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The story of Emperor Trajan’s victory over a mighty barbarian empire isn’t just one for the books. It’s also told in 155 scenes carved in a spiral frieze on a monumental column.
In back-to-back wars fought between A.D. 101 and 106, the emperor Trajan mustered tens of thousands of Roman troops, crossed the Danube River on two of the longest bridges the ancient world had ever seen, defeated a mighty barbarian empire on its mountainous home turf twice, then systematically wiped it from the face of Europe.
Trajan’s war on the Dacians, a civilization in what is now Romania, was the defining event of his 19-year rule. The loot he brought back was staggering. One contemporary chronicler boasted that the conquest yielded a half million pounds of gold and a million pounds of silver, not to mention a fertile new province.
The booty changed the landscape of Rome. To commemorate the victory, Trajan commissioned a forum that included a spacious plaza surrounded by colonnades, two libraries, a grand civic space known as the Basilica Ulpia, and possibly even a temple. The forum was “unique under the heavens,” one early historian enthused, “beggaring description and never again to be imitated by mortal men.”
Towering over it was a stone column 126 feet high, crowned with a bronze statue of the conqueror. Spiraling around the column like a modern-day comic strip is a narrative of the Dacian campaigns: Thousands of intricately carved Romans and Dacians march, build, fight, sail, sneak, negotiate, plead, and perish in 155 scenes. Completed in 113, the column has stood for more than 1,900 years.
Today tourists crane their necks up at it as guides explain its history. The eroded carvings are hard to make out above the first few twists of the story. All around are ruins—empty pedestals, cracked flagstones, broken pillars, and shattered sculptures hint at the magnificence of Trajan’s Forum, now fenced off and closed to the public, a testament to past imperial glory.
The column is one of the most distinctive monumental sculptures to have survived the fall of Rome. For centuries classicists have treated the carvings as a visual history of the wars, with Trajan as the hero and Decebalus, the Dacian king, as his worthy opponent. Archaeologists have scrutinized the scenes to learn about the uniforms, weapons, equipment, and tactics the Roman Army used.
And because Trajan left Dacia in ruins, the column and the remaining sculptures of defeated soldiers that once decorated the forum are treasured today by Romanians as clues to how their Dacian ancestors may have looked and dressed.
The column was deeply influential, the inspiration for later monuments in Rome and across the empire. Over the centuries, as the city’s landmarks crumbled, the column continued to fascinate and awe. A Renaissance pope replaced the statue of Trajan with one of St. Peter, to sanctify the ancient artifact. Artists lowered themselves in baskets from the top to study it in detail. Later it was a favorite attraction for tourists: Goethe, the German poet, climbed the 185 internal steps in 1787 to “enjoy that incomparable view.” Plaster casts of the column were made starting in the 1500s, and they have preserved details that acid rain and pollution have worn away.
Debate still simmers over the column’s construction, meaning, and most of all, historical accuracy. It sometimes seems as if there are as many interpretations as there are carved figures, and there are 2,662 of those.
Filippo Coarelli, a courtly italian archaeologist and art historian in his late 70s, literally wrote the book on the subject. In his sun-flooded living room in Rome, he pulls his illustrated history of the column off a crowded bookshelf. “The column is an amazing work,” he says, leafing through black-and-white photos of the carvings, pausing to admire dramatic scenes. “The Dacian women torturing Roman soldiers? The weeping Dacians poisoning themselves to avoid capture? It’s like a TV series.”
Or, Coarelli says, like Trajan’s memoirs. When it was built, the column stood between the two libraries, which perhaps held the soldier-emperor’s account of the wars. The way Coarelli sees it, the carving resembles a scroll, the likely form of Trajan’s war diary. “The artist—and artists at this time didn’t have the freedom to do what they wanted—must have acted according to Trajan’s will,” he says.
Working under the supervision of a maestro, Coarelli says, sculptors followed a plan to create a skyscraping version of Trajan’s scroll on 17 drums of the finest Carrara marble.
The emperor is the story’s hero. He appears 58 times, depicted as a canny commander, accomplished statesman, and pious ruler. Here he is giving a speech to the troops; there he is thoughtfully conferring with his advisers; over there, presiding over a sacrifice to the gods. “It’s Trajan’s attempt to be not only a man of the army,” Coarelli says, “but also a man of culture.”
Of course Coarelli’s speculating. Whatever form they took, Trajan’s memoirs are long gone. In fact clues gleaned from the column and excavations at Sarmizegetusa, the Dacian capital, suggest that the carvings say more about Roman preoccupations than about history.
Jon Coulston, an expert on Roman iconography, arms, and equipment at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, studied the column up close for months from the scaffolding that surrounded it during restoration work in the 1980s and ’90s. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the landmark and has remained obsessed—and pugnaciously contrarian—ever since. “People desperately want to compare it to news media and films,” he says. “They’re overinterpreting and always have. It’s all generic. You can’t believe a word of it.”
Coulston argues that no single mastermind was behind the carvings. Slight differences in style and obvious mistakes, such as windows that disrupt scenes and scenes of inconsistent heights, convinced him that sculptors created the column on the fly, relying on what they’d heard about the wars. “Instead of having what art historians love, which is a great master and creative mind,” he says, “the composition is being done by grunts at the stone face, not on a drawing board in the studio.”
The artwork, in his view, was more “inspired by” than “based on.” Take the column’s priorities. There’s not much fighting in its depiction of the two wars. Less than a quarter of the frieze shows battles or sieges, and Trajan himself is never shown in combat.
Meanwhile legionaries—the highly trained backbone of Rome’s war.