Scream-of-Consciousness

Io triumphe!

The problem with having your eventual success treated by kith and kin as a forgone conclusion, is that it tends to cheapen the actual victory. It may have been inevitable, but it was still damned hard work.

As I was driving south yesterday for the fifth-to-last-time (yes, I'm bloody well counting), I reflected that the ancient Romans had the right idea.

When a Roman general had a great martial victory, he was awarded a triumph by the Senate. He would ride into the city in a chariot, crowned with laurel, his procession led first by the senators, a few massive carts laden with the spoils of war, trumpeters, flute players, a white bull for sacrifice, his captives in chains, maybe a couple of elephants if they were in season. Behind him stood a man whose only job it was to whisper in his ear, admonishing him to remember he was still, in fact, mortal. (Respice post te, hominem memento te...) Which can be easy to forget when the cheering crowd is showering you with flowers and your soldiers are marching behind you shouting Io triumphe and singing, you know, paeans and stuff.

Which, I whined into my cellphone, is how I would like to celebrate my graduation next Saturday. What, after all, is Ziggy in a mortarboard compared with a few hundred Carthaginians or Gauls in chains?

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus.
Now is the time to drink, now the time to dance footloose upon the earth.

Where's my purple toga?

posted by lisamarlene @ 6:01 AM