080 - Optimus Trajan

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 80, Optimus Trajan. As I said at the end of last week's episode, had Trajan died after his first decade in office he probably would have been viewed by history as a highly successful emperor. When he took power, the empire was still a bit hung over from the last paranoid days of demission, and his predecessor Nerva had done nothing to settle anyone's stomach or cure anyone's headache. But the force of Trajan's personality had calmed a growing political crisis that might have engulfed a lesser man. A weaker emperor might have invited ambitious generals to replay the tragic events that followed the collapse of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in 68 AD, but Trajan was no weak emperor, and the collapse of the Flavians was not accompanied by a destructive civil war. This feat by itself was an enormous accomplishment that is sometimes overlooked because it revolves around what didn't happen rather than what did happen. It's easy to hold a triumph for conquering Dacia, much harder to hold one for preventing a theoretical civil war. But of everything Trajan did over the course of his reign, the simple fact of the stability he provided was at least as important as anything else he did, if not more so.

When the Julio-Claudians collapsed, there was war. When the Antonines collapsed, there was war. When the Severans collapsed, the empire almost fell apart. But when the Flavians collapsed, there was Trajan, and so there was peace. Trajan is remembered as a martial emperor because he opened his reign with successful campaigns in Dacia, and closed his reign with successful campaigns in Mesopotamia. But when you crunch the numbers, he spent the bulk of his time engaged in the mundane toils of civilian administration. Indeed, for seven undisturbed years after he returned from Dacia, the great general ruled an empire at peace. So what does a vigorous man of action do when there are no wars to fight? Apparently he does everything in his power to enhance the material lives of the citizens that he rules.

Trajan returned from Dacia laden with riches that he aimed to put to good use, and apart from his precious triumphal arches, of which there are more than a handful, he directed all of that money directly into the infrastructure of the empire. I already mentioned the new forum Apollodorus built in Rome, but a new marketplace, creatively called Trajan's Marketplace, was erected in the capital at the same time, as well as an extensive bath complex, creatively called the Baths of Trajan, that covered up the final remains of Nero's Golden Palace. Elsewhere in Italy, Trajan had a new harbor at Ostia built to put an end once and for all to the silting issues that had plagued the port town for generations. He also built a new road from Beneventum to Brundisium to provide an alternative to the winding and heavily trafficked Appian Way. Roads elsewhere in Italy and the provinces were expanded, upgraded, rebuilt, and generally improved, with Apollodorus continuing to litter the European countryside with bridges across previously impassable rivers. There is no doubt that this investment in the roads did much to ensure the longevity of the empire, as both internal communication and the movement of troops sped up considerably. Of course, the Romans' magnificent road networks would eventually contribute to their undoing, as it allowed barbarian hordes to march from the frontiers to the gates of Rome with alarming quickness, but centuries would pass before that unfortunate consequence emerged, so we ought not dwell on it now.

Trajan was consumed not only with building projects, but also general administrative duties. Though he delegated a great deal of responsibility to a grateful Senate, and did his best to empower governors to act on their own, there was still an avalanche of urgent, pressing, read-first, triple-exclamation-point business for the Emperor to attend to. To help us get a sense not only of Trajan's personal managerial style, but also the kind of action items that passed through the Emperor's inbox, we are lucky to have at our disposal the letters of Pliny the Younger, a contemporary and friend of Trajan's. Had not Pliny been left childless, he might never have been compelled to publish his correspondence so that he would be remembered by someone, anyone out there. But he was left childless, so we get the benefit of reading through, among other things, real-time conversations between the Emperor and a loyal provincial governor.

I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent, but Pliny really is an interesting guy, and since his letters fill in so much of the detail about daily life in early Imperial Rome, detail that gets left out of the monument inscriptions and senatorial decrees, he is worth pausing on for a moment. Born in 61 A.D. into the equestrian class, Pliny's father died when he was young, and by an odd little twist of fate, the younger Pliny's education was put in the hands of Virginius Rufus, the same Virginius Rufus who had refused to betray Nero at the beginning of the crisis of 68-69 A.D. Young Pliny eventually traveled to Rome and continued his education, and while there became close with his uncle, the famed naturalist Pliny the Elder. When Pliny the Elder died during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, his will stipulated that the younger Pliny should inherit all of his estates and be posthumously adopted into his family. With his uncle's money backing him up, Pliny the Younger then embarked on a highly successful trip up the Cursus Honorum. He served with distinction at every stop, and eventually became a well-respected lawyer, and administrator, who counted among his friends the historians Tacitus and Suetonius, and of course, the Emperor Trajan. The Emperor so trusted Pliny that in 110 A.D., when the provincial government of Bithynia Pontus seemed to be falling apart, Trajan sent his friend Pliny to clean the situation up.

In the two years that followed, Pliny and Trajan exchanged letters that touched on all aspects of imperial administration. The correspondence provides a rare window into the daily grind of managing an empire, and Trajan's philosophy of government, which seems to be founded on moderation, tradition, and common sense. Among the litany of topics discussed were whether soldiers should be used as prison guards – no, keep using the public slaves – whether the Emperor could send out some land surveyors – no, I can't afford to, but I'm sure you'll be able to find qualified provincials to help you out – whether Pliny could authorize the rebuilding of some public baths – yes, as long as no new taxes are levied and all other essential services continue uninterrupted – whether a volunteer fire company could be chartered – no, whatever the public good, associations like that always lead to political discord – how to handle criminals that had escaped punishment – if their crime was less than ten years ago, round them up and put them to work in the mines, if greater than ten years ago, put them to work as janitors in the public baths – and, of course, there was the famous question of what to do about the Christians.

Over the course of the last fifty years or so, more and more adherents to this strange new cult had begun popping up all over the Eastern Empire. Professing a monotheism that forbade them from worshipping the accepted deities of the Roman world, including the deified Emperors, governors across the empire were vexed over the question of just what to do with these people. They seemed docile enough, but then again, they also seemed to be actively fomenting sedition against imperial authority. Pliny wrote to Trajan for instructions after being handed some lists anonymously that named active Christians in Pliny's province. The Christians were clearly violating Trajan's injunction against the formation of independent political societies, but how severely should they be punished? Trajan's reply was brief, but to the point. "'Forget about the lists,' he said. Relying on anonymous informants is a slippery slope that leads to counterproductive tyranny. If someone gets hauled into court because there is independent proof that they are a Christian, then give them the chance to renounce their religion. If they don't, then punish them as you would any other seditious troublemaker. But if they do, then let them go free no worse for the wear.' Basically, there is no point in actively persecuting the Christians, but if they wind up on your doorstep unrepentant, then punish away. The question of what to do with the growing society of Christians in the empire would continue to befuddle emperors for the next 200 odd years, who alternatively ignored them, embraced them, or persecuted them, until Constantine put the issue to rest, and by that sign, conquered.

Trajan's time playing the part of enlightened despot was a productive and beneficial time for the empire, and indeed he was quickly given the title optimist, or the best, to add to his litany of honorifics. But the emperor had spent his entire life under arms. There was little chance he was going to pass the rest of his reign in peaceful domesticity. Luckily for Trajan, in 113 A.D., events conspired to provide the old general with one last opportunity for military glory. After the victories of Corbulo during the reign of Nero, Rome and Parthia had come to an understanding over the semi-independent kingdom of Armenia. Parthia was allowed to pick who ruled the kingdom, but Rome had to ratify the choice. In 113, the Parthians dutifully nominated a new king to fill the recently vacated throne, but the choice, the Parthian king's own nephew, was deemed unacceptable by Trajan. But the Parthians decided to test the limits of Rome's disapproval, and refused to remove the offending monarch from the throne. Whether or not Trajan was waiting for some pretext, any pretext, to launch a campaign in the east, or whether he was really and truly motivated to action by the question of Armenian succession is still an open question, but the results were the same. Trajan headed east, gathered up his legions, and invaded the kingdom of Armenia.

In 114, Trajan easily dismantled the Armenian defense force, and overthrew the offending Armenian king, who would later die in Roman custody. The emperor, though, had no plans to place his own puppet on the throne. Instead, he declared his intention to formally annex the kingdom, and reorganize it as a Roman province. He spent the rest of the year overseeing the creation of the new province of Armenia, and demanding the recognition of Roman hegemony from northern tribes who inhabited the Black Sea coast. Had he stopped there, we could probably state with confidence that Trajan had in fact been animated to action by little more than the unacceptable situation in Armenia. But as soon as Armenia was annexed, Trajan immediately turned south, and marched out on what was clearly now an open-ended war of conquest.

In 115, Trajan emerged from the mountains of Armenia into the deserts of Mesopotamia, and launched himself against the Parthian Empire. At the time, the Parthian kingdom was divided by internal political discord, which was one of the reasons the king had felt it necessary to place his nephew on the throne of Armenia in the first place, and the great empire of the east was able to offer little resistance to Trajan's invading legions. By 116, the Romans already controlled enough territory to organize a new province between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that Trajan dubbed Mesopotamia. He then sent two legions south to secure key cities, with one eventually capturing the ancient city of Babylon. Trajan himself gathered a fleet and set sail with the rest of the legions down the Euphrates River. After riding that river for a ways, Trajan ordered the fleet hauled overland to the Tigris, where they would continue south on their way to capture Seleucia and the Parthian capital, both of which lay on the Tigris. Encountering little resistance, Trajan seized the Parthian capital, and, leaving behind a garrison, continued down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf, where he seized the important port city of Tarkhs. In less than two years' time, Trajan had cut out a huge chunk of Parthian territory and annexed it into the Roman Empire. His only regret, expressed while standing at the shores of the Persian Gulf, was that his advanced age prevented him from following Alexander the Great all the way to India.

It seems that the Emperor's original intention was to conquer the entire Parthian Empire and rule it directly from Rome. But the swiftness of his victories hid the superficiality of Roman control. No sooner had he reached the Gulf than he was forced to turn around and deal with a Parthian insurrection led by another of the Parthian king's nephews. Though the legions were able to defeat the Parthian army, further revolt, including a serious Jewish uprising that was beginning to engulf the whole southeastern quadrant of the empire, led Trajan to scale back his ambition. Rather than attempt direct rule of Parthia, he decided to impose a puppet on the throne and make Parthia the greatest Roman client kingdom of them all. In late 116, Trajan was trying to root out the last holdout city in his new Mesopotamian province when he suffered heat stroke under the strong desert sun. Already plagued by supply issues caused by the spreading Jewish revolt, Trajan decided to withdraw from the siege, spread his troops out to quell the revolt, while he himself returned to Italy to recuperate from what was proving to be a physically trying campaign. In 117, he began the long trek back to Rome. But putting into port in Cilicia, his body finally gave out and on August 9, 117 AD, the Emperor Trajan died, one month shy of his 64th birthday. He had ruled Rome for 19 glorious years.

Now I know what you're possibly thinking at this point. Is that it? Here we are, talking about a man who led Rome for longer than any emperor since Tiberius, a man who is widely considered one of the two or three best emperors ever, and all he gets is the better part of two episodes? Unfortunately, the answer is yes, that's all he is going to get. The problem with Trajan is that we run into a paucity of primary source accountings of his reign. Plutarch and Tacitus and Suetonius all lived in and around his reign, and prudently avoided commenting on the sitting emperor. So the key sources that we used for everything up to this point just sort of cut out around the reign of the Flavians. For Trajan, we are left with snippets from Cassius Dio, inscriptions from monuments, coins and building projects, like the triumphal column in Rome, the letters he exchanged with Pliny, and scattered summaries from historians like Aurelius Victor, who would not be born for centuries. All in all, it leaves us with a dissatisfying amount of information about an emperor who was so highly regarded and who was so important to the present and future greatness of the empire. But such is life. We will run into similar difficulties with Hadrian, and then hit bottom with Antoninus Pius, whose only existent biography is in the Augustan History, a notoriously unreliable collection of imperial biographies that we should probably just pretend doesn't exist at all.

But despite the lack of detail, the broad sweeps of Trajan's legacy are well understood. He was the first emperor to be drawn from the provinces, rather than the Italian peninsula, a major landmark that allowed men of merit from across the empire to believe that every door in the empire was open to them. In time, other Spaniards, and Syrians, and Thracians, and most famously, a series of Illyrians, would come to don the purple and rule the empire. Had Trajan not been so successful in practically everything he set out to do, it is possible that the Roman aristocracy would have associated his failures with his provincial status, and banished forever any other provincial from reigning, shutting off a pipeline of talent that would in time save, rather than destroy, the empire. Trajan was also the last of the great conquering Romans. The outward expansion of the empire had been a defining feature of the Roman character for hundreds of years, but in the last century, it was a driving impulse that had been left to wither on the vine. Trajan reintroduced the glory, and riches, and satisfaction that accompany foreign conquest, and that for so long had been denied the Roman ego. The province of Dacia was an enormously valuable acquisition, and though most everything he took in the east would be abandoned by his prudent successor, the dispatches that came back to Rome, detailing the capture of the Parthian capital, and the seizure of a port on the far-off Persian Gulf, were reminiscent of Caesar's dispatches from Gaul, and the people, and Senate both, reveled in the glory of it all. In the coming centuries, great generals would come and go, and great battles would be won and lost, but it was all in the defense of what the empire already was, rather than in the pursuit of what it could be. As I said at the beginning, Trajan was Rome at its greatest extent, and for that he would remain the envy of every future Roman general.

Then there is the legacy he left administratively. He came to power inheriting your Lord and God Domitian's centralized autocracy, and left behind a substantially devolved principate, that relied on the sound judgment of provincial governors, and the input of the Senate. In all his letters with Pliny, he stressed over and over again, that the guiding principle of all that they did, should be the welfare of the people. Ruling was not about living a lavish life, or indulging egotistical power trips. It was about guaranteeing that your subjects not only survive in a cold hard world, but thrive in it. These principles would guide the policies of his successors, and Trajan's model of enlightened despotism would see the empire reach its full potential in the decades to come. In this though, his legacy was all too fleeting, and the inevitable slip from positive monarchy to negative tyranny came just sixty years later. But for the next little while, all would be well with the world, thanks to the wise precedent Trajan set.

His final legacy though, was his choice of successor. Just as Nerva had balanced all of his missteps by bringing Trajan into the imperial fold, Trajan himself would put the cherry on the top of an already brilliant career, by naming his former ward Hadrian as heir. Hadrian is on the short list of all time greatest emperors himself, and the seamless transition from one to the other turned the whole first third of the second century into one bright shiny package. But the trick to this final legacy is that Trajan may not have been the one behind it at all. We'll get into the early years of the next emperor's biography next week, but for now, let it suffice to say that Trajan and his wife Pompeia had been the boy's guardian after Hadrian's father died, and Pompeia was enormously fond of him. There is speculation, bordering on confirmed fact, that when Trajan died in Cilicia in 117, he had not yet named an heir, and that he may have intended power to transfer to one of the generals that he had left in charge of the armies in the east when he made his way back to Rome. Pompeia though, had long lobbied for Hadrian, and when Trajan died without leaving explicit instructions, there is suspicion that she manufactured fake orders stipulating the dead emperor's posthumous adoption of her favorite, Hadrian. While not quite as awesome as Edith Wilson's secret presidency, Pompeia's clandestine plot to put Hadrian on the throne was a plot that bore fruit for Rome for the next twenty years and cemented her own legacy as a woman of far-sighted wisdom.

Next week, we'll begin to unpack the fruits of Pompeia's labors, and introduce an emperor who embodied the virtues of a Renaissance man, equally skilled in war and poetry and philosophy and rhetoric and architecture, and whose mind raced daily with ways to improve and refine everything that surrounded him. It should come as no surprise, then, that the legacy of such a learned and impressive leader is generally… Hadrian? Yeah, didn't he, like, build a wall or something? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.