Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (29 page)

A wider view shows the Carpathians as part of an almost complete mountain circle, two hundred miles across, with peaks over 7,000 feet. Within lies Transylvania, home of the Dacians, a former steppe people of Sarmatian origin, related to Ovid's Getans. Their capital, as well as Dacia's most populous region (today's Hunedoara) lay in Transylvania's south-western corner, dangerously close to Belgrade and the Drava-Sava mouths. Southwards Dacia was less than 250 miles from the Aegean and barely a hundred from the Black Sea. Here was a natural fortress of exceptional strength, looming over the Danubian frontier; as well as a strategic hinge, hurtful to Rome in the wrong hands.

In earlier episodes we have glimpsed the barbarian lands by courtesy of Roman authors. Regrettably their light penetrates the Carpathian ring but faintly. The Dacian Wars are described only by Cassius Dio of Nicaea, the 3rd-century Greek whose account of this period survives in the much truncated form of a
précis
by John Xiphilinus, a Byzantine cleric, made at about the time of the Norman conquest of England. His few pages provide general background but little about Dacia and its people. Lack of information about the frontier lands is, of course, normal. The Roman army was late to arrive on these reaches of the Danube. The river bank and its hinterlands were places of army camps, half-drained bog, part-built roads and barely assimilated natives. We may assume that civilian visitors, especially of the tourist kind, were seldom seen. Beyond lived the wild tribes. Unless strongly escorted on military or diplomatic business, or carrying merchandise destined for barbarian chieftains, crossing the river was an act of last resort. As mentioned in Episode One, an archaic custom had allowed those condemned to death a grace period within which to flee Roman territory; the sanctuary seeming to offer little more than the sentence. This exemplified the
Barbaricum's
reputation; and neither it, nor the frontier in the stricter sense, nor even the outer provinces, were conducive to authors whose tastes, like their readers', tended to flower in more civilized vicinities. Rather than complain at the sparseness of the record, one should perhaps be grateful that Ovid, Dio and Tacitus contributed at all. However, Ovid is long gone and though Tacitus, freed at last from fear, is now writing at full flood, he stands at the stern of his age and his work covers nothing later than Agricola's death in
AD
93. From that date, to the commencement of Hadrian's reign in 117, written history runs thin. And yet there is, at the heart of Rome, a major source of quite another kind: a Bayeux Tapestry in marble, dedicated to the emperor Trajan and devoted almost entirely to his adventures across the Danube.

Of Trajan it may briefly be said that he was Rome's first non-Italian emperor. Born in 53 at Italica, near Seville, of good Roman family, his father had commanded the Xth legion when Vespasian's guns were battering the Judaean cities. He served as a tribune in Syria when his father was its governor. Under Domitian he himself governed Spain; and he was probably present at the two Danubian war theatres, Marcomannia (Czechoslovakia) and Dacia.
1
At the time of his adoption by Nerva he was governor of Upper Germany, where he stayed till that emperor's death. Modernity would probably call him a liberal, though in view of his survival in high office under Domitian the cynic might question his sincerity as a champion of freedom. History is not short of soldiers who plead duty in support of tyranny.

Though neither unduly intelligent, subtle nor learned, Trajan was, it seems, one of those rare men able to wear all hats and please all people. As emperor his answers to the twin ills of unemployment and public boredom anticipate the baby-kissing politics of our own day: ‘In popularity few have been his equal, for he knew that the Roman people's affections are engaged by two things: the corn dole and the spectacles; and that in successful government jollity looms as large as polity.'
2

He was serenely self-confident, with the gift of imperturbability and the ability to shrug off criticism. He was a relaxed and affable man, and perhaps also a modest one, though with a weakness for claiming credit for building work.
3
According to one source, ‘his name was on so many buildings that they nicknamed him Ivy.'
4
Dio accuses him of being a drinker and a paederast: ‘We know of course of his inclinations toward boys and wine. But despite this his reputation remained high, for though he drank hard he stayed sober and his relationships with boys harmed no one.'
5
His popularity with the army was beyond question and this was soon matched by popularity in Rome: with the lower classes for his bread and circuses and with the upper for his decisive rejection of all things Domitianic:

He envied no one. He killed no one. He favoured all good men and feared none. He ignored slanders. He refrained from anger. He was not tempted by others' money. He had no murders on his conscience. He spent hugely on war and the works of peace. He was approachable and a good mixer. He would share his carriage with others, visit the houses of ordinary citizens and relax there.
6

The dismantling of terror, begun by the elderly caretaker emperor Nerva (
AD
96–8), was accelerated in all spheres of public life. Informers and denouncers were outlawed. Publication of the
Senate Transactions
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(the Roman
Hansard
) was resumed. The Younger Pliny speaks of heady ideas such as imperial accountability and equality under law: ‘An emperor must deal fairly with his empire, accounting for expenditure and not spending what he might be ashamed to admit … There is a notion in the air which I hear and understand for the first time: not that the First Citizen is above the law but that the law is above the First Citizen.'
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This was the man on whom the Senate would vote the title for which he would be most remembered:
optimus princeps
(best emperor of all): ‘As the word “august” reminds us of the one on whom it was first bestowed, so the word “best” will not live in mankind's vocabulary without memory of you.'
9

Turning to the future emperor Hadrian, twenty-three years Trajan's junior and a distant relative from the same provincial town: the boy's father died when he was ten and Trajan became his guardian. In due course his mother sent him to Rome, where he was laughed at for his provincial accent, lost his head at the sight of so much glamour, overspent his allowance and incurred his guardian's displeasure. But fortune would smile in his direction when Nerva nominated him to carry the news to Mainz of his guardian's adoption. Then, on Nerva's death (after only a sixteen-month reign) he was again despatched to Germany to tell Trajan that the purple toga was his. To bring this, the greatest of all news, was seen as supremely auspicious. In Trajan's eyes, however, he would remain a messenger boy.

Trajan's Column, index of a trans-Danubian epic, stands alone in Trajan's Forum. It is remarkable in all respects but in none more than its preservation: a marble mast, intact amid the forum's shipwreck. And while St Peter
10
has replaced the emperor at the masthead, the shaft on which he stands (though chipped by eighteen centuries and gnawed by the petro-chemistry of our own) has eluded major ravage and spoliation. Even its base largely escaped injury by the Vandals and their more recent namesakes.

This last structure, the Column's podium, is a seventeen-foot cube of marble blocks, carved with captured armament and housing the sepulchral chamber for Trajan's ashes and those of his empress Plotina. Above the doorway an inscription tells us that the Senate had the Column erected during Trajan's sixth consulate (
c.
AD
113) ‘to show how high a hill required to be excavated to accommodate these great works'. The hill was the Quirinal; the works Trajan's Forum (last and largest of the imperial
fora
), the vast Basilica Ulpia which lay along its northern side, as well as libraries, markets, shops, colonnades and other useful or ceremonial features. To accommodate what was by all accounts a breathtaking ensemble of buildings and spaces, it had been necessary to cut away a flank of the hill to a depth of 120 feet. It is clear from the inscription that the original reason for the Column was simply to record this effort, the combined height of podium and shaft being equivalent to the depth of rock removed. In other words, the Column's far more famous function, as a memorial to the Dacian Wars, was an afterthought; and the shaft, originally intended to be plain, was adapted to this new purpose by carving on it the frieze, upon which its claim to greatness rests.

The Column consists of seventeen marble drums, each over four feet tall. Slanting across its joins and crossing them with extreme precision, the frieze covers the shaft's entire surface in a spiral of twenty-three bands, approximately three feet wide and 656 long. Its subject is Trajan's conquest of Transylvania, known as the Dacian Wars. It contains more than 2,500 human figures, those in foreground averaging twenty to twenty-two inches in height. These are in half relief, with background figures in low relief. Though the frieze is continuous, its action is divided into more than 150 episodes, separated by conventional uprights such as a tree, wall or standing man. The reliefs are thought to have been painted and many of the figures held metal swords and spears. Inside the Column is a spiral stairway, lit from four sides by forty-three window slits, which doubled as lewis holes when the drums were hoisted into place. There are also fourteen larger, round holes, brutally banged into the frieze at irregular intervals; probably for the scaffolding required to rob the marble hands of their weapons. It seems likely that the sculptors worked from a full-scale cartoon, consisting perhaps of a textile band on which the content had been drawn in detail. Opinions differ on whether it was carved drum by drum in the workshop; as one, on site; or in the workshop with a few inches, near each join, left for completion when assembled.

The reliefs are not mentioned by any ancient author. However, Trajanic coins show the Column, with diagonal lines to represent the frieze; their dates of issue suggesting that the final concept was in place at latest within eight years of the end of the Dacian Wars and well inside Trajan's reign. The frieze is remarkable for the number and diversity of its scenes, the quality of its compositions and its narrative skills. Most extraordinary of all is the precision of its detail, though the sculptors were working to only 30 per cent life-size. Equally memorable is the sense of great events, despite the inhibitions of the three-foot band. In terms of technique and artistry it is unsurpassed.

In theory the continuous frieze offered a powerful form of expression. At the symbolic level its upward movement echoes the hard slog, from the Danube up into the Carpathians. At the level of propaganda its continuity allows Trajan's quiet presence (sixty appearances in 165 scenes) to accumulate, with all the insistence of a drumbeat, culminating in the fanfare of his statue at the column's summit. But in other respects this is an inadequate medium. The Column is perplexing to the viewer, its narrative continually disappearing round the corner as well as retreating further and further up the shaft. From any position the story is disjointed, since more than half of each loop is out of sight. To follow it an observer would have to walk twenty-three times round the Column, inviting eye strain and a cricked neck. These irritants were originally mitigated by the Forum's design. Trajan's libraries – one for Greek, the other for Latin books – flanked the Column on two sides. These must have been provided with balconies from which close inspection could be made, at least to about half the Column's height. On the third side towered Trajan's huge temple, the Basilica Ulpia,
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on which we may suppose there were also viewing provisions, this time to full height. We must remember, too, that in their original painted form the reliefs would have been bolder and their story clearer.

Owing therefore to the problems of a Column which begins from a base itself three times human height and ends at an altitude which almost defies the unaided vision, attempts to study it
in situ
will almost certainly end in frustration. Fortunately plaster casts are to hand in the Museum of Roman Civilization.
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These are from matrices made on the initiative of Napoleon III in the 1860s. A second set went to Paris and a third to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where the entire frieze is reconstructed in halves, the replicas skilfully mounted round two columnar brick cores. They have stood in the Plaster Casts Hall since 1873 and make a striking sight, but the frieze is scarcely more accessible than the original and the lighting less than perfect. Nevertheless these Napoleonic casts, as well as the photographs of them made in the 1890s by Conrad Cichorius
13
of Leipzig University, are definitive sources for a masterpiece whose sharp and brilliant chisel work has since been dulled by sour air and acid rain.

The Column is plagued by problems of interpretation. Captions, so helpful in the Bayeux Tapestry, are entirely absent. We know that Trajan himself wrote a
Commentary
on the wars, whose original was housed in the adjacent Latin library. It is possible that this lost account and the frieze's narrative were integrated. Modern commentators have produced a confusing range of theories; while counter-arguments have been devised to refute almost all of them, especially in relation to the Column's intentions and meaning. The first and most common-sense supposition was that the frieze tells the story of the Dacian Wars. Though this failed to produce instant clarification it was hoped that, with further study, a cogent narrative would emerge, which would dovetail with field work and archaeology in today's Romania. At the other extreme art historians, following Karl Lehmann-Hartleben,
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began to interpret the Column in aesthetic terms, seeing it as a work of creative imagination in which neither places nor events played a decisive role. Richmond stood somewhere between. Living and working in Rome on the eve of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, he had a close view of glory-seeking; of propaganda and its place in official art; of the need to rouse the nation, vilify the enemy and extol the armed forces, either as a preliminary to war or as justification in its aftermath. Is the carved shaft of Trajan's Column, therefore, a record of events, a work of art, or an instrument of special pleading? Might it, indeed, be all three?