Winners Are Grinners
Emily Wilson; 5/7/08; Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard University Press).
The Roman Triumph; Mary Beard; Harvard University Press
Everybody above the age of four knows how important it is not to be a sore loser, and how difficult. When you lose your whole fortune to your sister at Monopoly, you are not supposed to burst into tears, accuse her of cheating, hit her, tear up the paper dollars or run screaming from the room. You are supposed to be gracious in defeat: congratulate the winner, allow her to enjoy her victory, stifle your sorrow and pretend not to mind too much.It is perhaps unfair that the moral and emotional burden of the situation should fall on tie one who has suffered defeat, but the same rules apply beyond the playroom. Even in war, when winning and losing is a matter of life or death, we still hang on to the unrealistic hope that the losing nation will do the decent thing, that it will accept defeat with good grace rather than fighting back with terrorism or breaking up into civil war.
See: The Australian; No Internet Text; The New Republic;
We assume that it is relatively easy to behave well when you win. After all, winners do not have to grapple with anger, resentment, bitterness or loss. But the complicating truth is that winning brings its own social and ethical hazards. The winners have to demonstrate that they are not ungrateful or arrogant and they have to avoid rubbing the losers’ faces in the dirt. The losers may have been humbled, but humility is expected of the winners. In political elections it can be just as difficult to win with grace: voters do not like losers but the conspicuous consumption of victory is unappealing.
Military victory raises even more difficult moral and political dilemmas. For one thing, although a single emperor or president may be morally and legally responsible for starting a war, the fighting — the winning and the losing — is done by nameless soldiers. War and Peace teaches, among many things, that battles are fought by the Pierres, not the Napoleons. More-over, the losers in war are not merely disappointed; they are wounded, impoverished, enslaved, raped, orphaned, widowed or dead.
Modern commemoration of war tends to focus on the sacrifice made by the unknown soldier rather than on the glory of the triumphant general or president. It would seem mean and outrageous for a US president to commemorate a war — however gloriously victorious it might have been — with a lavish procession through Washington in a four-horse chariot, clad in purple, with a golden laurel crown, his cheeks and chest smeared with blood, riding high above the defeated barbarian chieftains, who walk before him wearing exotic costumes and weighted down with chains, along with a troop of half-drunk soldiers carrying the loot they have seized in battle for the benefit of the city. Our wars kill millions more people than those of the Romans, but we celebrate them with less gusto.
It is tempting to conclude that we are less bloodthirsty than the primitive Romans, who celebrated their victories in precisely this way. But Mary Beard’s fine book about the Roman way of winning suggests that even the triumphal parade — that most obvious case of Roman militarism and patriotic pride — was a far more complex cultural phenomenon than most historians have recognised. Beard calls her book “a manifesto of sorts” and one of its tenets is that the Romans were no less complicated and conflicted than we are. Her book is a case study in ancient history, but also an invitation to reconsider representations of victory and loss in our culture.
It ranges among literary, historiographical, artistic, architectural, numismatic, epigraphical, and archeological sources with impressive ease and fluency, showing that the preoccupation with triumph haunts all these fields of Roman cultural life: from Ovid’s cheeky claim that triumphal processions could be good for picking up girls, to the many triumphal arches that the triumphalist Romans erected, which Beard reads as attempts to construct a permanent memorial from an essentially fleeting parade.
In ancient Rome, triumphs were the only occasions on which soldiers in full battle gear were allowed to march through the city. The full-scale triumph was relatively rare in most periods, but the triumph was, as Beard convincingly shows, a central element in the Roman political and cultural imagination. It was the single most important occasion for the Romans to dramatise the connections between foreign policy and domestic power. The victorious general, bloody from battle, rode straight from his parade to his inauguration in domestic government.
During the past century or so, historians have built up a very clear image of what happened at a typical Roman triumph: the route through the city, what the general wore, who marched where and so on. But Beard brilliantly shows that most of it is a scholarly or literary fabrication supported by very slender evidence, or by none at all; or it is a reconstruction based on evidence from authors in widely different time periods, each of whom has his own axe to grind. The standard claim, for example, that a slave stood behind the general saying, “Look behind you. Remember you are a man”, is a result of stitching together totally different pieces of evidence, which Beard meticulously picks apart.
The demolition work is the most obvious accomplishment of her book. But Beard’s bulldozer also points to a new building project. Tradition, she reminds us, involves a constant process of cultural invention or reinvention. She argues well that cultural history is more interesting, and more scholarly, than the old models of positivist reconstruction of a unified narrative of the past. We all think we know that Cleopatra killed herself because she refused to be paraded in a Roman triumph by the victorious Octavian.
But Beard reminds us that similar stories of famous prisoners who committed suicide rather than appear defeated before the Roman city recur suspiciously often in the literature of triumph, even before the defeat of Cleopatra. We should not, then, read these stories as evidence for the (frustratingly unknowable) experience of those defeated by the Roman army. What the stories do illuminate is the complexity of Roman responses to Roman victory. They point to the limits on Roman power, given that Cleopatra’s asp could help her outwit her enemies. On the other hand, as Beard emphasises, the stories clearly celebrate “the inexorable power of Roman conquest and triumph”: for a Roman prisoner, death is the only alternative to total humiliation.
Beard claims that “it is warrior states that produce the most sophisticated critique of the militaristic values they uphold”. But she acknowledges that the Romans were not proto-pacifists, and argues, explicitly against the claim — often made by classical scholars and Italian tour guides — that these parades were a way to expiate a sense of war guilt. Beard suggests that the Romans were not particularly worried about whether war was worth the cost of thousands of Roman lives, or about whether Rome had a right to colonise, or enslave, or impose Roman values
on the rest of the world. For the Romans, the big questions raised by the triumph were not “Is war wrong?” or even “Is this particular war worth celebrating?” The questions that vexed the Romans were rather: “What are the limits of a single man’s power?” and “How rich is too rich?” The triumph, in which a single general or emperor rode high above the city surrounded by wealth gathered from far-flung regions of the world, provided a memorable image of those perennial Roman concerns: the glories and the dangers of wealth, luxury and tyranny.
Triumphs were, among other things, exercises in public relations.
Beard’s book is particularly good on the ways in which public figures — then as now — try to massage dubious military action into an acceptable public shape; and how easily the meanings of victory and defeat can slip from the control of its organisers. Some Romans were perfectly well aware of how triumphs could be used for political spin; and this in itself, of course, reduced their political usefulness.
An example is the triumph of Germanicus in AD 17 under the rule of Tiberius. Germanicus had won victories in battle over German tribes, but he had by no means conquered the whole of Germany. Tacitus comments dryly on the hypocrisy involved: “A triumph was decreed to Germanicus while the war was still going on.”
When George W. Bush went to Israel in January, for the first time in his presidency, the trip seemed designed to perform some of the same political work as a Roman triumph. He announced that he intended to create peace in the Middle East before the end of his term in office. Tacitus spells out the dangers of such a strategy in terms that seem applicable to today. The spectators, he tells us, were very impressed by the sight of Germanicus on his chariot. But the spectacle also evoked some unwelcome memories: “That popularity had not turned out well for (Germanicus’s) father, Drusus, and that the enthusiasms of the Roman people were short-lived and ill-omened.”