Trajan received word of his accession while he was in charge of a Roman army in Cologne. It was characteristic of him that he went on with his work at the frontier and postponed his coming to Rome for nearly two years. He had been born in Spain of an Italian family long settled there; in him and in Hadrian Roman Spain arrived at political hegemony, as it had reached literary leadership in Seneca, Lucan, and Martial. He was the first in a long line of generals whose provincial birth and training seemed to give them the will-to-life that had gone from the native Roman stock. That Rome made no protest against this enthronement of a provincial was in itself an event and omen in Roman history.
Trajan never ceased to be a general. His carriage was military, his presence commanding; his features were undistinguished but strong. Tall and robust, he was wont to march on foot with his troops and ford with full armament the hundred rivers they had to cross. His courage showed a stoic impartiality between life and death. Told that Licinius Sura was plotting against him, he went to Sura’s house for dinner, ate without scrutiny whatever food was offered him, and had himself shaved by Sura’s barber.4 He was not in any technical sense a philosopher. He used to take Dio Chrysostom, the “golden-mouthed” rhetor, with him in his chariot to discourse to him on philosophy, but he confessed that he could not understand a word of Dio’s talk5—the worse for philosophy. His mind was clear and direct; he uttered an amazing minimum of nonsense for a man. He was vain, like all human beings, but completely unassuming; he took no advantage of his office, joined his friends at table and the hunt, drank with them copiously, and indulged in occasional pederasty as if out of deference to the customs of his time. Rome thought it worthy of praise that he never disturbed his wife Plotina by making love to another woman.
When, in the forty-second year of his age, Trajan reached Rome, he was at the height of his faculties. His simplicity, geniality, and moderation readily won a people so lately acquainted with tyranny. The younger Pliny was chosen by the Senate to pronounce the “panegyric” of greeting. About the same time Dio Chrysostom delivered before the Emperor a discourse on the duties of a monarch as viewed by the Stoic philosophy. Both Pliny and Dio distinguished between dominatio and principatus: the prince was to be not lord of the state but its first servant, the executive delegate of the people, chosen through their representatives, the senators. Imperaturus omnibus elegi debet ex omnibus, said Pliny: “He who is to command all should be elected by all.”6 The general listened courteously.
Such fair beginnings were not new in history; what astonished Rome was that Trajan fulfilled their promise abundantly. He gave to his aides or associates the villas in which his predecessors had stayed for a few weeks in the year; “he regarded nothing as his own,” said Pliny, “unless his friends possessed it”;7 as for himself he lived as simply as Vespasian. He asked the Senate’s opinion on all matters of moment, and discovered that he might wield nearly absolute power if he never used absolute speech. The Senate was willing to let him rule if he would observe the forms that maintained its dignity and prestige; like the rest of Rome, it now loved security too much to be capable of freedom. Perhaps also it was pleased to find Trajan a conservative, who had no intention of mulcting the rich to appease the poor.
Trajan was an able and tireless administrator, a sound financier, a just judge. To him the Digest of Justinian ascribes the principle, “It is better that the guilty should remain unpunished than that the innocent should be condemned.”8 By careful supervision of expenditures (and some lucrative conquests) he was able to complete extensive public works without increasing taxation; on the contrary, he lowered taxes and published a budget to expose the revenues and outlays of the government to examination and criticism. He required from the senators who enjoyed his comradeship an administrative devotion almost as meticulous as his own. The patricians entered the bureaucracy and worked as well as played; Trajan’s extant correspondence with them suggests how carefully they labored under his watchful and inspiring leadership. Many of the Eastern cities had mismanaged their finances to the point of bankruptcy, and Trajan sent cur at ores like the younger Pliny to help and check them. The procedure weakened municipal independence and institutions, but it was unavoidable; self-government, by extravagance and incompetence, had brought its own end.
Nurtured on war, the Emperor was a frank imperialist who preferred order to liberty and power to peace. Hardly a year after his arrival in Rome he set out for the conquest of Dacia. Roughly corresponding to the Rumania of 1940, Dacia plunged like a fist into the heart of Germany, and would therefore be of great military value in the struggle that Trajan foresaw between the Germans and Italy. Its annexation would give Rome control of the road that ran down the Save to the Danube and thence to Byzantium—an invaluable land route to the East. Besides, Dacia had gold mines. In a campaign brilliantly planned and swiftly executed, Trajan led his legions through all obstacles and resistance to the Dacian capital, Sarmizegetusa, and forced its surrender. A Roman sculptor has left us an impressive portrait of the Dacian king Decebalus—a face noble with strength and character. Trajan reinstated him as a client king and returned to Rome (102); but Decebalus soon broke his agreements and resumed his independent sway. Trajan marched his army back into Dacia (105), bridged the Danube with a structure that was one of the engineering marvels of the century, and again stormed the Dacian capital. Decebalus was killed, a strong garrison was left to hold Sarmizegetusa, and Trajan went back to Rome to celebrate his victory with 10,000 gladiators (probably war captives) in 123 days of public games. Dacia became a Roman province, received Roman colonists, married them, and corrupted the Latin language in its own Rumanian way. The gold mines of Transylvania were put under the direction of an imperial procurator and soon paid for the material cost of the war. To reimburse himself for his labors Trajan took out of Dacia a million pounds of silver and half a million pounds of gold—the last substantial booty that the legions would win for Roman sloth.
With these spoils the Emperor distributed 650 denarii ($260) to all such citizens as applied for the gift—probably some 300,000; and enough remained to remedy the unemployment of demobilization with the greatest program of public works, governmental aid, and architectural adornment that Italy had seen since Augustus. Trajan improved the older aqueducts and built a new one which is still in operation. At Ostia he constructed a spacious harbor connected by canals with the Tiber and the harbor of Claudius, and decorated it with warehouses that were models of beauty as well as of use. His engineers repaired old roads, carried a new one across the Pontine marshes, and laid the Via Traiana from Beneventum to Brundisium. They reopened the Claudian tunnel that had drained the Fucine Lake, dredged harbors at Centumcellae and Ancona, gave Ravenna an aqueduct, and Verona an amphitheater. Trajan supplied the funds for new roads, bridges, and buildings throughout the Empire. But he discouraged the architectural rivalry of the cities and urged them to spend their surplus on improving the condition and environment of the poor. He was always ready to help any city that had suffered from earthquake, fire, or storm. He tried to promote agriculture in Italy by requiring senators to invest a third of their capital in Italian land; and when he saw that this was extending the latifundia, he encouraged small proprietors by advancing them state funds at low interest for the purchase and improvement of their lands and homes.9 To raise the birth rate he enlarged the alimenta, or feeding fund: the state made mortgage loans at five per cent (half the usual rate) to Italian peasants, and allowed local charity boards to distribute the interest to poor parents at sixteen sesterces ($1.60) monthly for each boy raised by them, and twelve for each girl. The sums seem small, but contemporary testimony indicates that from sixteen to twenty sesterces sufficed for a month’s care of a child on a first-century Italian farm.10 With a similar hope Trajan allowed the children of Rome to receive the corn dole in addition to that given to their parents. The system of alimenta was enlarged by Hadrian and the Antonines, was extended to several parts of the Empire, and was supplemented by private philanthropy; so the younger Pliny gave 30,000 sesterces a year as alimenta to the children of Comum, and Caelia Macrina left a million to like purpose for the children of Tarracina in Spain.
Trajan, like Augustus, favored Italy over the provinces, and Rome over Italy. He used to the full the architectural genius of Apollodorus, a Damascene Greek who had designed the new roads and aqueduct, and the Danube bridge. The Emperor now commissioned him to clear away large blocks of houses, cut 130 feet from the base of the Quirinal hill, lay out in this and the adjoining space a new forum equal in area to all preceding forums combined, and surround it with buildings of a majesty fit for a world capital that had reached the height of its power and opulence. The Forum Traianum was entered through the Triumphal Arch of Trajan. The interior, 370 by 354 feet, was paved with smooth stone and surrounded by a high wall and portico; east and west walls were indented with hemicycle exedrae formed of Doric columns. In the center rose the Basilica Ulpia, named after Trajan’s clan and intended as an office building for commerce and finance; its exterior was adorned with fifty monolithic columns, its floor was of marble, its immense nave was enclosed by granite colonnades, its roof of massive beams was covered with bronze. Near the northern end of the new forum two libraries were built, one for Latin works, the other for Greek. Between them rose the column, behind them the temple, of Trajan. When the forum was complete it was accounted one of the architectural wonders of the world.
The column, still standing, was first of all an achievement in transportation. It was cut from eighteen cubes of marble, each weighing some fifty tons; the blocks were brought by ship from the island of Paros, were transferred to barges at Ostia, were drawn against the current up the river, and were moved on rollers up the bank and through the streets to their site. The cubes were recut into thirty-two blocks. Eight formed the pedestal; three sides of this were decorated with sculptures; the fourth opened into a spiral stairway of 185 marble steps. The shaft, twelve feet in diameter at the bottom, and ninety-seven feet high, was composed of twenty-one blocks and was topped by a statue of Trajan holding a globe of the world. Before being raised into position the blocks were carved with reliefs picturing the campaigns in Dacia. These reliefs are the culmination of Flavian realism and of ancient historical sculpture. They do not aim at the calm beauty or idealized types of Greek sculpture; they seek rather to convey a vivid impression of living individuals in the actual scenes and turmoil of war; they are Balzac and Zola after Corneille and Racine. In the 2000 figures of these 124 spiral panels we follow the conquest of Dacia step by step: the Roman cohorts issuing from their stations in full armor; the crossing of the Danube on a pontoon bridge; the pitching of a Roman camp in the enemy’s land; the confused conflict of spears, arrows, sickles, and stones; a Dacian village set to the torch, with women and children begging Trajan for mercy; Dacian women torturing Roman prisoners; soldiers displaying before the Emperor the heads of slain enemies; surgeons treating the wounded; the Dacian princes drinking one after another the cup of poison; the head of Decebalus brought as a trophy to Trajan; the long file of captive men, women, and children snatched from their homes into foreign settlement or Roman slavery—this and more the dark column tells in the most masterly narrative relief in sculptural history. These artists and their employers were not chauvinists; they showed Trajan’s acts of clemency, but also they revealed the heroic aspects of a nation’s struggle for freedom; and the finest figure in the scroll is the Dacian king. It is a strange document, too crowded for full effectiveness; some figures so crude that one wonders if a Dacian warrior carved them; superposition primitively substituted for perspective; and the whole observable, like Pheidias’ frieze, only by some skylark scorner of the ground. But it was an interesting deviation from a classic style whose placidity had never expressed the overwhelming energy of the Roman character. Its “method of continuity”11—making each scene melt into the next—carried on the suggestions of Titus’ arch and prepared for medieval reliefs. Despite its defects the spiral story was imitated again and again, from the column of Aurelius in Rome, and that of Arcadius in Constantinople, to the Napoleonic shaft in the Place Vendôme in Paris.
Trajan completed his building program by finishing in the grand manner the baths begun by Domitian. Meanwhile six years of peace had wearied him; administration was a task that did not awaken his reserve energies as war did; he did not feel alive in a palace. Why not take up Caesar’s plans where Antony had failed, settle the Parthian question once and for all, establish a more strategic frontier in the East, and capture control of the trade routes across Armenia and Parthia to Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and India?
After careful preparation he set out again with his legions (113). A year later he had taken Armenia; yet another year and he had marched down through Mesopotamia, captured Ctesiphon, and reached the Indian Ocean—the first and last Roman general to stand before that sea. The population at home learned geography by following his victories; the Senate was amused to be informed, almost weekly, of another nation conquered or hastily submitting: the Bosporus, Colchis, Asiatic Iberia, Asiatic Albania, Osrhoene, Messenia, Media, Assyria, Arabia Petrea, at last even Parthia. Parthia, Armenia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia were constituted provinces, and the new Alexander had the glory of naming and crowning a client king over the ancient enemies of Rome. Standing on the shores of the Red Sea, Trajan mourned that he was too old to repeat the Macedonian’s advance to the Indus. He contented himself with building a Red Sea fleet to control the passage and commerce to India; left garrisons at all strategic points, and turned back reluctantly toward Rome.
Like Antony he had gone too fast and too far and had neglected to consolidate his victories and his lines. On reaching Antioch he was informed that the Parthian king Osroes, whom he had deposed, had gathered another army and had reconquered central Mesopotamia; that rebellion had broken out in all the new provinces; that the Jews of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyrene were in revolt; and that disaffection was flaring up in Libya, Mauretania, and Britain. The old warrior wished to take the field again, but his flesh refused. He had worn himself out by living as actively in the hot East as in the West; dropsy set in, and a paralytic stroke left the great will helpless in a broken frame. Sadly he commissioned Lucius Quietus to put down the uprisings in Mesopotamia, sent Marcius Turba to suppress the Jews in Africa, and left his nephew Hadrian in command of the main Roman army in Syria. He had himself carried down to the Cilician coast, hoping to sail thence to Rome, where the Senate was preparing for him the greatest triumph since Augustus. He died at Selinus on the way (117), aged sixty-four, after a reign of nineteen years. His ashes were taken to the capital, and were buried under the great column that he had chosen as his tomb.