Trophies
(or, What do the Worth Monument
and Melania Trump have in common?)

by Dianne Durante
March 2007

While writing an essay on the William Jenkins Worth Monument (the essay should soon be available as an Amazon Short), I had to describe a feature of the Monument known as a trophy. And I wondered: how did we come to use the same word for a collection of flags and weapons, and for a beautiful woman who's much younger than her husband? Some prowling about the library and the Net made the progression clear.

 By the 6th or 5th c. B.C., the Greeks were erecting memorials on battlefields at the point where the enemy was put to flight. The word tropaion (tropaion), from which "trophy" derives, comes from trepo (trepw), to turn. The earliest trophies were tree trunks with captured enemy armor nailed to them in roughly anthropomorphic shape. (A later variation of the trophy, the "cumulus" type, was merely a stack of arms on a pile of stones.)

The military trophy was at once a warning to potential enemies, an offering to the gods, and a symbol of victory. Not surprisingly, it soon appeared with the mythological figure of Victory. In a vase of ca. 450 B.C. by the "Trophy Painter" (at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts), Nike/Victory is shown putting the finishing touches on a trophy.

Name vase of the Trophy Painter, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In time the use of trophies expanded to commemorate victories other than those where infantry turned the tide of battle. By the Hellenistic period (ca. 323-ca. 100 B.C.), naval battles might be celebrated with a trophy that included the bronze beaks from Greek ships - the distant predecessors of the beaks adorning the column of the Columbus Monument at Columbus Circle. (See Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 35.) Representations of Aphrodite might show a "trophy" of the armor of her husband Mars, whom she conquered by love.

The Romans adopted the trophy form from the Greeks by the 2nd c. B.C. and transformed it into a more permanent display by hanging the weapons and other spoils from commemorative structures such as triumphal arches. To celebrate a victorious campaign, a coin was often issued showing Mars carrying a trophy.

Mars Victor coin, 199-200 A.D. Mars carries the trophy jauntily over his shoulder: it's that strange object at the upper left.

When Renaissance artists looked to the Romans for inspiration over a millennium later, they revived the trophy image. At that point the meaning of "trophy" was expanded even further to indicate almost any group of related objects loosely arranged together. Trophies composed of musical instruments were very common. Although I've seen such trophies frequently on the engraved title-pages of 16th and 17th-c. books, I haven't been able to find an example on the Net. (As subsidiary decoration, they're probably not indexed.) Here's a sketch of one, from a page on Renaissance furniture.

Renaissance musical trophy (later sketch)

 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which picks up the story ca. 1500, the meaning of trophy was transferred from the original military trophy to any prize taken in war or hunting, especially if it was displayed as a memorial of the event. Thus a stuffed moose head became a trophy. Harnett's After the Hunt  is a 19th-c. trompe l'oeil depiction of a hunting "trophy" - a rifle, powder horn, hat, and dead duck. From a reminder of a specific event, the OED explains, derives the figurative meaning "anything serving as a token or evidence of victory, valour, power, skill, etc." - hence trophies for sports triumphs. From there we finally arrive at "trophy wife," which a 1997 addition to the OED defines as "a wife regarded as a status symbol for a (usu. older) man."

Sources

Grove Dictionary of Art (1996), 31:368-9, s.v. "trophy," by Luca Leoncini.

Peck, Harry Thurston. Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897, s.v. "tropaeum."

Oxford English Dictionary online, accessed 3/26/07.

Vermeule, Cornelius. Review of Gilbert-Charles Picard's Les Trophees romains (1957), American Journal of Archeology 64:3, p. 300 (available on JSTOR).

Copyright (c) 2007 Dianne Durante. All rights for text reserved. Contact: comments@forgottendelights.com