest of the eastern king Mithrates.

13:12 Now this starts out by being extraordinary

13:15 because triumphs by and large are one-day affairs.

13:18 You know you load everything up, you process through the city of Rome,

13:23 you get to the temple of Jupiter optim maximus,

13:26 you do a sacrifice and you have a great dinner and that's it.

13:31 Now what Pompy does, he says that he cannot squash all his stuff

13:37 into a procession that lasts just one day.

13:41 So it's a two-day procession.

13:45 It is full of really really extravagant

13:50 spoils particularly from the court of Mithrates.

13:55 Actually, one of these we have one bronze pot which

14:00 almost certainly goes back to Pompy's triumph and still survives.

14:04 It's in the capital museums at Rome

14:07 and it's clearly came from Mithrates's kingdom and it's

14:10 very very likely was one of the things

14:13 that was actually carried in the procession.

14:16 It is not by any means the grandest.

14:19 It's a rather elegant plain bronze picture about 70 cm high.

14:25 But we read of most fantastic ornamented sund dials.

14:31 We read of kind of barrels load of coin.

14:36 We read even of an image of Pompy

14:40 himself presumably made out of the spoils where

14:44 his head carried in this procession as as were

14:49 as part of the fruits of conqueror.

14:52 His head is made entirely out of pearl.

14:56 It must have been a colossal head made of pearl.

15:00 Um it has to be said that this is one

15:03 of the cases where in a sense Pompy got it a bit wrong.

15:07 I mean people are always looking at the triumph both wanting to admire it be

15:14 impressed but also wanting to say I think this is a bit over the top.

15:20 I think this is a bit vulgar actually.

15:22 I think I think this is too luxurious.

15:25 So there's always that counterpoint and the head of Pompium Pearl was uh one

15:32 of the objects that really captured that critical

15:36 tendency because people said two things about it.

15:40 They said um this is a very epheminizing thing to do.

15:46 Pearls in the Roman imagination were very very much associated with women.

15:51 So the critics of Pompy said, "How could he have his head represented

15:57 in that female material?" But there were also,

16:01 I'm afraid, rather nastier insinuations made later because Pompy in the end,

16:08 he's the the major adversary of Julius Caesar.

16:12 Julius Caesar and Pompy fight it out in the 40s

16:15 BC basically for who's going to run the Roman world.

16:19 Caesar wins.

16:20 Pompy flees to Egypt.

16:21 Uh when he gets to Egypt,

16:24 he thinks he's getting out of the boat to safety actually.

16:29 But the Egyptians on the shore uh cut

16:32 his head off and people looked back at this head.

16:36 is just the head of Pompy carried

16:39 in the procession and they wagged their fingers

16:43 and said that was an omen of what was going to happen to him in the end.

16:50 So there is always this sense that huge luxury and Romans

16:55 are very moralizing about this huge luxury is always a bit dangerous.

17:02 the moment of the general's the acme of his career.

17:05 You know, the triumph is kind of thing.

17:08 You'd say, "What what do little Roman boys dream

17:11 of?" uh as being the biggest success they could ever achieve,

17:16 a triumphal procession.

17:18 And yet, it's very often slightly tainted with potential disaster,

17:25 potential overreach.

17:26 any number of stories of for example triumphing generals

17:31 who very soon after found that their sons died.

17:35 You know that it kind of the success of the triumph comes back to haunt you.

17:42 There was always a question of how how

17:46 far you really were as the triumphing general, the star of the show.

17:52 And it was obviously extremely desirable if you're

17:56 a general to have a great king in front

17:58 of you marching along in front of you to show that you had conquered a king.

18:03 There was uncomfortably often a sense that the crowd

18:07 were actually more interested in the king

18:10 and the princesses and the sad captains than they were in the general himself.

18:16 So it's not all win if you have a trial.

18:20 There is a a wonderful quote from the Roman

18:23 philosopher Senica who was also the tutor

18:26 of the emperor Nero um thinking in part about

18:32 triumphs and it says petty sacrilege gets punished sacrilege

18:36 on a grand scale that is what gets you

18:41 a triumph it's a quote which Senica is partly

18:45 drawing and adapting from a famous story about Alexander

18:50 the eight who captures a pirate and asks a pirate.

18:54 This is in the 4th century BC.

18:57 He says to the pirate, "Why did you take other people's property?" Right?

19:02 Why did you why did you steal things?

19:05 And the pirate replies, um,

19:07 if you steal things and you've only got one ship, you're called a pirate.

19:13 If you steal things and you've got a whole army and a navy,

19:18 you're called a king, right?

19:20 Sunny in a way is adapting that and having one eye on the triumph.

19:25 And I I think it's it's a quote I very much like because it

19:31 it shows the Romans really reflecting on reward morality um on who makes it big,

19:42 who doesn't, who gets blamed.

19:44 I mean we do have or much of the modern world I think has a tendency

19:49 to think of Romans as if they had you know no problem about any of this.

19:54 They went off and they conquered things and they came back

19:57 with their booty and their loot and they didn't bat an eyelid.

20:01 They thought it was holy to their good.

20:03 They had no moral scruple.

20:05 What Zenica is saying is that you know if you rip things off,

20:09 you go to temple and you take all the sacred

20:12 objects from the temple and you're just a single guy,

20:16 you'll find yourself punished.

20:18 If you do that on a grand scale, Rome honors you.

20:23 And the question of course is that he's raising about Roman imperialism

20:28 and the Roman Empire is is actually different you know is is it

20:33 just theft on a very big scale now it's those kind of worries

20:40 I think that the Romans are are negotiating when they talk about triumph.

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