Trump on the grand stage of ego

William J Dominik writes that Donald Trump is framed as Pyrgopolynices, a modern braggart whose performative narcissism has morphed from comedy to real power, and whose consequences are still unfolding.

THE ANCIENT WORLD has presented us with an endless gallery of pompous clowns, but none as entertaining or as instructive. Pyrgopolynices inside Boastful Soldier (Latin: Miles Gloriosus) by Roman playwright PlautusActive in the late third and early second centuries BC.

Plautus depicts Pyrgopolynices as the swollen peacock of a soldier whose every breath inflates his own legend. The name Pyrgopolinices itself, whose Greek name means “plunderer of many cities”, a title greater than any of the actions he actually performed, points to his inflated self-image. His world is a comical illusion: Thousands of enemies fall; women faint in droves; and the mere sight of it strikes fear into armies.

Modern America also knows a version of this figure: Donald Trump. Like Pyrgopolynices, Trump enjoys the spectacle. The soldier’s identity depends on the constant performance of greatness: imagined military prowess, exaggerated romantic victories, and explosively inflated personal and financial worth.

Trump’s political life has operated much the same way: a constant rallying cry, a never-ending feast of self-praise, a stage where he simultaneously plays the invincible hero, the irresistible (and stable) genius, the persecuted martyr, and the arch-con artist. Reality is merely an inconvenience, as in the case of Pyrgopolynices.

Plautus understood an eternal truth: the greater the ego, the finer the matter. Pyrgopolynices parades in ostentatious attire and boasts of victories that never occurred. Trump appears beneath golden ceilings at Mar-a-Lago and trumpets accomplishments that exist largely in his imagination. His over-the-top skills—master of business and “deals,” political prophet, unrivaled negotiator, expert on everything from COVID-19 to military strategy—reflect the soldier’s elephant-slaying bravado. Neither man lets facts interrupt a good brag or a long story.

Pyrgopolynices’ vaunted military career exists largely in the steamy world of his own imagination, a world of impossible victories and fabricated scars. Trump’s relationship with military identity offers a contemporary analogue on the Plautine frontier. While Pyrgopolynices was nursing wounds he never received, Trump famously delayed the draft five times: “bone spurs”, a medical exemption whose legitimacy has long been questioned.

The detail is almost too apt: the Commander-in-Chief who has built his entire persona on combat prowess, but whose only documented encounter with military danger takes the form of a conveniently timed anatomical derangement. This is a modern version of a Plautine-style joke – the warrior bragging about killing elephants but lying on the ground because of a suspiciously painful heel.

Both Pyrgopolynices and Trump rely on a supporting cast to match their panache. Pyrgopolynices wants his parasite Artotrogus to repeat his adventures to him with exaggerated admiration. Trump, too, has developed his own Artotrogi: advisers, staffers, media personalities, and a segment of the public complicit in the performance and willing to parrot his claims, embellish his myths, and turn hyperbole into gospel.

For both men, loyalty is measured not by competence or honesty, but by the enthusiasm of the person applauding their imagined victory.

Then there is the comedy of self-perceived erotic irresistibility that is a defining characteristic of the Plautine braggart. Plot Boastful Soldier He activates Pyrgopolynices’ delusion that every woman desires him. Trump’s public performances of masculinity—bragging about his sexual prowess (and the size of his anatomy), bragging about his victories, and leaving behind a long trail of obscenities (“grab them by the pussy”) – unmistakably belongs to the same comedy scenario. The difference is that Plautus’s audience was allowed to laugh openly. Many Americans and much of the world are not in this situation.

However, the most fundamental parallel lies in the structure of the comedy itself. Pyrgopolynices can’t see that it’s a joke. He struts around the stage, unaware that everyone around him is seeing the fuss. More cunning characters—slaves, prostitutes, and ordinary people he sees as inferior—plot his downfall by playing on his vanity. The soldier is destroyed not by force, but by his insatiable appetite for flattery.

Here the comparison reaches its sharpest point. Trump, too, has built a world in which he is constantly deceived by those who know how to manipulate his narcissistic need for praise. Sycophants, opportunists and extremists thrive around him because they understand his fundamental weakness. Those who flatter and tolerate him are controlling him, even if they only appear to serve and bow to him.

Inside Boastful SoldierThis recognition creates catharsis. Pyrgopolynices is exposed, humiliated, beaten, and forced to admit that he is not the demigod he claims to be. The audience leaves with relief: ostentation punished, ostentation collapsed, order restored.

But modern politics is not an old farce. There was no defining moment when Trump’s armor was shattered, no final metaphorical beating that would set the world right. Trump’s Pyrgopolinic persona (his exaggerations, myths, and theatrical bravado) has not yet yielded to the justice promised by Plautus. Instead, he shaped a political party, a movement, and a significant portion of the American public. In other words, the joke continues, but the stage is much bigger and the stakes are much higher.

If Plautus teaches us anything, it’s that the braggart warrior eventually collapses under the weight of his own fiction. The performance can go on for a long time (sometimes a very long time), but eventually reality intervenes.

The question for America is whether it wants to play the role of Plautine’s audience, whether it will recognize the absurdity before the damage is too great, or whether it will continue to applaud a man suffering from two delusions worthy of Pyrgopolynices – that his tailored suit is armor and that his fantasies are real.