Pliny’s letter shows the extent of Christianity’s spread in the Greek East. He wrote that he was faced, for the first time in his career, with a large Christian minority, urban and rural, young and old, male and female, free and slave. After receiving a series of denunciations, some anonymous, he was forced to investigate. The Roman public, overwhelmingly pagan and long suspicious of Christians as criminals, was riled up, and Pliny’s job as governor was to calm them down. But just what was he supposed to do? The government in Rome considered Christians suspect, but it had no general policy toward them. It left the matter up to local initiative.
From the Roman point of view, Christians were dangerous in many ways. The Romans considered their own religion—time honored, state sponsored, and carried out in public—to be the very foundation of their civilization. By participating in festivals and sacrifices, every person helped earn Rome security and prosperity. Christians broke the rules. They didn’t worship the gods, and they didn’t offer sacrifices for the emperor, which made them atheists in Roman eyes. A man who wasn’t god-fearing was not just a potential lawbreaker but also a threat to the very fabric of society; someone who might anger the gods against the whole community.
But one could also consider Christians too religious—guilty of unreasonable and excessive fear of the gods, which the Romans considered to be superstition. Jews were similarly considered atheists, but the Romans tolerated them because of the antiquity of Judaism. Christianity was relatively new, and Rome was suspicious of novelty. The Latin term for revolution was “new things” (res novae).
Then too, Christians gathered in private associations, and Roman history taught that where there was association, there was sedition. Indeed, following Trajan’s instructions, Pliny had banned religious fraternities in his province.
All that was true, and yet it was equally true that Christians generally kept the peace and minded their own business. So Pliny trod cautiously. He explained that he interrogated accused Christians at least three times. If they proved their innocence by denouncing Christ and worshipping a statue of the emperor with prayer, incense, and wine, he let them go. If they refused, he executed them. As he explained, Christian or not, they deserved to be punished for stubbornness and arrogance.
Class and status mattered, as the letter shows. If stubborn Christians were Roman citizens, Pliny did not execute them. Instead, he signed an order to have them transferred to Rome, since, as citizens, they had a right to a trial there. Slaves, of course, stood at the other end of the social scale. Pliny explained that, in order to find out what was really happening at Christian meetings, he tortured two female slaves “who were called deaconesses.” He didn’t believe what Christians said in their defense: that they merely sang hymns, swore oaths to be honest and true and not to commit theft or adultery, and then shared a meal. He expected to discover a conspiracy to commit crime but instead found merely “depraved and immoderate superstition.” Of course, Pliny was wrong. The sweetness, sociability, and support of Christian rituals contributed mightily to the new religion’s success.
Pliny wrote to the emperor, as he did for anything about which he was in doubt. Had he behaved properly in regard to the Christians? In his response, Trajan praised Pliny for behaving just as he should have. The emperor called for a defensive policy rather than an aggressive one. Christians should not be sought out, but those who were accused should be tested one by one. Every case was different; there was no fixed standard. Even those who were proven guilty should be given a chance to repent “by worshipping our gods” and thereby earn a pardon. Finally, charges had to be signed. There was no place for anonymously posted accusations. They were a bad precedent and “not in the spirit of our era.”
By our standards, the Romans under Pliny and Trajan were persecutors. However, by Roman norms, they were tough but humane. Trajan mapped out a middle ground for the future treatment of Christians. Unwittingly, he gave Christianity freedom to grow.
THE CONQUEST OF DACIA
Trajan spent almost half his reign away from Rome on campaign. Considering his love of war, he surely didn’t complain. His great success came in Dacia, roughly, modern Romania.
Throughout its history, Rome always looked with worry at the rise of potential threats. Dacia, ruled by a determined and warlike king, had forced Domitian into a compromise. The sources refer to King Decebalus as a shrewd warrior, expert both in ambushes and pitched battle, a master of timing, and an astute manager of victory as well as defeat. Decebalus was defiant, rich, and in the process of building up a network of anti-Roman allies. In doing so, he was violating his agreement with Domitian. Trajan, for his part, was a warrior. He decided to attack.
The Romans invaded Dacia in 101, with Trajan in the lead. It was a major expedition involving perhaps a third of the Roman army. The war required hard fighting, major engineering feats, and prodigies of communications and diplomacy. A year later, after the Romans had destroyed Dacian villages and defeated the enemy in battle, Decebalus agreed to make peace. Hoping to manage the situation, Trajan let him keep his throne. The emperor returned to Rome, celebrated a triumph, and received the title Dacicus.
The joy was premature, though, as King Decebalus was soon on the rise again. So Trajan invaded Dacia again in 105, this time raising two new legions. Hard mountain fighting preceded the conquest of Decebalus’s capital. The king fled and, facing capture, committed suicide. His head was brought to Trajan, who in turn had it displayed to the army and sent it to Rome, where it was thrown down the side of the Capitoline Hill.
Although Trajan tactfully sent regular reports from the field to the Senate, just as a republican-era general would have done, he saw the yearlong war as a grand and glorious achievement on his part. Few details survive in the sources, but one writer summarizes the war thus: “In the course of the campaign, he himself performed many deeds of good generalship and bravery, and his troops ran many risks and displayed great prowess on his behalf.”
A sculpted relief shows the emperor as he might have liked to see himself, on horseback in the midst of battle. He is wearing full armor, his cape billowing in the wind as he rides boldly into the enemy, who are fighting on foot. In real life, Trajan’s guards would have protected him, but the image of splendid combat is how the war was remembered.
Whereas Domitian had to accept a compromise in Dacia, Trajan conquered it, annihilated its ruling class, and opened the country to colonization by Roman veterans. The destruction of the Dacian elite was so complete that although Dacia remained a Roman province for only two hundred years, Romanians today speak a language derived from Latin.
Dacia was a rich country, and the war proved immensely profitable to Rome. Trajan found Decebalus’s hidden treasure: an estimated 360,000 pounds of gold and 730,000 pounds of silver. It was one of antiquity’s largest treasures, and there was more to come, since the country also had gold mines for Rome to exploit.
Trajan wrote Dacica, an account of the Dacian wars. Only one sentence survives, and it is as terse as Caesar: “From Berzobim, we then proceeded to Azi.” But the sentence lacks Caesar’s egotism. While Caesar refers to himself in his writings as “he,” Trajan uses “we,” showing fellowship with his fellow soldiers. Always a lavish impresario, Caesar might have approved of the victory games for Dacia that Trajan put on in Rome. They lasted 123 days, during which ten thousand gladiators fought and eleven thousand animals, both wild and tame, were slaughtered.
Trajan resembled Caesar in another way as well, being the greatest conqueror to rule Rome since the days of the dictator. Neither Augustus, who conquered Egypt, nor Claudius, who conquered Britain, was a warrior. Tiberius and Vespasian were great soldiers, but only before they became emperor. For all the talk of expanding the empire, most emperors found it exorbitant and destabilizing. Trajan was the exception.
Unlike Caesar, fortunately, Trajan knew how to moderate his arrogance and to mollify the Senate. He won additional favor by spending the treasure he had conquered on behal
f of the Roman people.
THE BUILDER
Trajan was a great builder—by some measures, the greatest of all the emperors. A later emperor called him “a creeper that grows on walls” because his name was inscribed on so many buildings. This was partly a dig at Trajan for taking credit for projects begun by his predecessors—a fair criticism but outweighed by the emperor’s new works. He sponsored such engineering feats as a great bridge across the Danube (in what is today Romania) to attack Dacia, with a wooden roadway supported by twenty masonry piers. He reduced travel time on the Appian Way by building a shorter route in southern Italy, known as Trajan’s Way. He built new ports for several Italian cities, including Rome. His most famous projects were in the capital itself: Trajan’s Column, at ninety-eight feet high a skyscraping tower for its day, with an innovative spiral relief illustrating Trajan’s conquest of Dacia; the Baths of Trajan, the first of the great imperial baths and the model for those that followed; Trajan’s Forum, including a basilica, the largest and most ambitious of the imperial forums. War spoils from Dacia financed the new forum, thereby giving Trajan bragging rights.
Like Augustus, Trajan increased the amount of marble in Rome, in pavements and columns, for example. But by Trajan’s day, brick was the most important material in Roman construction, followed by concrete. Construction was big business, making a few people rich and employing from 4 percent to 6 percent of the total population of Rome in the boom years of the first two centuries AD.
When it came to construction, Trajan’s greatest collaborator was Apollodorus of Damascus. As his name and birthplace indicate, he was Greek. Apollodorus was primarily a military engineer. He built the bridge over the Danube and wrote a book on how to conduct a siege. He is most famous, though, for Trajan’s Forum. He might possibly also have been the architect of Trajan’s Baths.
Trajan’s Forum dropped the usual temple-in-a-square arrangement for an almost square plan, perhaps recalling a military camp. It marked an unusual combination of a large Greek-style open square with a Roman roofed public building, or basilica. Elements of Near Eastern architecture can be found here, too. The variety in design symbolized the immense size of the empire, as did the presence of diverse, colored marble and granite columns from East and West. So did the scale of the project: for example, the open square alone was about twice the size of an American football field, and, in a sign of luxury, it was paved in white marble. Statues of captive Dacians lined the roofs, making the forum a kind of victory monument. They were useful as symbols of Trajan’s success, Rome’s power, and the ever-present threat of foreign foes; better to have people think about that than about any problems at home. There were three arches and two libraries flanking Trajan’s Column. At the northern end of the forum stood an imposing temple.
Trajan’s building projects were about as subtle as Hercules clubbing a mountain in two as myth said he did to create the Strait of Gibraltar, known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules. Trajan’s engineers sliced off part of a mountain in order to bring a road near Rome closer to the sea. Meanwhile, they demolished part of the Quirinal Hill in order to build Trajan’s Forum, and then they had to erect a new, multitiered structure (today’s Trajan’s Markets, a complex of shops and offices) to support the remaining hillside. To build his baths, Trajan filled in the only remaining part of Nero’s Golden House, a wing on the Esquiline Hill, and sank foundation walls into the once-magnificent halls. It was wasteful but eloquent in its message. Not only was Trajan rich enough to bury a perfectly good building but also selfless enough to deny himself a magnificent palace and devote the space to the Roman people instead.
Trajan’s projects advertised him. They all bore his name, including the new aqueduct to meet Rome’s increased water needs caused by his baths: the Aqua Traiana, or Trajan’s Aqueduct. Romans entered his forum through a monumental gateway that was probably topped with a statue of Trajan in a six-horse chariot. Inside the forum stood a statue of Trajan on horseback, and other statues of him appeared in every corner of the complex. Meanwhile, Trajan’s Column told the story of the conquest of Dacia via a sculpted frieze in 155 scenes. It wound its way up the shaft like some giant scroll. Trajan himself appears more than sixty times in the column’s scenes. But nothing promoted Trajan as baldly as the imposing temple that rose at the end of the complex. In all likelihood, Trajan declined to name the building as it went up because the Romans would not tolerate a living emperor erecting a temple to his own divinity. Yet that was just what he was doing. It would be dedicated after his death as the Temple of the Deified Trajan, with a colossal statue inside of seated Trajan as Olympian Zeus or Jupiter. The entire forum was a gigantic propaganda project to Rome’s power and the emperor’s glory.
NEMESIS IN THE EAST
Around the same time as it was conquering Dacia, Rome annexed what it called Arabia (roughly, modern Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and the northwestern Arabian Peninsula). With the addition of these two new provinces, the Roman Empire reached its maximum geographical expansion. But Trajan wanted more.
Perhaps because he wanted to equal Alexander, who conquered Iran, or perhaps because he wanted to outdo Caesar and Mark Antony, who failed to do so, or perhaps simply because he saw no greater rival state on the horizon, Trajan made war on Parthia. The pretext was a disagreement over Armenia, long a buffer state between the two empires. Rome claimed a veto power over Armenia, but the Parthians had chosen Armenia’s most recent king. Yet when the Parthians backed off, Trajan refused to take yes for an answer. He wanted his war because he wanted glory.
Trajan set off on a major expedition to the East. Plotina and Matidia traveled with him as far as Antioch in 114. Trajan and the army proceeded to take control of Armenia and then conquered all of Mesopotamia (roughly, Iraq) up to the Persian Gulf. The Parthians were distracted by civil strife. In some ways, the hardest opposition that Trajan faced was the December 115 earthquake in Antioch with which this chapter began. The Romans declared Armenia and Mesopotamia to be new provinces.
When he reached the Persian Gulf, Trajan looked eastward wistfully toward India and Alexander’s farthest conquests. He was forced to admit that he was too old to emulate his hero. He said: “I should certainly have crossed over to the Indi, too, if I were still young.” Nevertheless, he wrote the Senate that he had advanced farther than Alexander. They in turn declared him Parthicus and said that he could celebrate a triumph for as many nations as he pleased, since he had written to them about more triumphs than they could follow.
The Parthians regrouped, however. They stirred up rebellion in Mesopotamia and attacked Roman supply lines as far north as Armenia. At the same time, Jewish communities rose in revolt in the Eastern provinces outside of Judea and in Mesopotamia. It was a major rebellion, the product of discontent over bigotry and taxation, as well as support for Parthia, and Trajan had to send troops and seasoned commanders to suppress it. Trajan managed to reestablish control in Mesopotamia and started home. Roman rule in the East was fragile, though.
On the way back north, the emperor aimed for one last victory by trying to take the wealthy caravan city of Hatra (in northern Iraq) by assault. Trajan himself took part in the cavalry attack, with nearly fatal results, as one report states. Although he had taken off his purple cloak to escape recognition, “the enemy, seeing his majestic gray head and his august countenance, suspected his identity, shot at him, and killed a cavalryman in his escort.” It was a major effort for a man over the age of sixty, and it shows how much the emperor loved battle.
It proved impossible for Rome to hold its new territories. By the time Trajan returned to Antioch in 117, he had effectively lost all his Eastern conquests. Parthia had reestablished control. For Rome, the war proved bloody, expensive, and fruitless. As it turned out, Dacia and not Parthia was Rome’s last major conquest.
THE FIVE GOOD EMPERORS?
Put off by his warmongering and his Jupiter complex, we may find it hard to warm to Trajan, in spite of his generosity and p
olitical good sense. And yet Trajan’s approach worked. Following in the footsteps of Nerva, he brought the empire a century of relative peace and prosperity. After the murder of Domitian in 96, no Roman emperor was assassinated for nearly a century. After Trajan’s death, Rome engaged in no foreign wars for forty years. Trajan’s political touch was so sure, his investment in the welfare of the people of Italy so deep, and his building projects so impressive that both his title as Optimus and his appeal to later ages are understandable.
Trajan was the second of the so-called Five Good Emperors. Besides Nerva (who reigned from 96 to 98) and Trajan (98 to 117), they are Hadrian (117 to 138), Antoninus Pius (138 to 161), and Marcus Aurelius (161 to 180). It is generally thought that the empire enjoyed its zenith under them.
Historian Edward Gibbon made a famous comment about that era in his great work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “If a man were called upon to fix that period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the deaths of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”
Although that is certainly not true today, Gibbon wrote it in 1776, and back then he had a point. It is estimated that in the second century of our era, the empire’s gross domestic product and per capita gross domestic product were comparable to those of Europe in 1600. Even more impressive, the figures for the city of Rome are comparable to those of cities in the Netherlands in 1600. For all the problems in compiling good statistics from the ancient world, these figures enjoy a wide consensus of support among scholars.
Rome also enjoyed a favorable climate. What scholars refer to as the Roman Climate Optimum, a period of warm, wet, and stable conditions, stretched across the Mediterranean world. It was ideal for farmers and for consumers too.
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