Legions of Rome (67 page)

At dawn the next morning, the Roman siege towers were moved into position and the legions came over the city walls. The defenders were overwhelmed, the fires extinguished and the Roman army sacked Sarmizegethusa and took tens of thousands of prisoners. From captives, Trajan learned of the escape of Decebalus. He gave the job of finding the king to his cavalry. Thousands of cavalry troopers now spread out from Sarmizegethusa in search of Decebalus.

Several captured retainers of Decebalus begged for their lives, and one, Bicilis, offered to tell Trajan where the king had hidden much of his vast treasure. Some was in mountain caves, while more lay buried beneath the bed of the Sargetia river right outside the Sarmizegethusa city walls. To achieve the latter, said Bicilis, the king had used prisoners to temporarily divert the course of the river before excavating a hole for gold, silver, and other valuables. Once the treasure had been deposited in the ground, stones were heaped over the hiding place and the river was directed back to its old course over it. The prisoners had then been killed so that none could identify the hiding place.

Trajan now set several of his legions to work redirecting the river. A levy bank was created, and once the dried riverbed had been exposed beside the city walls thousands of legionaries made short work of digging it up. Sure enough, the king’s treasure hoard was unearthed. It was so immense that, combined with gold and silver produced by the mines of Dacia, it was to finance all the major new building works in Rome over the next few years. The Basilica Ulpia, in Trajan’s Forum, would bear plaques declaring that it was built
E Manubiis
—“from the spoils.” [Carc.,
I
, 1]

News that Dacians were regrouping in the mountains to the north, under the direction of Decebalus, prompted Trajan to send several legions north. At this point on Trajan’s Column, some legionaries are seen tramping over a Roman bridge that spans a river; others build boats to cross it. Decebalus soon led an attack on a Roman marching camp. But his troops were too few, and, soon dispirited, were beaten off and retreated into the forest.

By the second week of August, outside the ruined city of Sarmizegethusa, Trajan conducted an
ad locutio
, a religious ceremony designed to give thanks to the gods for Rome’s great military victory. To crown Trajan’s success, another hoard of Decebalus’ valuables was now found in caves on the Dacians’ holy mountain. Meanwhile, in the mountains to the north, Decebalus addressed the last of his loyal followers; Trajan’s Column shows some of them pleading with him. It seems the king told them
he intended seeking asylum with former Sarmatian allies, hoping to convince them to return him one day to Dacia at the head of an army that would throw out the Romans. Decebalus, accompanied by his closest advisers, bodyguards and several children, then mounted up and rode away. Some of the Dacians that Decebalus left behind took their own lives, others went to Trajan and surrendered.

A little later, in the Carpathian Mountains, snow was thick on the ground as Roman cavalry of the 2nd Pannonian Ala closed in on a party of riders that had paused in a forest clearing. As revealed by his later gravestone, decurion Tiberius Claudius Maximus from Philippi in Macedonia, formerly with the 7th Claudia Legion, led a Pannonian Horse detachment that caught up with King Decebalus. Outside Porolissum, not far from where the borders of Romania, Moldova and the Ukraine meet today, the elated troopers encircled the exhausted king and his party.

Decebalus had dismounted. Decurion Maximus urged his horse forward, aiming to make the king a prisoner. Decebalus reached to the sheath at his waist and drew a curved dagger. In one quick movement, the king drew the blade across his neck, and slit his own throat. Maximus quickly dismounted, but the king, lying in the snow, drowning in his own blood, could not be kept alive. Trajan’s Column shows one of the troopers on horseback surrounding the Dacian party making an obscene two-fingered gesture toward the dying monarch. With Decebalus dead, Maximus drew his long cavalry sword, and with carefully aimed blows, severed the king’s head and right arm.

The decurion and his men took Decebalus’ remains south to Trajan, who rewarded the cavalry officer with a golden torque, the second such decoration that Maximus received during his career, which would also include service for the emperor in Parthia. The head of King Decebalus was subsequently taken to Rome and displayed on the Gemonian Stairs—proof positive to the Roman people that their great enemy of the past twenty-one years had finally been eliminated, that the Dacian wars were at last at an end, and that the legionaries who had perished at the hands of Decebalus and the Sarmatians had been avenged.

Dacia was now a Roman province. Trajan left the 13th Gemina Legion building a base for itself at Apulum in northern Dacia, and numerous auxiliary units were stationed throughout conquered Dacian territory. The remainder of the invasion force withdrew to bases south of the Danube. Four legions would now make their homes along the Danube in Moesia in support of the 13th Gemina—the 1st Italica
at Novae, the 5th Macedonica at Troesmis, the 7th Claudia at Viminacium and the 11th Claudia at Durosturum.

The emperor himself set off back to Rome. According to Trajan’s personal physician Crito, Trajan brought 50,000 Dacian prisoners back to Rome, all of whom were put up for auction, creating a significant boost to the Roman slave market. [Carc.,
III
, 3] Trajan sent orders ahead of him for preparations to be made for 123 days of spectacles at the Colosseum; 11,000 animals were to die in the arena during these spectacles, and 10,000 gladiators did battle. [Dio,
LXVIII
, 15]

When news of the complete victory of Roman force of arms in Dacia reached Rome ahead of Trajan’s return, Trajan’s friend and client Pliny the Younger dashed off a brief note to him: “May I congratulate you, noble emperor, in my own name and that of the State, on a great and glorious victory in the finest tradition of Rome.” [Pliny,
X
, 14]

AD
106
XLIV. TRAJAN ANNEXES ARABIA
Eyeing eastern expansion

Even as he was delivering the knockout blows to King Decebalus in Dacia in
AD
105–106, Trajan had his eye on further conquest in the East. The new 2nd Traiana Legion arrived in Syria by the end of
AD
105, and with it came orders for the governor of Syria, the propraetor Aulus Cornelius Palma. Orders also went to the prefect commanding the 3rd Cyrenaica Legion based at Alexandria, telling him to prepare to march his legion north.

In the spring of
AD
106, the 3rd Cyrenaica left Alexandria, crossed the Nile, and marched across Egypt, through Judea, and into Syria, where it linked up with propraetor Palma, his gubernatorial bodyguard, and almost certainly the newly arrived 2nd Traiana Legion and detachments from legions based in Syria. Led by Palma, this army marched into the kingdom of Nabataea, in present-day Lebanon. Nabataea, which had its capital at the famed city of Petra, had long been a Roman ally, supplying valued cavalry to the Roman army. Palma annexed it for Trajan, creating the new Roman province of Arabia Petraea.

As Palma and the other troops returned to Syria, the 3rd Cyrenaica Legion established a new base at Bostra in the new province, as the 2nd Traiana took the 3rd Cyrenaica’s place in Egypt. After Palma returned to Rome from his Syrian posting, Trajan was so pleased with the job he had done in Arabia he appointed him a consul for the second time, in
AD
109.

For the moment, this was the extent of Trajan’s moves in the East. But, the time was not far off when he would set out to achieve what Julius Caesar had planned to do but had never accomplished—the conquest of Parthia.

CREATING TRAJAN’S COLUMN

“He set up an enormous column, to serve at once as a monument to himself and as a memorial of his work in the Forum.”

D
IO
,
Roman Histories
,
LXVIII
, 16

Between the close of the Second Dacian War in
AD
106 and
AD
113, a team of artists and sculptors worked on the creation of the most unique war memorial in the world. Standing 125 feet (38 meters) tall, Trajan’s Column is one of the few monuments of ancient Rome to remain almost completely intact in Rome today, with the sculpted marble scenes circling it from bottom to top in a continuous spiral band 800 feet (244 meters) long, telling the story of the emperor Trajan’s Dacian Wars.

The Column’s creator was probably Apollodorus of Damascus, responsible for the massive bridge across the Danube at Drobeta, as well as Trajan’s new odeum and gymnasium buildings at Rome, and, more famously, Trajan’s Forum, where Trajan’s round Column was to stand. [Dio, lxix, 4] Apollodurus was fond of the curve—his bridge was a series of graceful arches, while Trajan’s Forum is based on two hemicycles of brick.

Trajan’s Column is hollow. Inside, it measures 12 feet 2 inches (4 meters) across, and in this narrow space a staircase winds to the top. Forty-three small window slits admit a little light to the interior. The curving exterior Parian marble panels, each roughly 4 feet (1.2 meters) high, would have been sculpted in an artist’s studio over several years. The varying quality of the sculpting, from astonishing detail on the fingers and faces of some of the 2,500 figures, to no more than adequate chisel and rasp work on others, shows that a few master craftsmen worked on the project aided by a number of less skilled assistants.

The craftsmen’s studio was probably in Rome, not far from the chosen site for the Column in the new Forum of Trajan. The staged nature of each scene, and the way that many groups of figures are stepped, with one figure slightly above the other, indicates that models stood in place on a series of tiers in the studio. First, the designer would have consulted with the emperor to determine what Trajan wanted depicted on the Column, and once the hundreds of scenes had been mapped out, the human and animal models would have been brought in. Each panel was designed as a separate unit, with one scene sometimes flowing into the next; while at other times a device such as trees was used as a scene break. The less lifelike backgrounds would have been added later from descriptions or rough sketches drawn from memory or on location by officers who had taken part in the two campaigns.

Throughout the drafting stage, troops stationed in Rome would have been used as models—primarily men of the Praetorian Guard, which had actually taken part in the campaigns. This is indicated by the fact that most of the emblems on Praetorian and legion shields depicted on the Column are of similar thunderbolt designs. For many years this was taken by historians to mean that by the beginning of the second century all legion shield emblems had standardized on the thunderbolt theme. Designs shown in the later Notitia Dignitatum indicate that this was unlikely. It is more likely that the shield designs we see on the Column represent different cohorts of the Praetorian Guard. Each Praetorian cohort was like a mini legion, and another second-century engraving said to represent men of the Praetorian Guard shows each with different though similar thunderbolt emblems on their shields.

Artists and sculptors of Roman times were invariably of Greek origin. Those responsible for Trajan’s Column would have had no sensibility of the corporate nature of legion shield emblems, and would have drawn the emblems in front of them—those of the Praetorian Guard. For cavalry scenes, troopers of the Augustan Singularian Horse, the imperial horse guard at Rome, may have played the part of all the Roman auxiliary cavalry shown on the Column. Singularians would probably have donned captured enemy armor to act the role of Sarmatian cavalry. A detachment of auxiliary light infantry was probably sent to Rome to model for the Column; we see these auxiliaries in various scenes, with the same auxiliary unit shield design often recurring.

Many, though not all, of the auxiliaries depicted on the Column are clean-shaven, which was untypical of auxiliaries by the second century. Some have mustaches, a Gallic trait. Intriguingly, most of the “legionaries” seen crossing
the Danube in an early panel wear full beards, which historians have believed did not become the fashion until the reign of Hadrian, himself a beard-wearer, a decade after the Dacian Wars. Either the Column disproves that theory, or these “legionaries” shown crossing the Danube behind legion standards and in full legionary equipment were auxiliaries modeling the part.

There are several authentic-looking auxiliary slingers and archers on the Column, and it is likely that a handful of each were sent to Rome to act as models; a troop of Lusius Quietus’ Numidian cavalrymen is depicted, with dreadlocked hair, flowing robes and riding bareback as was the Numidian custom. Imperial slaves were probably used to play the roles of Dacians, using captured Dacian weapons displayed in Rome during Trajan’s
AD
103 Triumph.