Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (33 page)

In spiral fifteen, then, the bridgehead is under attack, Trajan arrives in the nick of time and the day is saved. After dedicating the bridge the emperor gives audience to ambassadors from friendly or frightened tribes. These are of both German and Sarmato-Dacian racial groups, distinguishable by dress and hairstyles. The setting, in the bridge's shadow, is at once a propaganda exercise and a threat, for not only was the bridge an accomplishment beyond barbarian capability, but also a warning that technology gave Rome the keys to all lands east of the Danube and Rhine. Students of the Column have proposed that Apollodorus appears in this scene, standing behind Trajan (viewer's right). If true it is his only known portrait.

In spiral sixteen the army spills across the Danube for a third time, now by the bridge. On the Dacian bank the units divide into two strands, separated by the rusticated marble which represents mountain. Once again Trajan leads the further or left arm of a pincer which will meet near the enemy capital. The crossing was in the spring of 106; and in spiral seventeen, after scenes of footslogging on upward paths, a transition to high summer is implied by legionaries with sickles, reaping the alien corn (another cinematic trick, in which tedious time is overstepped and its passage implied by a seasonal symbol). Crossing the mountains and fighting his way toward Sarmizegetusa has cost Trajan three months. But now a change is seen in the enemy's attitude. On the walls of a stronghold close to the capital the defenders are shouting at one another, with vigorous gestures, arguing whether to resist or surrender.

Sarmizegetusa comes into sight, its awesome ramparts stretching much of the length of spiral eighteen, perhaps four times longer than those of lesser citadels. The Romans fell trees and construct siege towers. The two army groups reunite before the walls. These appear to be of polygonal blocks, some variant of the
murus gallicus.
In the foreground a heap of rough stones, probably core filling, implies last-minute efforts to strengthen the defences. Upon this are strewn three sets of bizarre equipment, whose function surely mystified the artist who recorded them and has puzzled commentators since. They consist of poles, with discs at each end. The poles are nailed together to form triangles. Across the centre of each lies what seems to be a trident. Other poles are supposedly attached to objects resembling casks or small barrels!

Here the artist may have linked separate items, thrown together on a heap, into one fanciful structure; the ‘poles with barrels' being large mallets or tamping instruments; the ‘tridents' being rakes or forks and the ‘poles with discs' being the bracing members by which the inner and outer wall-faces were tied together.
42
Again we see an uncannily photographic eye without the specialized knowledge to support it.

The walls are stormed and breached; and spiral nineteen shows disheartened Dacians already setting fire to their own defences. Further along the rampart distraught defenders raise their hands to heaven. Others are grouped round a pot, ladling out the contents, presumably poison. In spiral twenty the Romans occupy and loot the city. Trajan receives another salutation.

Spirals twenty-one to twenty-three are largely devoted to pursuit of the Dacian remnant through forest and mountain, beyond the river Muresh and into north-western Transylvania. Hard fighting still lies ahead; and the drama is heightened by the presence of the king, who has escaped the
débâcle
and leads his hard-core loyalists in a desperate rearguard action. During twenty-one, however, there is a flashback to a very different scene, also described by Dio:

Decebal's treasure was found buried beneath the River Sargetia, which runs past his palace. Prisoners of war had been used to divert the river. A pit was then dug in the bottom to take gold and silver in great quantities, plus other valuables impervious to water. The river bed was reinstated and the stream returned to its course. The royal robes and other perishables were hidden in caves and the same prisoners – used for this work also – were then butchered to ensure secrecy. But when Bicilis, a courtier who knew what had happened, was captured, he gave away the secret.
43

Dacia was rich in precious metals. The
massif
north of the royal capital is to this day called the Muntsii Metalici (Metal-Bearing Mountains). The Column shows goblets, plate and other valuables being loaded onto mules. This was estimated as more than half-a-million pounds of gold plus a million of silver; in cash terms 700 million
denarii:
44
Rome's last great loot from a foreign war. Meanwhile, in a mountain retreat, Decebal addresses his followers for the last time. Some kill each other in suicide pacts. Spiral twenty-two sees the king and his bodyguard cornered in a wood by Roman cavalry. Under a tree, bareheaded and on one knee, Decebal cuts his own throat with a diagonal sweep of the sword. A Roman officer, arm outstretched, leans from his galloping horse in an attempt to take him alive. He is a second too late. Decebal's head is displayed on a tray in the Roman camp. It would later be sent to Rome, there to be rolled down the Gemonian Steps, a fate usually reserved for the bodies of executed criminals. The Dacian Wars are over.

In 1965 the tombstone of this same cavalry officer, one T. Claudius Maximus, was discovered in northern Greece.
45
It describes the incident and carved upon it is almost the same scene as on the Column: a small but important confirmation of the latter's historicity.

The last turn of the topmost spiral, twenty-three, shows Roman army veterans, marching into Dacia. Before them a Dacian family is fleeing the country. The men carry large bundles. One drags a reluctant child by the wrist. A man and woman look longingly backwards. Men and boys drive cattle and sheep before them. As the spiral tapers toward ‘final fade-out', the leading animal wanders from the Dacian homeland, perhaps through one of the north Carpathian passes into the Ukrainian plain and exile. On this poignant note the frieze of Trajan's Column ends.

Comparing the Column's first and last scenes we are reminded of the frontier Rome had given up and that which she would now take on. The new boundary would be a huge bulge protruding into Sarmatian territory. Three hundred inbending river miles had been bartered for five hundred outbending mountain miles. The northern Carpathians, which touch 7,000 feet, are not a single ridge but a tangle of peaks up to fifty miles deep. The army had no experience of defending Alpine crests, extremely difficult to supply and almost untenable in winter. Trajan's answer was to keep his forts within the Transylvanian basin and guard its mountain approaches through watchtower networks. The plan seems to have worked, for the Dacian province would last 165 years, as long as Rome had strength to hold it. Trajan's victory was followed by sixty years of almost unbroken peace on the Lower Danube.

The other military imperative was to prevent Dacia becoming a vacuum. Hence the implanting of veterans. In fact these were only the van of a migration without precedent in the conquered territories: poor Italians to plough the new province and Dalmatian miners to win its metals. Those Dacians who remained became an underclass, their identity diluted or lost. So pronounced an ethnic and cultural displacement provides antiquity's closest approximation to the land-runs and gold-rushes of the 19th-century New World; though government control of mineral exploitation and the huge army presence made it less of a free-for-all.

Our evidence is less archaeological than philological: disappearance of the Dacian tongue and the persistence of Romanian, a wholly Romance language, closely resembling Italian in sound and substance. Situated in the Greek-speaking half of the empire, Dacia would stay culturally Western. Some 3,000 Latin inscriptions have been found, compared with only thirty-five Greek. Though later surrounded by Slav, Magyar and Turk, part Orthodox and part Moslem, Romania has survived as an island of Latinity in speech and sentiment, as well as in her very name. Even her Black Sea province of Dobruja, Greek from the Bronze Age, today speaks Romanian; and it is one of history's small ironies that Ovid's verses may be better understood in modern Constantsa than in the Tomis of his own day. The survival of Romanian is especially remarkable in view of the eventual loss of Latin from all other Roman frontier provinces.

Romanian does not resemble Italian in all respects. It seems normal to look inwards to the Romance languages, toward an Italy or a France at the heart of the West; drawing on them for the vocabularies of sophistication. With Romanian one looks outwards, beyond the Balkans; and one will not be surprised to find a simpler tongue, as if Italian had survived only in the Apennines or Alps. Trajan's name is enshrined in the language. The word
Trajan
signifies anything Roman and by extension almost anything old: a defensive work, an ancient road, a
tumulus
or barrow; even a snowdrift, in the sense that this may resemble a barrow. Hence the verb
introeni
= to be snowed under (literally, to be
entrajanned!
).
46

The spring of 107 saw Trajan back in Dacia, organizing the new territory. The Roman capital would be Sarmizegetusa, some twenty-five miles from the mountain stronghold of Royal Sarmizegetusa, now razed and desolate. Three legions remained in the province; and though two would be withdrawn within a decade, an unusually large complement of auxiliaries meant that her garrison would be similar to Britain's: 30–40,000, or one tenth of the Roman Army. Nearly 100 fort sites are known in Romania, compared with Britain's exceptional total of 250. Roman Britain was, of course, twice as big and held twice as long.

Visitors to Romania may wish to see Sarmizegetusa Regia, capital of the indomitable Decebal. It lies in the Orashtie Mountains at 4,000 feet; on a steep, high hill, densely clad in majestic beech: centrepiece of a clutch of Dacian citadels, cunningly concealed within the inner Carpathian foothills. They are approached from the north via the town of Orashtie (Hunedoara Province). From there a secondary road runs south to the village of Costeshti. Alas, Sarmizegetusa is some sixteen miles deeper into this upland tangle, via an unsurfaced forestry track of dwindling merit whose second half is negotiable by off-road type vehicle only. Even the nearer citadels, like Blidaru, involve a 2,000-foot climb. The remains are greatly reduced by Roman demolition. This, plus the absence of signposting and the low quality of local advice, makes the casual visit a questionable proposition. Sarmizegetusa, though a milestone in the story of Roman expansion, is still among antiquity's least accessible and most undeveloped major sites.

The Roman capital,
Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa,
is on Route 68 to Caransebesh, some twenty-eight miles south of Hunedoara. A well-preserved amphitheatre, the Forum of Trajan and a palace of the Augustales (priestly college) are on view. Ten miles west, on this same road, is the
Poarta de Fier a Transilvaniei
(another Iron Gates), the pass commanding the western approach to the royal strongholds, where the battle of Tapae was fought. On the Danube, at Turnu Severin, are the remains of the Drobeta fortress and the surviving abutment of Apollodorus' bridge. In the Dobruja there is of course Adamclisi, famous for its three monuments. The carved panels, formerly scattered, are now assembled in the village museum. Nearby stand the ruins of a municipality founded by Trajan and called Tropaeum Traiani after his monument of the same name. The ruined circuit of its 4th-century walls, with some two dozen towers, survives. On the coast are the remains of the Pontic cities of Callatis (Mangalia) and Histria (Istria), the latter twenty-five miles north of Constantsa on the coast road. At Constantsa (Tomis) itself are the Archaeological Museum of the Dobruja, a stretch of Trajanic city wall and some fine 4th-century floor mosaics. At Hirshova are the remains of the lower Danubian fort of Carsium and south of it, between the villages of Topalu and Dunarea, those of Capidava.

It is time to resume centre stage and, in returning to the Eternal City, to ask who was the author of Trajan's Column. Surely so copious a masterpiece must have been the work of many: whoever brought back the visual material from Transcarpathia, whoever edited it and whoever fixed it in stone. Possibly the sculptors were summoned from a studio in Asia Minor, where centres like Aphrodisias
47
supplied statuary to the Roman world. There must also have been a co-ordinator to select the scenes, set the style and supervise the work; and who more suitable than Apollodorus, architect to the imperial court and author of Trajan's Forum? There is, however, a clue to the contrary. The Column's depiction of his Danube bridge is flawed. Crucial struts, intended to counter the downthrust of the arches, are shown as if positioned the wrong way round. If this typifies our artist's blindness to technicalities, it also makes a fool of the bridge's designer and few would believe that had Apollodorus been in charge of the sculptural project he would have let the error pass. Doubtless his hands were full elsewhere in Trajan's Forum: a commission so abundant that even the Column was a minor addition. Failing Apollodorus, commentators have invented a master-sculptor, even calling him ‘the
maestro
': perhaps the specialist charged with the Forum's decoration, while Apollodorus looked after its buildings. Some have gone further and argued that the supposed
maestro
must have been answerable to a ‘column committee', appointed by the Senate; for the dedicatory inscription tells us that the Column was sponsored by that body. The existence of a committee, with conflicts between itself and the
maestro,
could explain the Column's contradictions: great artistry negated by excessive content and incomparable execution wasted through prohibitive viewing problems. Surely so brilliant a professional would have chosen a more accessible medium (such as a continuous, horizontal frieze, housed in an arcade) or at least a wider band and a simplified narrative. But we know that the senators had already commissioned a column for another reason (to mark the depth of rock excavated) and doubtless clung to their original choice. It is also conceivable that a senate committee, fawning on the emperor, would insist that no detail of his war be omitted: an approach regretted by art critics but applauded by historians and students of warfare.