The braggart soldier returns: Trump on the grand stage of ego

Donald Trump is framed as a modern Pyrgopolynices, a braggart whose performative narcissism has moved from farce to real power, with consequences still unfolding, writes William J Dominik.

THE ANCIENT WORLD has given us an endless gallery of vainglorious buffoons, but none is as entertaining or as instructive as Pyrgopolynices in The Braggart Soldier (Latin: Miles Gloriosus) by the Roman playwright Plautus, active in the late third and early second centuries BC.

Plautus portrays Pyrgopolynices as a swollen peacock of a soldier whose every breath inflates his own legend. The very name Pyrgopolinices, whose Greek name means “sacker of many cities”, a title grander than any deeds he actually performs, signals his bloated self-image. His world is one of comic delusion: enemies fall by the thousands; women swoon in droves; and the mere sight of him strikes terror into armies.

Modern America knows a version of this figure, too: Donald Trump. Like Pyrgopolynices, Trump thrives on spectacle. The soldier’s identity depends on the continuous performance of greatness: imagined military prowess, exaggerated romantic triumphs, and personal and financial worth inflated to bursting.

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Trump’s political life has functioned in much the same way: a perpetual rally, a never-ending banquet of self-praise, a stage on which he plays the invincible hero, the irresistible (and stable) genius, the persecuted martyr and the conman-in-chief all at once. Reality, as in the case of Pyrgopolynices, is merely an inconvenience.

Plautus understood a timeless truth: the larger the ego, the thinner the substance. Pyrgopolynices parades in ostentatious finery, boasting of victories that never occurred. Trump appears beneath golden ceilings at Mar-a-Lago, proclaiming achievements that exist largely in his imagination. His exaggerated feats – master of business and “the deal”, prophet of politics, unrivalled negotiator, connoisseur of everything from COVID-19 to military strategy – echo the soldier’s elephant-slaying bravado. Neither man allows facts to interrupt a good boast or tall tale.

Pyrgopolynices’ vaunted military career exists largely in the vaporous realm of his own imagination, a world of impossible victories and fabricated scars. Trump’s relationship to military identity offers a contemporary analogue that borders on the Plautine. Whereas Pyrgopolynices brandishes wounds he never received, Trump famously deferred the military draft five times through “bone spurs”, a medical exemption whose legitimacy has long been questioned.

The detail is almost too fitting: the Commander-in-Chief who constructs an entire persona around martial valour, yet whose only documented encounter with military danger takes the form of a conveniently timed anatomical irregularity. It is a modern version of a Plautine-style joke — the warrior who boasts of slaying elephants but is laid low by a dubiously sore heel.

Both Pyrgopolynices and Trump depend on a supporting cast uniquely suited to their vanity. Pyrgopolynices requires his parasite Artotrogus to repeat his exploits back to him with exaggerated awe. Trump, in turn, has cultivated his own Artotrogi: advisers, functionaries, media personalities and a segment of the public complicit in the performance and willing to echo his claims, embellish his myths, and transform exaggeration into gospel.

Loyalty, for both men, is measured not in competence or integrity but in the enthusiasm with which one applauds their imaginary triumphs.

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Then there is the comedy of self-perceived erotic irresistibility, a defining trait of the Plautine braggart. The plot of The Braggart Soldier turns on Pyrgopolynices’ delusion that every woman desires him. Trump’s public performances of masculinity – boasting about his sexual prowess (and the size of his anatomy), bragging about his conquests and leaving behind a long trail of lewd remarks (“grab ’em by the pussy”) – belong unmistakably to the same comedic script. The difference is that Plautus’ audience was permitted to laugh openly. Many Americans – and much of the world – are not.

The most essential parallel, however, lies in the structure of the comedy itself. Pyrgopolynices cannot see that he is the joke. He struts across the stage unaware that everyone around him sees through the bluster. The craftier characters – slaves, courtesans and ordinary people he considers beneath him – engineer his downfall by playing to his vanity. The soldier is undone not by force but through his insatiable appetite for adulation.

Here, the comparison acquires its sharpest edge. 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 flourish around him precisely because they understand his central weakness. Those who flatter and indulge him control him, even as they appear merely to serve and bow before him.

In The Braggart Soldier, this recognition produces catharsis. Pyrgopolynices is exposed, humiliated, beaten and forced to admit that he is not the demigod he pretends to be. The audience leaves reassured: vanity has been punished, pretension collapsed, order restored.

But modern politics is not ancient comedy. There has been no decisive moment when Trump’s armour has been shattered, no final metaphorical beating to set the world right. Trump’s Pyrgopolynicean persona – its exaggerations, myths and theatrical bravado – has yet to yield to the justice Plautus promises. Instead, it has shaped a political party, a movement and a significant portion of the American public. The joke, in other words, continues, but the stage is far larger and the stakes far higher.

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

The question for America is whether it wishes to play the role of the Plautine audience, recognising the absurdity before the damage grows too great, or whether it will continue applauding a man who suffers from two delusions worthy of Pyrgopolynices — that his tailored suit is armour and his fantasies are fact.