Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  X

  BEYOND THE DANUBE

  King Decebalus in his aerie felt completely safe—above all, safe enough to challenge the Romans with every prospect of success. So much stood in his favor.

  First of all there were the mountains, impenetrable to strangers. The heartland of the Dacian kingdom was the Transylvanian basin, inside the great semicircular sweep of the Carpathian Mountains north of the Danube. They vary from about four thousand to more than eight thousand feet in height, and were heavily forested. A rich habitat for brown bears, wolves, and lynxes, even today the range hosts more than a third of all Europe’s plant species.

  Second, the Dacians took care to defend themselves. Their craggy kingdom was guarded by half a dozen great fortresses, whose ramparts were constructed from the unique murus Dacicus, literally “Dacian wall.” Heavy masonry facings covered a timber-reinforced rubble core. The wood made these defenses flexible, and they resisted battering rams. The Dacians also erected rectangular projecting towers, on the Greek model, which allowed archers and missile-throwing engines, the technology acquired courtesy of Domitian, to provide flanking fire.

  The greatest of the fortresses was Sarmizegetusa, perched on a crag almost four thousand feet high (its extensive remains can be seen in the Orastie Mountains of Romania). It formed a quadrilateral made of huge stone blocks and was constructed on five terraces. Nearby stood two sanctuaries, one circular and the other rectangular, consisting of rows of wooden columns, symbolic groves from which hung offerings to the gods. Civilians lived outside the fortress walls: tens of additional terraces housed dwelling compounds, craftsmen’s workshops, storehouses, warehouses, aqueducts, water tanks, and pipes. Roads were paved and there was a sewage system.

  The Dacians had a civilization of which they could be proud. Their lands were rich in minerals, and they acquired great skill in metalworking. They traded with the Greek world, importing pottery, olive oil, and wine, and may have engaged in slave dealing. Compared with their neighbors they enjoyed a high standard of living as well as a rich spiritual life.

  Militarily, the Dacians were less advanced. Unlike the Roman legions, they did not field a standing army, although there was a warrior class, the comati, or “long-haired ones.” Instead, they depended on annual levies after the harvest had been gathered in, thus limiting the length of time a military force was able to stay in arms. The chieftains and warriors—Dacia’s nobility—protected themselves with armor and helmets, and the rank and file wore ordinary clothes and were defended only by an oval shield. They marched into battle accompanied by the howl of boar-headed trumpets and following their standard, the draco, or “dragon,” a multicolored windsock. Their principal weapon, the falx, was a fearsome curved machete, used for slashing rather than thrusting. As intended, a Dacian horde made a terrifying audiovisual spectacle.

  On March 25, 101, a group of men wearing odd-looking hats gathered together on the Capitol in Rome. They were members of an ancient club, the fratres arvales, or Brothers of the Plowed Field, and their suitably agricultural headgear consisted of a white band holding in place a garland made from ears of corn. Founded by Rome’s legendary second king, Numa Pompilius, they faded into obscurity during the later centuries of the Republic, but were reinvented by that most antiquarian of emperors, Augustus.

  There were twelve Arvals, and at this time they were among the most distinguished personalities in Rome; they included former consuls, one of whom was in office when Domitian was assassinated and was probably involved in the conspiracy. All were seasoned players of the political game, exactly the kind of dinner guests favored by the late emperor Nerva.

  The task of the Arvals was the worship of Dea Dia, an old rural fertility goddess, whom some thought to be the same as the Etruscan divinity Acca Larentia, Romulus’ adoptive mother. They celebrated her in May at the festival of Ambarvalia.

  The society also offered thanksgiving of a more contemporary and comprehensible kind. On this occasion only half a dozen brothers were in attendance. The emperor was an Arval ex officio, and sent his apologies. This was because today he was leaving Rome to lead an expedition against the Dacians, and the brothers wordily wished him the best of fortune.

  O Jupiter, Greatest and Best, we publicly beseech and entreat thee to cause in prosperity and felicity the safety, return, and victory of the emperor … and to bring him back and restore him in safety to the city of Rome at the earliest possible time.

  It is highly probable that one of the first decisions of Trajan’s reign was to deal with the threat posed by Decebalus. This was why he had visited the Danube provinces before returning to Rome for his inauguration. However, an attack on Dacia was high risk, and it is no wonder that an underlying impression of unease can be detected in the Arvals’ good wishes; after all, previous campaigns had failed, with generals come to grief and legions mauled or (even) wiped out.

  The new emperor had two good reasons for proceeding—one specific and the other general. First, Decebalus was an ambitious, able, and expansionist leader who threatened the stability of the imperial frontier; second, Trajan shared Augustus’ perception that an aggressive foreign policy cemented consent for the autocracy at home.

  That said, a careful and well-prepared approach would be essential to success. Trajan was an admirer of the ancient world’s greatest conqueror, Alexander the Great. But although the Macedonian was justly famed for his bravery and bravura on the battlefield, Trajan understood the invisible key to his unbroken record of victory. Alexander was a master of logistics; he took great care of his supply lines and well understood the need to protect a victorious army’s rear as it advanced into enemy territory.

  The Danube was an essential line of communication for the movement of troops and supplies. However, in places rapids made it impassable; so one or more navigable canals were dug alongside stretches of the river, a characteristically ambitious grand projet, traces of which have been discovered.

  Trajan built two great but temporary bridges resting on tethered boats, crossing the Danube at Lederata (near the present-day village of Kostolac, east of Belgrade) and Bononia (today’s Vidin). These bridges gave the legions points of entry into the mountains of Dacia.

  However, to ensure maximum security the emperor needed to provide a reliable connection between them. This was more easily said than done, for at the so-called Iron Gates of Orsova the Danube narrows to a gorge bounded by steep cliffs. At their feet on the southern, or Moesian, side the Romans cut a roadway-cum-towpath through sheer stone for a length of twelve miles. It was widened by cantilevered planks overhanging the water that were supported by wooden beams inserted into holes driven into the rock. This triumph of the legionary engineer can still be seen today.

  Trajan was also justifiably proud of his achievement, as he made clear in a votive inscription of the year 100.

  Imperator Caesar, son of the deified Nerva, Nerva Traianus Augustus Germanicus, pontifex maximus, holding the tribunician power for the fourth time, father of his country, consul for the third time, cut down mountains, erected the projecting arms, and constructed this road.

  A year later another inscription boasted that “because of the danger of cataracts, [Trajan] drew off the stream and made the Danube’s navigation safe.”

  All these preparations—not to mention the reorganization and strengthening of existing military bases north of the Danube, building accommodation for the invasion force, and increasing the capacity of ports during winter’s inclement weather—took time, perhaps as much as two or three years. As the work drew to a conclusion, a large army was assembled in Moesia—nine of the empire’s total of thirty legions. In addition, there was a roughly equal number of auxiliary troops, which included cavalry (which would face the fearsome Dacian cataphracts, or heavily armored horsemen), ten regiments of archers, and irregular forces such as the semibarbarian symmacharii—essential for warfare in rugged territory where set-piece battles were not feasible.

  Soldiers were summoned
from many parts of the empire—Spaniards, Britons, and a body of fierce Moorish riders commanded by the fiery Lusius Quietus, son of a tribal chieftain in Mauretania (roughly today’s Morocco), who recruited his bareheaded cavalry from the free Berber tribes of northern Africa: they rode bareback and without reins, hurling light javelins at the enemy. A brilliant commander but a notorious rogue, he had been dismissed from the service for some unnamed conduct unbecoming, but was now forgiven for his prowess. In all, the units deployed in Moesia added up to the largest army a Roman general had ever commanded. On the assumption that many units stayed in the rear to secure the Danubian provinces and protect supply lines, more than fifty thousand men were available for front-line duty. Trajan was a cautious commander, who countered the risk of marching into unknown territory by the application of overwhelming force.

  We can be sure that it was not only the Arvals who turned out to mark Trajan’s departure. The Senate will have gathered to see him off, accompanied by his wife, Plotina, with crowds of ordinary citizens lining the streets. The imperial entourage included some of the best military talent of the day and most astute political minds—among them, the scion of an eastern royal house, C. Julius Quadratus Bassus from Pergamum, a splendid city in today’s western Turkey, with its citadel modeled on the Acropolis of Athens; Hadrian’s bugbear and brother-in-law, Servianus, now in his fifties; and the inevitable Licinius Sura.

  The youngest comes Augusti, “companion of the Augustus,” or official associate, was a twenty-five-year-old quaestor. Although obviously a competent junior officer who had useful firsthand knowledge of Moesia and the Roman frontier troops, Hadrian owed his elevated position to being a relative of the emperor. He was rising fast, but he knew he could fall faster. He had a good friend in Sura, but Servianus was a hostile critic and Trajan sometimes listened to one and sometimes the other. Hadrian was facing his first experience of war; all eyes were on him and he would have to work hard to win his spurs. What he had gained by birth, he would maintain only on merit.

  Little has survived on paper about the course of the campaign, but the full story has been told in stone. It can still be “read” in Rome to this day. A visitor who walks down the wide, dusty viale dei Fori Imperiali from the Colosseum to the Vittore Emmanuele monument (looking more like a homage to Cecil B. DeMille than a true evocation of the classical world) will see on his right the ruins of the Forum, which Trajan commissioned later in his reign. The last, largest, and most magnificent of all the imperial fora, it dwarfed those of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Vespasian, and Nerva.

  The emperor’s architect was Apollodorus of Damascus, a designer and engineer of great virtuosity whose work exploited the revolutionary transition from traditional methods and materials to an architecture based on concrete, opus caementicum, a mixture of lime mortar, sand, water, and stones. Invented in the first century B.C., it was refined and developed and by the end of the following century had became the most popular building material. Thanks to concrete, the vault and the arch entered the Romans’ architectural vocabulary, and buildings could rise as high as four or five stories.

  The new forum stretched all the way from those of Caesar and Augustus northward to the Campus Martius. A large segment of the Quirinal Hill was removed to make room. A high arch, topped with a statue of Trajan in a war chariot, bounded the southern end of a vast rectangular piazza. This in turn led to a basilica, or conference and shopping center, and then a great temple, between which a tall freestanding column was erected, flanked by two libraries, one for Latin literature and the other for Greek.

  Trajan’s Column, the only component of this collection of massive edifices to remain intact, rises one hundred feet from the ground, as an inscription at its foot proudly claimed, to measure “how high a hill and place have been excavated for these great works.” Inside the pedestal a small room was set aside to receive one day the ashes of emperor and empress in two golden urns (it is now empty); and a circular stairway ascends to the top of the column, where a gilt-bronze statue of Trajan once stood. He was displaced during the Renaissance by Saint Peter, who remains in occupation.

  The exterior surface of the column takes the form of a stone ribbon about three feet wide and 670 feet long that winds its way up the column in twenty-three spirals. On this ribbon carved reliefs recount in realistic detail Trajan’s struggle with the Dacians, rather in the manner of a modern cartoon strip. Its narrative is broadly trustworthy, although, just as ancient historians used to make up “appropriate” speeches for their protagonists, so the column’s sculptor or sculptors sometimes inserted scenes that were typical of what could or should have happened rather than of what actually did. Hard to descry from the ground, the column could be readily admired and studied from windows in the libraries’ upper floor or floors.

  Winter was too much for classical armies and campaigns usually started in May, when there was enough fresh greenery to feed horses and pack animals, and the ground was firm underfoot. Fighting might be expected to start in June, or July after harvests had been brought in, and tailed out at the end of autumn.

  So Trajan did not have to wait long after arriving in Moesia sometime in April 101 before launching the big push. The column picks up the tale. We see the flat riverbank across the wavy waters of the Danube and a series of blockhouses and watchtowers, the Roman limes, one and two stories respectively and surrounded by wooden palisades. In small ports on the Roman bank, stevedores are loading ships with supplies to be ferried across into Dacia. Bareheaded legionaries, their helmets hanging from their right shoulder and carrying their kit on the other, march in formation over the pontoon bridge, probably at Lederata.

  On the second bridge a column of Praetorian standard-bearers is preceded by trumpeters and dismounted cavalry. At the head of the guard Trajan sets foot for the first time on Dacian territory. This emperor, it is clear, means to lead his men from the front.

  The carvings pay close attention to engineering feats. Legionaries clear woodland and build camps, forts, bridges, and roads. Every advance into unknown territory is carefully secured to avert any danger of being outflanked by the enemy. Trajan is to be found everywhere, surveying terrain, confronting a Dacian prisoner, addressing respectfully attentive troops.

  Decebalus avoids a full-scale encounter with the Romans and conducts a strategic withdrawal to his mountainous heartland and the royal citadel of Sarmizegetusa, but at Tapae, where years previously he had wiped out a Roman force, the king is either tempted or outmaneuvered into giving battle. This time he loses, and Trajan’s auxiliaries, whom he placed in the front line, display before him the severed heads of fallen Dacians. However, the Romans suffer heavy casualties and the emperor gives some of his clothing to be torn into bandages. Decebalus cannot be prevented from retiring in good order.

  In the absence of anything better to do, much territory is pillaged and many captives are taken. Among them we see a group of Dacian women, one of whom is richly dressed with a child in her arms—almost certainly the king’s sister. The emperor is a gentleman and makes a point of treating them all generously (as Alexander did the womenfolk of the Persian king of kings). Autumn has arrived and the legions hole up in their winter quarters to await next year’s spring. The fighting season draws to a close on a faintly equivocal note; Trajan has scored a victory, but failed to win the war.

  In Italy the public was on tenterhooks. Everyone wanted news, and if they had a friend in the forces they wrote for the latest information. In a state of high anxiety, Pliny promised his friend Servianus, who was evidently a dilatory correspondent, that he would pay for a special courier to carry his reply if only he would put pen to paper (or stylus to waxed tablet).

  I have had no letter from you for such a long time … Please end my anxiety—I can’t bear it … I am well myself if “well” is the right word for living in such a state of worry and suspense, expecting and fearing to hear any moment that a dear friend has met with one of the accidents that can befall mankind.
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br />   Whether or not Servianus responded in writing is unknown, but Pliny did not have to wait long for an answer in person. While the emperor stayed behind on the front, Servianus and Sura returned to Rome, where their service to the state was rewarded with “ordinary” consulships. They were accompanied by Hadrian, still imperial quaestor until the end of the year; he carried with him Trajan’s dispatches, a blow-by-blow account of the campaign, which he read out to the Senate.

  Hadrian had had a good war, although what exactly he did has not come down to us. An inscription has been found in the theater of Dionysus in Athens that sets out his early career and notes that he was twice awarded military decorations. There were specific awards for different classes of officer, but as a comes Augusti, Hadrian held no particular command and, strictly speaking, did not qualify for any of them; so he must have won one or more of a range of decorations that honor particular acts of valor—the corona civica, for saving the life of a Roman citizen in battle; the corona muralis, for assault on a wall; the corona vallaris, for assault on a ditch or bastion; and the corona obsidionalis, for bravery during a siege. The Dacian campaign afforded plenty of opportunities for any of these risky specialties.

  Also Hadrian at last managed to get “into a position of fairly close intimacy” with the emperor. He writes in his autobiography that he made sure to “fall in with Trajan’s habits,” in particular by getting drunk with him in the evenings. For this he received “opulent rewards.” Evidently Hadrian had learned that essential aspect of the courtier’s art—always to turn up, always to be on hand. Not only did this breed familiarity, but it reduced the monopolizing access to the presence that a carper such as Servianus needed to turn the emperor’s mind against him.