Trajan

• 1. Introduction

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  Trajan was born Marcus Ulpius Traianus on the 18th of September in AD 53, in a modest Roman colony called Italica, in what is now the Andalusian province of Seville in southern Spain. At the time of his birth, Italica was a small town without baths, a theatre, or an amphitheatre. By the time he died, in August of AD 117, the Roman Empire had stretched to its greatest extent in history, touching the Persian Gulf in the east. How does a man from a small provincial colony in Hispania become not just emperor of Rome, but the one the Senate itself called optimus princeps, "the best ruler"? What drove him across the Danube, into the deserts of Arabia, and finally to the banks of the Euphrates? And what did his reign actually look like for the millions of people, from Greek intellectuals to Dacian miners to Christian communities in Pontus, who lived beneath his authority? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Roots in Roman Spain

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  Italica, where Trajan grew up, had been founded in 206 BC by the general Scipio Africanus as a settlement for Italian veterans who had fought in Spain. Among those early settlers, or later arrivals, were the Ulpii and the Traii, whose family names linguistic studies trace to Osco-Umbrian origins. Their original home was the town of Tuder, known today as Todi, in the Umbria region of central Italy. Trajan himself acknowledged this ancestry in his full title, sometimes rendered as "Ulpius Traianus ex urbe Tudertina."

  Trajan's father, also named Marcus Ulpius Traianus, rose to become a prominent senator and general who commanded the Legio X Fretensis under Vespasian in the First Jewish-Roman War. Trajan's mother, Marcia, was a Roman noblewoman of the gens Marcia and a sister-in-law of the emperor Titus. Her father is believed to have been Quintus Marcius Barea Sura. Through both parents, the young Trajan was woven into the fabric of imperial Roman society from birth, though the small size of Italica meant the Ulpii lacked the kind of local power base that Roman senatorial families usually cultivated. To compensate, they built networks of alliances across Hispania and into southern Gaul, including a strategically important connection to Pompeia Plotina, who would one day become Trajan's wife.

  Trajan probably spent his earliest years in Italica before moving to Rome. Around the age of eight or nine, he almost certainly returned temporarily to Italica during his father's governorship of Baetica in approximately 64-65 AD. The family's home in Rome, known as the Domus Traiana, stood on the Aventine Hill; excavations under the Piazza del Tempio di Diana have uncovered remains thought to belong to its large suburban villa, with evidence of highly decorated rooms. Trajan's elder sister Ulpia Marciana and his niece Salonia Matidia would carry the Ulpian line forward well beyond his own life.

• 3. Soldier, Senator, Emperor

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  Trajan's path to the throne ran through the legions. In AD 76-77, while his father governed Syria, Trajan served there as a military tribune, and Pliny the Younger implies he saw active combat during that commission. In about 86, Trajan's cousin Aelius Afer died, leaving two young children, Hadrian and Paulina, as orphans; Trajan and his colleague Publius Acilius Attianus became their co-guardians. Around this time Trajan also brought the architect Apollodorus of Damascus with him to Rome, a partnership that would later reshape the city itself.

  The decisive moment in Trajan's military career came in 89, when, as legate of Legio VII Gemina in Hispania Tarraconensis, he backed the emperor Domitian against the attempted coup by the governor of Germania Superior, Lucius Antonius Saturninus. That loyalty earned him rapid advancement. He was appointed ordinary consul for 91, a distinction his father's prestige helped secure. Domitian's successor, the elderly Nerva, found himself deeply unpopular with the army; his Praetorian Prefect Casperius Aelianus had forced him to execute Domitian's own killers. Needing the army's backing, Nerva named Trajan his adoptive son and successor in the summer of 97, publicly attributing the choice to Trajan's military merit. Contemporary literary hints, however, suggest the adoption may have been imposed on Nerva rather than freely chosen.

  Nerva died on the 28th of January, 98. Trajan did not rush to Rome. Instead, he made a lengthy inspection tour of the Rhine and Danube frontiers, which may indicate he was uncertain of his position, or equally may reflect a calculated military mind assessing the empire's most vulnerable borders. Before departing, he ordered Praetorian Prefect Aelianus to attend him in Germany, where Aelianus was apparently executed at once, his post given to Attius Suburanus. Trajan's ceremonial entry into Rome came only in 99, and Pliny the Younger noted its deliberate understatement. Trajan gave the people a direct gift of money but cut the traditional military donative by half. His closest personal adviser was Lucius Licinius Sura, a Roman senator born in Spain and the governor of Germania Inferior, whom Trajan would appoint to a third consulship in 107 and whose influence was so great that some senators compared him unfavorably to Vespasian's own kingmaker, Licinius Mucianus.

• 4. The Senate and the Greeks

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  On the 1st of January, 100, at the inauguration of his third consulship, Trajan made a speech inviting the Senate to share responsibility for governing the empire, an event later commemorated on a coin. In practice, Pliny the Younger was candid about the reality: "everything depends on the whims of a single man who, on behalf of the common welfare, has taken upon himself all functions and all tasks." Trajan's deference was a performance of moderatio, moderation, rather than a genuine transfer of authority. The honorific optimus, meaning "the best," appeared on coins from 105 onward; it was the only time the Roman Senate officially granted that specific title to any emperor.

  Trajan's relationship with the Greek intellectual world was one of the most complicated features of his reign. He recalled to Rome scholars who had been exiled by Domitian, including the orator Dio of Prusa, and returned confiscated private property. He also dealt positively with Plutarch, whose home city of Delphi benefited when one of Trajan's legates arbitrated a boundary dispute in its favor. Yet Pliny's letters make clear that Greek civic elites were to be treated as notionally free but never placed on equal footing with Roman rulers. When the city of Apamea complained that Pliny's audit violated its status as a free Roman colony, Trajan replied bluntly that the audit had been ordered at his own wish.

  Dio of Prusa occupied a revealing middle position. Philostratus described him as Trajan's close friend, and Trajan reportedly held public conversations with him. Yet Dio's real goal, elevating Prusa to the status of a fully autonomous free city exempt from Roman taxes, was denied. He eventually won the right for Prusa to become the head of its assize-district, meaning its citizens no longer had to travel to the Roman governor for judgment, but full political autonomy was refused. When Dio placed a statue of Trajan in a building complex where Dio's wife and son were buried, incurring a theoretical charge of treason for putting the emperor's image near a tomb, Trajan dropped the charge. Pliny, as imperial governor of Bithynia in AD 110, was left to untangle the fiscal chaos that Dio and fellow civic officials had wrought: "It's well established that the cities' finances are in a state of disorder," Pliny wrote to Trajan, identifying collusion between local officials and contractors on unnecessary building projects as a central problem. Trajan's solution included appointing imperial correctores, officials drawn from the highest social ranks, to audit the finances of technically free Greek cities, an innovation with no precedent in earlier Roman governance.

• 5. Building Rome's World

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  Apollodorus of Damascus, the architect Trajan had first brought to Rome early in his career, became the designer of some of antiquity's most ambitious structures. His bridge across the Danube gave the Roman army a crossing point usable in any weather, solving the problem that the river froze reliably enough to be crossed only rarely. In the Iron Gates region of the Danube, Trajan's engineers cut or enlarged a boardwalk road into the cliff face of the gorge, and constructed a canal between the Kasajna tributary and Ducis Pratum to circumvent rapids.

  Forum Traiani, Trajan's Forum, became the largest forum in Rome. Financed largely from the loot of the Dacian campaigns, its construction required cutting away portions of the Capitoline and Quirinal Hills. Apollodorus designed an entrance triumphal arch, a forum space approximately 120 meters long and 90 meters wide surrounded by peristyles, a monumental basilica, and what would become Trajan's Column and its flanking libraries. Work began in AD 107, and the forum was dedicated on the 1st of January, 112. It remained in use for at least 500 years; the emperor Constantius II still visited it with admiration in the fourth century.

  Trajan also rebuilt the Circus Maximus, replacing wooden seating with stone and adding about 5,000 seats to its already vast capacity. He rebuilt its elevated imperial viewing box among the general seating tiers, so that the crowd could see their emperor watching the races alongside his family. His reconstruction was completed by 103; Trajan himself described it as merely "adequate" for the Roman people. At some point during 108 or 109, he staged 123 days of games to celebrate his Dacian victory, involving, as sources record, fully 10,000 gladiators and the slaughter of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of animals. The orator Fronto congratulated Trajan for giving equal weight to entertainments and serious governance, noting that neglect of amusements caused greater public discontent than neglect of weightier matters.

  Beyond Rome itself, Trajan's building program extended across the empire: the Via Traiana extended the Via Appia from Beneventum to Brundisium; the Via Traiana Nova ran as a primarily military road between Damascus and Aila; the Aqua Traiana brought fresh water to the city. Some historians also attribute to him the construction or reconstruction of the Roman fortress at Old Cairo, known as Babylon Fort, and a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea. In Egypt, he was active in embellishing temples; his cartouche appears on column shafts at the Temple of Khnum at Esna.

• 6. The Dacian Wars

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  In May of 101, Trajan crossed to the northern bank of the Danube and struck into the Dacian kingdom, defeating the Dacian army under King Decebalus at Tapae, near the Iron Gates of Transylvania. It was not a clean victory; his troops took heavy losses, and he suspended campaigning to regroup. That winter, Decebalus launched a counter-attack across the Danube, backed by Sarmatian cavalry. The Dacians and their allies were turned back after two battles in Moesia, at Nicopolis ad Istrum and Adamclisi. Trajan's army then pushed deep into Dacian territory, eventually forcing Decebalus to submit. Decebalus had to renounce portions of his kingdom, return Roman runaways he had sheltered, most of them technical experts, and surrender his war machines. Trajan returned to Rome and received the title Dacicus.

  Peace was short-lived. Decebalus rearmed, sheltered Roman deserters again, and pressured the Iazyges Sarmatians to ally with him against Rome. In 104, he attempted to have Trajan assassinated through Roman deserters. That plan failed. He then took Trajan's legate Longinus prisoner; Longinus eventually poisoned himself in captivity. By 105, Trajan had raised two new legions and assembled fourteen legions along the middle and lower Danube, roughly half the entire Roman army. Including auxiliaries, the forces engaged across both campaigns numbered between 150,000 and 175,000 Roman troops.

  The second war was a systematic siege campaign. The Romans tightened their grip around Decebalus' stronghold of Sarmizegetusa Regia. A controversial scene on Trajan's Column suggests Decebalus may have offered poison to his remaining men as an alternative to capture. When Roman cavalry finally cornered Decebalus, he killed himself. His severed head was brought to Trajan by the cavalryman Tiberius Claudius Maximus, then displayed on the steps leading to the Capitol and thrown on the Gemonian stairs. The location of Decebalus' treasury, concealed under a diverted river with the captive workers killed to preserve the secret, was revealed only after a Dacian nobleman named Bikilis was captured. The treasure was found. Trajan founded a new civilian capital, Colonia Ulpia Traiana Augusta Dacica Sarmizegetusa, on a different site from the destroyed Dacian city. The victory was commemorated by the Tropaeum Traiani cenotaph in Moesia, built in 102, and by Trajan's Column in Rome, completed in 113.

• 7. Arabia, Parthia, and the Limits of Empire

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  In 106, the death of Rabbel II Soter, one of Rome's client kings, prompted the annexation of the Nabataean Kingdom. By 107, Roman legions were stationed near Petra and Bosra, as a papyrus found in Egypt confirms. The furthest southern garrison the Romans established was Hegra, more than 300 kilometers south-west of Petra. The new province, Arabia Petraea, covered what is now southern Jordan and northwest Saudi Arabia. Since Nabataea had been the last client kingdom in Asia west of the Euphrates, its annexation completed the provincialization of the entire Roman East.

  In 113, Trajan launched the campaign that would ultimately overreach. The pretext was Parthia's installation of an unacceptable king on the Armenian throne, a kingdom the two powers had shared hegemony over since the time of Nero. Modern historians debate whether Trajan's true motive was economic, aimed at controlling the Indian trade route whose western terminus at Charax on the Persian Gulf lay outside Roman reach; or strategic, seeking a more defensible eastern frontier; or ideological, emulating the conquests of Alexander the Great. Cassius Dio attributed the campaign simply to the lure of territorial conquest and prestige. The propaganda value of a Roman Alexander was real: coins and monuments linked Trajan to Hercules, and Greek intellectuals including Plutarch had written that as few as 70,000 Roman soldiers would suffice to conquer India.

  Ten legions were assembled. Provincial authorities in Bithynia, as Pliny the Younger's correspondence from 111 onward shows, were already organizing supplies for passing troops. Trajan marched into Armenia, deposed the Parthian-appointed king Parthamasiris, who was afterwards killed in Roman custody in an incident later criticized as a breach of Roman good faith, and annexed the country as a province. A column under the cavalry general Lusius Quietus crossed the Araxes River into Media Atropatene. Early in 115, Trajan launched into Mesopotamia, taking the cities of Nisibis and Batnae and organizing a province of Mesopotamia. King Abgar VII of Osrhoene submitted publicly as a Roman protectorate. Trajan then sailed down the Euphrates from Dura-Europos, where a triumphal arch was built in his honor, dragged his fleet overland to the Tigris, and captured Seleucia and the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon. He reached the shore of the Persian Gulf, received the submission of Athambelus, the ruler of Charax, erected his statue on the shoreline, and sent the Senate a letter declaring the war concluded, adding that he was too old to repeat the conquests of Alexander.

  He never consolidated those gains. A revolt led by Sanatruces, a nephew of the Parthian king Osroes I, threatened Roman positions across Mesopotamia and Armenia. Lusius Quietus recovered Nisibis and Edessa from the rebels. A second Roman army under Appius Maximus Santra was defeated and Santra killed. Trajan himself defeated a Parthian force in battle where Sanatruces was killed, then formally deposed Osroes and installed a client king, Parthamaspates, an event commemorated on a coin with the legend REX PARTHIS DATUS, "a king is given to the Parthians." Trajan then retreated northward. The fortress city of Hatra, on the Tigris, held out against repeated Roman assaults; it is possible he suffered a heat stroke during the siege. His health now began to fail in earnest. He set sail for Rome in early 117 and died at Selinus, shortly before the 11th of August, of a stroke. His ashes were placed in the small chamber at the base of Trajan's Column, according to established historical tradition, though some modern scholarship suggests a nearby mausoleum or cult tomb. The Roman Senate deified him; Hadrian, his cousin, confirmed the honor.

• 8. Currency, Welfare, and Christians

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  In 107, Trajan reduced the silver content of the Roman denarius from 93.5 percent to 89 percent, with the actual silver weight falling from 3.04 grams to 2.88 grams. Combined with the enormous quantities of gold and silver brought back from Dacia, this devaluation allowed him to mint far more coins than any predecessor. He also withdrew from circulation silver denarii issued before Nero's own earlier devaluation. The move appears to have served a political purpose: enabling planned increases in both military and civil spending.

  Trajan formalized the alimenta, a welfare program that distributed cash, food, and subsidized education to orphans and poor children across Italy. It was funded through a combination of Dacian war booty, estate taxes, philanthropy, and an indirect mechanism of mortgages secured against Italian farmland. Registered landowners received a lump sum from the imperial treasury; in return they paid annual installments into the alimentary fund. The program reflected a genuine philanthropy that had characterized Trajan's public image from the beginning of his reign, and stood alongside his other social programs including the direct grain dole for Rome's urban poor.

  During the period of relative peace after the Dacian wars, Trajan exchanged letters with Pliny the Younger about how to handle the Christian communities in Pontus. His instructions balanced prosecution with restraint: Christians who admitted their faith and refused to recant were to be executed for obstinacy, but Trajan specifically forbade anonymous or malicious denunciations, considering them contrary to the spirit of the age. Roman citizens accused of Christianity were to be sent to Rome for trial rather than dealt with locally. Those who cursed Christ, recited prayers to the gods, or offered supplication to Trajan's statue were to be released. Pliny himself acknowledged that genuinely committed Christians would not perform those acts. Writing from Pontus around AD 112, he reported to Trajan that the spread of Christianity there cut across gender, age, and social rank alike, framing it as a kind of contagion. The exchange between Pliny and Trajan in Bithynia-Pontus is notable as the only surviving correspondence between a Roman provincial governor and his emperor, and its survival inside the tenth volume of Pliny's letters gives it a significance well beyond the narrow question of Christian policy.