Who was Trajan?

A soldier from Spain

Marcus Ulpius Traianus was born on September 18, AD 53, at Italica, a Roman town near today’s Seville that Scipio Africanus had founded for wounded veterans. His family had come from Italy generations before, but no emperor had yet been born in the provinces. His father rose to the consulship and the governorship of Syria, and the son grew up in army camps, first as a military tribune, then in command of a legion. In 97 he was governing Upper Germany, on the Rhine, when the news came that changed everything.

An emperor by adoption

Domitian, the last of his dynasty, had been murdered in 96, and the Senate put an elderly senator, Nerva, on the throne. When the Praetorian Guard mutinied, Nerva needed a general the legions respected. In October 97 he adopted Trajan as his son, and three months later he died. Trajan, now 44, did not rush home. He inspected the Rhine and Danube frontiers first, and when he entered Rome in 99, he came on foot, greeting senators as equals. Pliny the Younger celebrated the scene in his Panegyricus, the speech of thanks he gave as consul in 100.

Dacia, the bridge and the Column

North of the lower Danube, the Dacian king Decebalus had forced Domitian into a humiliating peace. Trajan fought him twice, in 101–102 and 105–106. Between the wars his architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, threw a bridge more than a kilometer long across the river; stumps of its piers still stand at Drobeta-Turnu Severin. In 106 Decebalus killed himself rather than be captured, and Dacia became a province. Its gold helped pay for games that ran 123 days (in the Colosseum) and for a vast new forum.

In that forum stands Trajan’s Column, dedicated in 113. A band of carvings about 190 meters long winds 23 times up a shaft 100 Roman feet high, about 30 meters, crowded with some 2,500 figures building forts, crossing rivers and fighting. Its inscription says the column marks how high the hillside cut away for the forum once rose. Trajan’s ashes were laid in its base. Since the 1580s a statue of Saint Peter has stood on top.

Why Romania is called Romania

Romania means “land of the Romans,” and Romanian is a Romance language, a sister of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (languages from Latin). Many Romanians trace both back to Trajan’s conquest and the settlers he brought. The real history is less tidy. Rome held Dacia for only about 165 years and pulled out under Aurelian in the 270s, and historians still debate how Latin speech survived north of the Danube. Romanians honor both sides of the war, Trajan and Decebalus, and a full cast of the Column’s reliefs is on show at the National History Museum in Bucharest.

Optimus, the best

At home Trajan built and gave. His forum, with its huge basilica, Greek and Latin libraries and the market halls on the slope beside it, was the grandest in Rome. He dug a six-sided harbor at Portus for the grain fleets and paid allowances for poor children in Italian towns. His letters with Pliny, governor of Bithynia, show him ruling in detail, from a fire brigade he refused to allow at Nicomedia to the Christians, who were not to be hunted down or condemned on anonymous charges (what Pliny asked). In 114 the Senate made official a title it had long used for him: Optimus, the best.

His war on Parthia took him to the Persian Gulf in 116, but revolts broke out behind him (how far the empire reached). Heading home, he suffered a stroke and died at Selinus, on the southern coast of today’s Turkey, in August 117, aged 63. His ward Hadrian succeeded him, on an adoption some said was arranged after he died. In the 300s the Senate still greeted each new emperor with a wish: may he be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan. Dante went further and placed him in Paradise.