Trajan

Trajan was Roman emperor from 98 to 117 and the first emperor born outside Italy. A soldier who conquered Dacia and pushed deep into Mesopotamia, he ruled over the Roman Empire at its greatest territorial extent. He was also a lavish builder and a ruler who kept good relations with the Senate, and later Romans remembered him as the model of a good emperor, the "optimus princeps", or best of rulers.

Marcus Ulpius Traianus was born on 18 September 53 at Italica, a Roman town in the province of Baetica in southern Spain, near modern Seville. His family, the Ulpii, had come from Tuder in Umbria and settled among the Italian colonists of Spain. His father, also called Marcus Ulpius Traianus, rose through the army and the Senate under the emperor Vespasian, becoming consul and governor of Syria, and the son followed him into military service, including a period as a tribune on the eastern frontier.

Trajan advanced steadily under the emperor Domitian. In 89, commanding a legion in northern Spain, he marched to the Rhine to help put down the revolt of the governor Antonius Saturninus, though the rebellion was crushed before he arrived. He was consul in 91 and later governed a province on the German frontier. After Domitian's murder in 96, the elderly senator Nerva became emperor, but he had no son and little support among the soldiers. When the Praetorian Guard humiliated him in 97, Nerva adopted Trajan, then governor of Upper Germany, as his son and heir. Nerva died in January 98, and Trajan succeeded without opposition, though he stayed on the northern frontier for more than a year before entering Rome.

The sources for Trajan's reign are thin. The relevant books of Cassius Dio survive only in a later Byzantine summary, and no full biography exists. Much of what is known comes from inscriptions, coins, monuments and the writings of Pliny the Younger, including a flattering speech of thanks to the emperor and a collection of letters. These show Trajan as a careful, approachable ruler who treated senators with respect, avoided the treason trials that had made Domitian feared, and was praised for his modest manners. Coins from about 105 call him "optimus", and in 114 the Senate formally added Optimus to his titles.

Pliny's letters from his governorship of Bithynia, in northern Asia Minor, include an exchange about Christians. Trajan replied that they should not be hunted down or condemned on anonymous accusations, but that those who were denounced and refused to sacrifice to the gods should be punished. This rescript became a guideline for Roman treatment of Christianity for much of the second century.

Trajan's first great war was against Dacia, a kingdom north of the lower Danube, roughly in modern Romania. Its king, Decebalus, had fought Domitian to a draw and received Roman subsidies. In the first war, in 101 and 102, Trajan invaded and forced Decebalus to accept terms. When the king rebuilt his strength, Trajan returned in 105 and 106, crossing the Danube on a great stone bridge designed by Apollodorus of Damascus. The Dacian capital, Sarmizegetusa, fell, Decebalus killed himself to avoid capture, and Dacia became a Roman province, settled by colonists from across the empire. Its gold mines and the enormous booty from the war paid for much of Trajan's building programme. The same year, Rome also annexed the Nabataean kingdom, around Petra and Bostra, as the province of Arabia.

In Rome, Apollodorus designed the Forum of Trajan, the largest of the imperial forums, with a great basilica, libraries and a market complex built into the slope of the Quirinal hill. Trajan's Column, dedicated in 113, rises above it, carved with a spiral frieze about 200 metres long showing the Dacian campaigns in detail, and is still one of the most important visual records of the Roman army. Trajan also built baths on the site of Nero's Golden House, a new harbour at Portus near Ostia, and roads, bridges and aqueducts in Italy and the provinces. He expanded the alimenta, a scheme that funded the upbringing of poor children in Italian towns, partly from the interest on loans to landowners.

In 113 Trajan left for the East, after the Parthian Empire placed its own candidate on the throne of Armenia, a kingdom that Rome regarded as within its sphere. In 114 he annexed Armenia as a province. He then advanced into Mesopotamia, and in 116 took the Parthian capital, Ctesiphon, near modern Baghdad, and sailed down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf. New provinces of Mesopotamia and Assyria were declared, and in Iraq Rome reached the farthest point it would ever hold in the East. Dio says Trajan, looking at a ship leaving for India, wished he were young enough to follow Alexander the Great.

The conquests did not last. Revolts broke out across the newly occupied lands, and in 115 Jewish communities in Cyrenaica, Egypt, Cyprus and Mesopotamia rose in a bitter uprising, the Diaspora Revolt, which was suppressed with great loss of life on all sides. Trajan failed to take the desert city of Hatra and, falling ill, set out for Italy in 117. He died at Selinus in Cilicia, on the southern coast of modern Turkey, in early August 117, probably after a stroke.

Trajan had no children. His wife, Plotina, announced that on his deathbed he had adopted his cousin and ward Hadrian, then governor of Syria. Ancient writers already suspected that the adoption had been arranged after his death, and the question cannot be settled. Hadrian quickly gave up the Mesopotamian conquests, but kept Dacia and Arabia. Trajan's ashes were placed in the base of his column.

Later generations treated Trajan as the measure of imperial excellence. In the fourth century the Senate is said to have greeted new emperors with the wish that they be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan. A medieval Christian legend held that Pope Gregory the Great had prayed him out of hell, and Dante placed him in paradise. Modern historians are more critical of the cost of his wars, but he remains the emperor under whom the Roman Empire reached its widest borders, and he is still honoured in Romania as a founder of the Romanian people's Latin heritage.