Elections, Image-Management... and Classics

Mid-Term Elections, Image-Management, Elephants, Tanks ... and Classics

One of the delights of studying the ancient classics is to observe how they continue to provide a template for every aspect of modern culture.  As I write, the results of the American mid-term elections have just come through.  James Delingpole in a Telegraph commentary (3.11.2010) refers to “the humiliating, crushing, thousands-of-floating-dead-Persians-at-Salamis-style defeat inflicted by the Tea Party movement on Democrats”; the  Obama healthcare reform had earlier been labelled a “Pyrrhic victory” (as had Christine O’Donnell’s Republican nomination and—again on November 3—also Harry Reid’s wafer-thin win in Nevada); rewinding still further, we all have vivid recollections how Barack Obama’s win in 2008 was hailed as a truly messianic event, a Second Coming of sorts, complete with Hollywood glitz and polystyrene stage-props more fitting for a production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.  The Roman poet Horace described Jupiter as “moving the universe with his brow” (cuncta supercilio movens, Odes 3.1.8): many expected the same of the new president, whose “Yes we can” has an approximate Latin equivalent Horace’s nil mortalibus ardui est (Odes 1.3.37).  And so on.

The mid-terms have demonstrated again that image is everything: in recent years PR consultants and impression managers have become a new breed of super-tycoons—but the phenomenon itself has been around much longer, albeit without gurus like Karl Rove.  Ancient politicians did their own self-promotion.  Let’s take a particularly egregious example, which at first sight looks like a simple absurdity.  The year is 81BC.  The leading politician at Rome is Sulla—dour, autocratic, intolerant.  A rising star has appeared in the person of young Pompey—whose extraordinary military successes in Africa are noted with resentment by Sulla; Pompey is ordered to send his legions back to Rome.  Sulla perceives the brilliant young commander as an upstart and comments gracelessly, “It was evidently his fate, now that he was an old man, to have boys for his antagonists” (Plutarch, Pompey 13.5).  The senior politician didn’t take kindly to being overshadowed by the charismatic youngster.  Earlier, when Sulla had been presented with the head of another rival (the younger Marius), he sneered: “First learn to row, before trying your hand at the helm” (Appian, Civil War 1.94); on another occasion he mocked Pompey for having scarcely grown a beard (Plutarch, Pompey 14.2).  All of which must have rankled with the ambitious young commander...

In March 81 Pompey returned to Rome after a brilliant campaign in Africa, and celebrated his first triumph; he was a mere 25 at the time.  Sulla at first tried to block the fanfare on the grounds that Pompey was constitutionally too young.  But in the event the show went ahead in truly grand style.  The victorious general intended to parade in a chariot drawn by four elephants (!)—but when the triumphal arch proved too narrow for this unorthodox mode of transport, he proceeded in the more conventional horse-drawn chariot (Plutarch, Pompey 14).  What on earth was he thinking?

First, the elephants evoked Alexander the Great (whose coins frequently depicted these beasts); at a later triumph, Pompey actually wore a cloak that had allegedly belonged to Alexander himself.  Pompey was casting himself as a second Alexander.  But why this extravagant and self-promoting gesture?  Was Pompey trying to make a statement?  The attention-grabbing theatrics make excellent sense in connection with the simmering tensions with old Sulla.  Alexander was famously a paradigm of the supremely ambitious young man whose spectacular achievements transcend his age and propel him beyond the normal frames of reference—a nuance not lost on the Romans.  This interpretation of the Pompey-as-Alexander gesture fits well with his animosity with Sulla, and with what we know about Pompey’s natural ambitions.  After Sulla’s disparaging put-down (the beardless youth too young to celebrate a triumph), Pompey in an ironic riposte meant to exploit the Alexandrian association to drive home the point that he could indeed be helmsman without first having served on the rowing benches!  And in conclusion, we might fast-forward to September 1988, when US presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis, accused for being soft on defence, was photographed riding on a tank (the martial posture backfired badly, and exposed the very un-Alexandrian Greek-American to much ridicule).  So not that much has changed!  I suspect Pompey’s grand idea with the elephants would have gone down well as a modern American electioneering stunt!