Mark the Golden: on Pomp
In book seven of his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says this:
Πομπῆς κενοσπουδία, ἐπὶ σκηνῆς δράματα, ποίμνια, ἀγέλαι, διαδορατισμοί, κυνιδίοις ὀστάριον ἐρριμμένον, ψωμίον εἰς τὰς τῶν ἰχθύων δεξαμενάς, μυρμήκων ταλαιπωρίαι καὶ ἀχθοφορίαι, μυιδίων ἐπτοημένων διαδρομαί, σιγιλλάρια νευροσπαστούμενα. χρὴ οὖν ἐν τούτοις εὐμενῶς μὲν καὶ μὴ καταφρυαττόμενον ἑστάναι, παρακολουθεῖν μέντοι, ὅτι τοσούτου ἄξιος ἕκαστός ἐστιν, ὅσου ἄξιά ἐστι ταῦτα περὶ ἃ ἐσπούδακεν.
Shows of pomp in all their emptiness, dramas on the stage, flocks, herds, gladiators fighting, a bone thrown to curs, crumbs into the ponds of greedy fish, the pain and endless burden-bearing of toiling ants, the running to-and-fro of terrified mice, marionettes dancing nervously up and down on their strings: amongst all these objects of the world you must stand firm, unaffected, unindignant; with just as much right reason and understanding as is merited by the value of those things by which a man is moved and by which his worth is determined.
The Greek word πομπή (pompa in Latin) means a procession or a parade: it’s not exactly the same thing as a Roman triumph, as pictured at the head of this post — to be precise, a triumph was a special kind of pompa, particularly showy and spectacular, reserved for great military commanders and emperors who had won major wars or captured significant territory. Marcus Aurelius took part in a few himself. Here he is, processing triumphantly through Rome after defeating Rome’s enemies in AD 176:
Marcus is deprecating even this kind of thing as merely empty spectacle, vacuousness, on a par with σκηνῆς δράματα, dramas on the stage (the scaena, whence we get our word ‘scene’), or διαδορατισμοί, gladiatorial contests in the arena. Actually διαδορατισμός means δια, two men, δορατισμός, fighting one another with spears. This was originally men on foot, but by the time of the Byzantine empire it had become mounted men charging one another with long spears — the origin of the later medieval sport of jousting:
Among the tournaments diadoratismos (διαδορατισμός) stood out. More commonly known as kontaromachia (κονταρομαχία), kontarochtipima (κονταροχτύπημα) or tzostra (τζόστρα), this was a challenging game in which mounted armor men displayed their skills in jousting and fighting … This game gained favor in Byzantine at this time due to the fact that a number of emperors and wealthy, land-owning aristocrats had risen from the military class. It became the most popular form of entertainment for the Western European knights and nobles in the Middle Ages.
τζόστρα is behind Old French word jouster and our joust. Strictly, as any fule kno, ‘gladiators’ were men who fought with gladii, the short stabbing sword of the Roman army. Lots of other kinds of fighters, with other kinds fo weapon, competed in what we now call the gladiatorial arena.
This perspective on the bread-and-circuses popular entertainment of Ancient Rome, framed in the actual words of Marcus Aurelius himself, has a particular contemporary zing. Our most current sense of this Stoic philosopher-ruler is Richard Harris’s gerontious performance in Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Gladiator (2000), failing to persuade his son Joaquin Phoenix to pass power over to manly Russell Crowe and ending up being suffocated by a pillow for his pains. That leads directly to the thrilling spectacle of, precisely, all those vain and pompous shows in the circus maximus that are the heart of that splendid film.
For actual Marcus Aurelius, these shows were all nothings: ‘a bone thrown to hungry curs, a bait for greedy fishes’ — a disdainful, dismissive view of the lower classes (‘throughout his life Marcus displayed a consistent pattern of sombre reserve and distaste for lesser mortals’). These people — us, that is —are mere toiling ants, frightened mice running to-and-fro, marionettes dancing nervously up and down on our strings. Marcus hovers above all this vulgar brouhaha. He is saying he does so because of his Stoic philosophy, although we may believe he is only able to take this perspective because he is emperor, rich, powerful and elevated. For us, caught up in the roil and moil of ordinary life, scurrying about, worked and pressured and fearful, these empty shows, these vain simulacra, are distractions by which we are moved. By such passions are we known, and known to be empty, silly, vain.
Marcus’s is a condescending, contemptuous view of the human race. It is also a strangely limited one. That a pompa might not be empty — that it might contain, precisely by being so spectacular, meaningful political purpose, ‘appealing through the perceptive senses directly to the emotion of the spectators and thereby creating in them a feeling of exaltation, celebration, and awe’, reinforcing the emperor’s charisma and authority, settling power and guaranteeing the security and stability of the state [Richard Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (New Haven 1999), 239–40] — is not part of Marcus Aurelius’s argument, though he was adept at politics and ruled for a long time. He did not actually ban gladiatorial contests, although according to Cassius Dio [72.29.3] he did insist that gladiators be armed only with blunted swords so that blood would not be shed, though Dio goes on to say that the populace were indeed hungry for blood. His son gave the populace what they wanted.
In an essay on Ridley Scott’s movie, Lasse Thomassen makes the point that the rather simplistic ‘moral’ of the film (‘the message of Gladiator is clear: dictators are bad, and democracy and the rule of law are the best way to organize a society’) is rather undercut by the jouissance of the film’s commitment to violence.
What then is the problem with Gladiator? The problem is that the violence of Maximus — the violence that (re)founds the republic — goes unacknowledged for what it is: founding violence. This violence may appear rational and justified from the retroactive perspective of what it institutes … however at the moment of the institution of the new order it is not clear that the violence is sufficient and necessary. [Lasse Thomassen, ‘Gladiator, Violence, and the Founding of a Republic’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 42:1 (2009), 148]
Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.
