Trajan: the emperor who made Rome largest

Trajan was a provincial from Spain and a professional soldier who spent most of his life in army camps and came to the throne by adoption, not birth. He fought at the head of his legions, marched on foot with the rank and file, and pushed the empire's borders farther than any emperor since Augustus had dared. Late in the fourth century, almost three hundred years after his death, each new emperor was still hailed with the wish that he might be "luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan."²

Early life

Marcus Ulpius Traianus was born in September 53 AD (Britannica gives 15 September with a question mark, the Loyola University entry 18 September) at Italica in Baetica, the Roman province that covered roughly modern Andalusia. His family was Roman, or at least Italian, by descent, prosperous and prominent in the province, and may have intermarried with local people. His mother was Marcia; his sister, Ulpia Marciana, was about five years older.³

His father, also Marcus Ulpius Traianus, was the first of the family to enter the imperial service and the first senator. He commanded a legion in Vespasian's war against the Jews in 67 and 68, was rewarded with a consulship in 70, was raised to the patrician class, and governed Syria and then Asia. Little is known of the son's childhood; he probably grew up in Rome or in his father's military headquarters.⁴

A soldier's career

Trajan served ten years as a legionary staff officer and was with his father in Syria in the mid-70s. He then climbed the usual ladder of offices, quaestor around 78 and praetor around 84, and in 86 became one of the guardians of his young cousin Hadrian. By 89 he commanded the legion VII Gemina in Spain.⁵

That year the governor of Upper Germany, Antonius Saturninus, rebelled against the emperor Domitian, and Trajan was ordered to march his legion to the Rhine. The revolt was crushed before he probably arrived, but the loyal march won him Domitian's favor: in 91 he held the ordinary consulship, the most prestigious office in Rome. He went on to govern provinces on the northern frontier, Lower Moesia on the Danube and then Upper Germany, with its headquarters at Mogontiacum (Mainz).⁶

Adopted heir

On 18 September 96 Domitian was murdered by a palace conspiracy, and the Senate welcomed the elderly Nerva as emperor. The praetorian guard forced Nerva to execute the men who had made him, and the frontier commanders were restless. To steady his rule, in the autumn of 97 Nerva adopted Trajan, the governor of Upper Germany, a choice acceptable both to the generals and to the Senate. Hadrian brought him the army's congratulations at Mainz.⁷

Nerva died on 27 or 28 January 98, and Trajan became emperor without opposition. He did not hurry to Rome. He spent nearly a year on the Rhine and the Danube, strengthening the defenses and restoring discipline; he sent orders for the execution of the praetorians who had humiliated Nerva, and gave the soldiers only half the customary accession bonus. When he finally entered Rome in 99 he treated the Senate with courtesy, distributed cash to the people and raised the number of poor citizens receiving free grain.⁸

The First Dacian War

Beyond the lower Danube, in what is now Romania, lay the kingdom of Dacia under its formidable king Decebalus, who had fought Domitian to a standstill and forced him to abandon his invasion. In 101 Trajan took the field to finish the job. His architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, cut a road along the cliffs of the Iron Gates gorge, so that, in the Loyola University entry's phrase, the army seemingly marched on water. After hard fighting, in 102 Decebalus capitulated and became a client king of Rome, and Trajan took the title Dacicus.⁹ › The Greatest Battles of Ancient Rome

To make sure the next war would be quicker, Apollodorus bridged the Danube itself. Cassius Dio, writing a century later, describes twenty piers of squared stone, each 150 feet high and 60 feet wide, set 170 feet apart and joined by arches.¹⁰

The Second Dacian War

Decebalus did not stay subdued, and in 105 Trajan went back to war. Eleven legions took part. In 106 the Romans took the Dacian capital, Sarmizegetusa Regia, in the mountains north of the Iron Gates. Decebalus fled and, rather than be paraded in a Roman triumph, killed himself; his head, Dio records, was brought to Rome.¹¹

Dacia became a Roman province, the first north of the Danube, set inside the curve of the Carpathians. It gave land to Roman settlers, rich mines of gold and salt, and a buffer against the nomads of the steppe. Trajan celebrated with games lasting 123 days, and a great victory monument, the Tropaeum Traiani, was raised at Adamclisi, in what is now Romania.¹²

Arabia and the Parthian War

In 105 and 106 one of his generals annexed the Nabataean kingdom east and south of Judaea as the province of Arabia, with its capital at Bostra, and Trajan built the Via Nova Traiana along the old King's Highway to the Red Sea. Then he turned on Rome's old enemy, Parthia. Around 110 the Parthians had deposed the pro-Roman king of Armenia and put their own candidate on the throne. In 113 Trajan prepared for war, and in 114 he invaded Armenia.¹³

The chronology of the next campaigns is uncertain. In 115 he annexed upper Mesopotamia, and in that year or the next he moved down the Tigris, took Babylon and the Parthian capital, Ctesiphon, and early in 116 accepted the title Parthicus. He reached the Persian Gulf. There, Dio writes, he said that if he were still young he would have crossed over to the Indians too, as Alexander had.¹⁴

The conquests did not hold. Late in 115 Trajan had barely escaped an earthquake that devastated Antioch. In 116 the new provinces rose in revolt, and the Jewish communities of several eastern provinces rebelled. Discouraged and ill, the emperor set out for Rome.¹⁵

How he led

Trajan was a soldier's emperor in the full sense. Dio praises him above all for his justice, his bravery and the simplicity of his habits. He marched on foot with the rank and file, toiled in every enterprise almost as hard as the others, joined his companions in hunting, banquets, work and jokes, and ruled the soldiers with such a firm hand that, Dio says, arrogance never appeared among them in his reign. Britannica's judgment is that he dealt fairly, if strictly, with the armies.¹⁶

His wars were also feats of engineering and logistics: the Iron Gates road, the Danube bridge, the roads across Arabia. He prepared each campaign carefully, used overwhelming force, eleven legions against Dacia, and turned conquests into provinces with settlers, mines and roads. His weakness was the scale of his ambition. Modern historians still divide over it: some see the Dacian conquest as a source of revenue and a stronger Danube frontier; others, Britannica notes, see the Parthian war as overstraining the empire's resources in pursuit of glory.¹⁷

Rome under Trajan

Dacian gold paid for one of the greatest building programs in Roman history. A new aqueduct from Lake Bracciano was dedicated in 109; great public baths rose on the Esquiline Hill, partly over the ruins of Nero's Golden House; and Apollodorus designed the Forum of Trajan, with a colossal equestrian statue of the emperor, the Basilica Ulpia, and libraries for Greek and Latin books. Behind it, the Quirinal hill was cut back for a curving complex of shops and offices, the Markets of Trajan. At Ostia he built a hexagonal harbor that made it Italy's leading port.¹⁸

He was also a careful governor. He extended the alimenta, public funds for poor children in the towns of Italy, sent trusted men to sort out the finances of troubled provinces, and kept up a working correspondence with them. When his friend Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, asked how to treat the Christians, Trajan told him not to hunt them down or accept unsupported charges, which, he wrote, was not in keeping with the spirit of the age. The people called him optimus, "the best," early in his reign, and in 114 the title became official.¹⁹

Death and succession

On the journey home, at Selinus in Cilicia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, Trajan "suddenly expired," as Dio puts it, on 8 or 9 August 117, in his 64th year. Just before his death was announced, it was proclaimed that he had adopted Hadrian, his former ward, who in 100 had married into Trajan's family. Gossip said the adoption was invented by the empress Plotina; Britannica judges it was probably a genuine deathbed decision. Hadrian learned of it on 11 August.²⁰

Hadrian quickly gave up the new conquests east of the Euphrates. Trajan was deified, granted a posthumous triumph, and his ashes were laid in the base of his column.²¹

Legacy and memory

Trajan's Column still stands in Rome, 100 Roman feet high, its spiral frieze of 23 bands carrying some 2,500 figures through both Dacian wars; it is one of the richest pictures we have of the Roman army at work. His statue on top was lost in the Middle Ages and replaced in 1588 by one of Saint Peter.²² › How the Roman Legion Worked

His reputation outlived his conquests. Tacitus called the beginning of his reign a most happy age, and in the late fourth century, the Loyola University entry notes, each new emperor was still hailed with the prayer felicior Augusto, melior Traiano: "luckier than Augustus, better than Trajan."²³

Read more about the greatest commanders of ancient Rome, the first emperor, Augustus, whose frontier policy Trajan abandoned, or how the legions he led fought in Phalanx vs Legion.