From The Times, November 9, 2007

When is a war not over? History tells us it is best not to celebrate too soon, says Mary Beard

IN AD17 THE DASHING PRINCE Germanicus was notching up some victories for the Romans against the barbarians in the Rhineland. They weren't quite the stunning successes he cracked them up to be. In fact the enemy commander Arminius was still at large, no doubt holed up Osama-style in a cave, under the protection of some rogue state.

All the same, the optimistic reports from the front annoyed Germanicus's uncle, the emperor Tiberius, who tended to take a jealous view of the successes of his nearest and dearest. But how was he to rein in the boy? The answer was to declare the whole war brilliantly finished and to celebrate a magnificent victory parade — or “triumph” — in the city of Rome. The congratulations would stick in the old man's throat, but the ceremony would at least put an end to Germanicus's exploits.

The triumph was speedily arranged. The prisoners were marched through the city in front of the general's chariot. No Arminius, of course. But they had managed to round up his wife and son. There was also a magnificent display of models and replicas of the sites of battle and the mountains and rivers of barbarian territory. Again standard Roman practice. But on this occasion cynics couldn't resist observing that it wasn't only these geographical features that were a sham.

The victory itself was fake.

It's hard not to be reminded of George Bush's famous “Mission Accomplished” moment. Of course, when the President landed on the aircraft carrier to announce “the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free”, he wasn't in the business of undermining a successful general. Nor was this a triumphal parade through the streets of Washington or New York. Instead the occasion was brought to a mass audience by television.

But the same kind of fakery was involved. Bush perhaps believed what he was saying. But it was premature to imply that the mission had been accomplished and false to claim that Iraq was free. He was also using the same kind of amateur dramatic stunts as the Romans had deployed with their model rivers and mountains. Until recently, I imagined that this aircraft carrier was somewhere within a thousand miles of the Persian Gulf. Why else did he need to land on it in a jet? But that was the point. The ship was already safely home, off the coast of California. The jet was presumably used to give the impression that he had flown out a very long way.

To be kinder to Tiberius and Bush, victory celebrations are almost always paradoxical affairs. There is, for example, the simple question of whether we can be certain that the war really has ended. Those who plan these occasions always have to face the nasty possibility that a belated round of insurgency will make all their carefully choreographed pomp and circumstance look decidedly hollow.

This was precisely the joke in a nice New Yorker cartoon some years back. It showed a couple of Roman builders putting the finishing touches to a triumphal arch: one is saying to the other, “So far so good. Let's hope we win”. Many “triumphs” are wishful thinking — and always have been.

There is also the question of just how triumphalist celebrations should be. The Romans opted for the public display of their prisoners and their loot, from bullion through statues and other works of art to the flora and fauna of the conquered territories. Napoleon was happy to mimic this when he paraded the art works he had taken from Italy in a Roman-style procession through Paris on their way to his new museum in the Louvre. But in 1815 The Times was sniffy about the idea that the British would stoop to any such thing after Waterloo.

Prisoners, in the West at least, haven't played a main part in public victory celebrations for decades. But again television now does the job of bringing the images of the defeated before our eyes, the proof of our victory. The best-known modern controversy about how victory should be fêted was the scrap between Robert Runcie and Margaret Thatcher. Runcie — Archbishop of Canterbury and a distinguished classicist who knew all about Roman triumphs — urged that the Falklands commemoration in 1982 should not be triumphalist. He made it as even-handed an occasion as you could get. Prayers were said for the dead on both sides.

This was certainly a victory for liberal compassion. But Runcie, with his classical background, may have been more hard-headed than Thatcher realised. For one of the lessons the Romans learnt from their triumphal processions was a simple one: the more you degraded your victims, the more likely you were to turn the crowd's eyes (and sympathies) on to them.

Roman literature provides plenty of examples of the audience weeping at the sight of the pathetic prisoners, rather than cheering the commander. And there is a marvellous 19thcentury painting of that fake triumph of Germanicus in AD17. You can hardly see the victorious general. Tiberius is sitting in the background looking decidedly grumpy. The star of the show is Arminius's wife, the proud captive Thusnelda.

The Roman Triumph by Mary Beard
Harvard University Press, £19.95