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. It certainly provided the   model in Europe for uh 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, "Ah, 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 capital line 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  capital line 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. Uh,   and they are seen to be most impressive  when they're of the highest rank and the   most exotically dressed. I mean, 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 on on onto platforms and  bound hand and foot were carried along for people   to look at. And we know that that the audience  of the triumph were drawn to see what the people   were like. The Romans had now conquered. Now it it  could sometimes rebound. They sometimes felt very   sorry for them actually. But the general is really  parading his power over the the dynasts and the   ordinary soldiers uh 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, um coin coming in to 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. Um 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 of the foreign places you   find in painting and mosaic. That's true. But  this is a literally bringing the Roman people   face to face with the world and I think slightly  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 you're what you're seeing  is not just the elaborate brick and sometimes it   is very elaborate. this extraordinary stories of,  you know, seeing the king's throne encrusted with   jewels carried along in procession, but it's also  the flora and fauna of of the captured place. And   that combined 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 uh the  victories happening, the destroyed forts of the   enemy. And behind the general came at least some  of his victorious troops. They interestingly were   were said to um 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 in  above himself. Um 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 it's now I think very hard to get   a a sense of the 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 um the coronation of a British monarch.  But I think the coronation of a British monarch   is is 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 a ceremony news of which I suspect   travels that that enacts the humiliation of the  defeated. And we know that there are several uh   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 Anthony. 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 your the  sheer 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 refusnic. Mithridates is  another refusnic. 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 um 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   uh celebrations of royal or military power ever  after. Um successful generals in the Renaissance   imitating um 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. Uh 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   um 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 B.CE. 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 it were 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 um which is which is the grandest or   the most extravagant over-the-top lavish or bad  taste of these ceremonies. But the the ceremony   that people pick out and that Romans picked out  was the two-day ceremony that Pompy the Great held   in 61 B.CE E for his conquest of the pirates and  also his conquest of the eastern king Mithrates.   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   optim maximus, you do a sacrifice and you have a  great dinner and that's it. Now what Pompy 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 Mithrates. Actually, one of these we  have one bronze pot which almost certainly goes   back to Pompy's triumph and still survives. It's  in the capital museums at Rome and it's clearly   came from Mithrates's 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 cm high. But we read of most  fantastic ornamented sund dials. We read of   kind of barrels load of coin. We read even of an  image of Pompy himself presumably made out of the   spoils where his head carried in this procession  as as were as part of the fruits of conqueror. His   head is made entirely out of pearl. It must have  been a colossal head made of pearl. Um it has to   be said that this is one of the cases where in  a sense Pompy 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 I think   this is too luxurious. So there's always that  counterpoint and the head of Pompium Pearl was   uh one of the objects that really captured that  critical tendency because people said two things   about it. They said um this is a very epheminizing  thing to do. Pearls in the Roman imagination were   very very much associated with women. So the  critics of Pompy 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 Pompy in the end,  he's the the major adversary of Julius Caesar.   Julius Caesar and Pompy fight it out in the 40s BC  basically for who's going to run the Roman world.   Caesar wins. Pompy flees to Egypt. Uh when he gets  to Egypt, he thinks he's getting out of the boat   to safety actually. But the Egyptians on the shore  uh cut his head off and people looked back at this   head. is just the head of Pompy carried in the  procession and they wagged their fingers and said   that was an omen of what was going to happen to  him in the end. So there is always this sense 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 what do little Roman boys dream of?" uh 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. You know that  it kind of the success of the triumph comes back   to haunt you. There was always a question of how  how far you really were as the triumphing general,   the star of the show. And it was obviously  extremely desirable if you're 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 trial. There is a a wonderful  quote from the Roman philosopher Senica who was   also the tutor of the emperor Nero um 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 Senica   is partly drawing and adapting from a famous  story about Alexander the eight 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?" Right? Why did you  why did you steal things? And the pirate replies,   um, 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're  called a king, right? Sunny in a way is adapting   that and having one eye on the triumph. And I I  think it's it's a quote I very much like because   it it shows the Romans really reflecting on reward  morality um on who makes it big, who doesn't,   who gets blamed. I mean 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  moral scruple. What Zenica is 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 is actually different you  know is is it just theft on a very big scale now   it's those kind of worries I think that the Romans  are are negotiating when they talk about triumph. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think   members community where you get  access to videos early and free.

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, "Ah, 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 capital line 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  capital line 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. Uh,   and they are seen to be most impressive  when they're of the highest rank and the   most exotically dressed. I mean, 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 on on onto platforms and  bound hand and foot were carried along for people   to look at. And we know that that the audience  of the triumph were drawn to see what the people   were like. The Romans had now conquered. Now it it  could sometimes rebound. They sometimes felt very   sorry for them actually. But the general is really  parading his power over the the dynasts and the   ordinary soldiers uh 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, um coin coming in to 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. Um 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 of the foreign places you   find in painting and mosaic. That's true. But  this is a literally bringing the Roman people   face to face with the world and I think slightly  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 you're what you're seeing  is not just the elaborate brick and sometimes it   is very elaborate. this extraordinary stories of,  you know, seeing the king's throne encrusted with   jewels carried along in procession, but it's also  the flora and fauna of of the captured place. And   that combined 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 uh the  victories happening, the destroyed forts of the   enemy. And behind the general came at least some  of his victorious troops. They interestingly were   were said to um 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 in  above himself. Um 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 it's now I think very hard to get   a a sense of the 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 um the coronation of a British monarch.  But I think the coronation of a British monarch   is is 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 a ceremony news of which I suspect   travels that that enacts the humiliation of the  defeated. And we know that there are several uh   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 Anthony. 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 your the  sheer 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 refusnic. Mithridates is  another refusnic. 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 um 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   uh celebrations of royal or military power ever  after. Um successful generals in the Renaissance   imitating um 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. Uh 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   um 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 B.CE. 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 it were 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 um which is which is the grandest or   the most extravagant over-the-top lavish or bad  taste of these ceremonies. But the the ceremony   that people pick out and that Romans picked out  was the two-day ceremony that Pompy the Great held   in 61 B.CE E for his conquest of the pirates and  also his conquest of the eastern king Mithrates.   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   optim maximus, you do a sacrifice and you have a  great dinner and that's it. Now what Pompy 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 Mithrates. Actually, one of these we  have one bronze pot which almost certainly goes   back to Pompy's triumph and still survives. It's  in the capital museums at Rome and it's clearly   came from Mithrates's 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 cm high. But we read of most  fantastic ornamented sund dials. We read of   kind of barrels load of coin. We read even of an  image of Pompy himself presumably made out of the   spoils where his head carried in this procession  as as were as part of the fruits of conqueror. His   head is made entirely out of pearl. It must have  been a colossal head made of pearl. Um it has to   be said that this is one of the cases where in  a sense Pompy 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 I think   this is too luxurious. So there's always that  counterpoint and the head of Pompium Pearl was   uh one of the objects that really captured that  critical tendency because people said two things   about it. They said um this is a very epheminizing  thing to do. Pearls in the Roman imagination were   very very much associated with women. So the  critics of Pompy 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 Pompy in the end,  he's the the major adversary of Julius Caesar.   Julius Caesar and Pompy fight it out in the 40s BC  basically for who's going to run the Roman world.   Caesar wins. Pompy flees to Egypt. Uh when he gets  to Egypt, he thinks he's getting out of the boat   to safety actually. But the Egyptians on the shore  uh cut his head off and people looked back at this   head. is just the head of Pompy carried in the  procession and they wagged their fingers and said   that was an omen of what was going to happen to  him in the end. So there is always this sense 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 what do little Roman boys dream of?" uh 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. You know that  it kind of the success of the triumph comes back   to haunt you. There was always a question of how  how far you really were as the triumphing general,   the star of the show. And it was obviously  extremely desirable if you're 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 trial. There is a a wonderful  quote from the Roman philosopher Senica who was   also the tutor of the emperor Nero um 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 Senica   is partly drawing and adapting from a famous  story about Alexander the eight 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?" Right? Why did you  why did you steal things? And the pirate replies,   um, 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're  called a king, right? Sunny in a way is adapting   that and having one eye on the triumph. And I I  think it's it's a quote I very much like because   it it shows the Romans really reflecting on reward  morality um on who makes it big, who doesn't,   who gets blamed. I mean 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  moral scruple. What Zenica is 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 is actually different you  know is is it just theft on a very big scale now   it's those kind of worries I think that the Romans  are are negotiating when they talk about triumph. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think   members community where you get  access to videos early and free.