Archaeologically speaking, the most important sites in Italy to illustrate Roman events and the Roman way of life in the happy reign (A.D. 98–117) of Trajan—called Optimus Princeps, “best of princes”—are the port of Ostia, which in his time reached its apogee, and his Forum, the last and grandest of the Imperial Fora.

Our present knowledge of Ostia, extending far beyond the early castrum discussed in Chapter IV, is due in large part to the devoted skill of Guido Calza. Under some pressure from Mussolini, who wanted the dig finished for an exposition scheduled for 1942 (but never inaugurated), he supervised the removal in four years of over 600,000 cubic yards of earth, recovering some seventy of the 170 acres enclosed within Ostia’s Sullan wall. What he uncovered he rejuvenated but did not falsify: his method was much the same as Spinazzola’s in Pompeii. This was his principle: “Better to brace than repair, better repair than restore, better restore than embellish; never add or subtract.” His aim was not to suppress inconvenient ugliness, but to remove impediments to study and understanding. He restored mosaics, making a clear distinction between the old tesserae and the new; re-erected columns, put balconies back in place, rebuilt wooden ceilings to protect houses from the weather. He detached wall-paintings, reinforced them with cement and wire mesh, and replaced them, covered with glass, and protected against mold by the insertion of lead plates into the wall below the painting, to retard the spread, by capillary action, of dampness. He sealed the tops of walls, freed flights of stairs from rubble, opened out windows which had been bricked up in late antiquity. He planted trees, and set a privet hedge to mark the line of the city wall. He restored the ancient drainage-system. The result of all this careful work was to present to the modern world a picture of Roman life under the Empire only a shade less vivid than Pompeii. And the picture is not of a provincial town, but of the very vestibule of Rome itself, in fact a Rome in miniature, for Ostia gives an excellent notion of what life in the metropolis was like at the height of the Empire. And thanks to the careful work on the brick stamps by Professor Herbert Bloch of Harvard, most of the buildings excavated can be dated with a very fair degree of precision, so that Ostia’s development can be accurately traced from end to end.

We know from an inscription that Trajan’s artificial harbor, whose completion marked the beginning of Ostia’s peak of prosperity, was built in A.D. 104. Ostia proper was at the very mouth of the Tiber, but silting, which today has put the beach of modern Ostia (Ostia Lido) three miles beyond the seawall of the ancient town, early made the city docks impracticable for any but the smallest vessels, so that Trajan built his harbor beside (indeed over the necropolis of) Claudius’, two-and-a-half miles northwest of the town. The traffic in grain and luxury goods to feed and pander to the more or less refined tastes of the largest and richest city in the world made Ostia vastly prosperous. The evidence is building activity, dated by brick stamps, impressed on building tiles, and bearing the names of consuls, tile manufacturers, or both. There was a slight time-lag, while prosperity built up. Only twelve per cent of the datable buildings in Ostia belong to Trajan’s reign; forty-three per cent were built or restored under Hadrian. Then activity tapers off again: seventeen per cent of the buildings are of Antonine date (A.D. 138–192), while only twelve per cent belong to the age of the Severi (A.D. 193–235). Thereafter Ostia, whose fortunes rose with Rome’s, declines with her also.

The most illuminating way to describe what archaeology has to tell us about Ostia is to follow the plan used for Pompeii, treating in order the town and its population, municipal life and public amenities, housing arrangements, trade and industry, and the evidence for Ostia’s religious life. Art in Ostia hardly deserves separate treatment: it is, naturally, less well-preserved than at Pompeii, and what there is seldom rises above the level of pure documentation.

The plan of Ostia (Figs. 10.1 and 10.2) is regular but not regimented. It has unity in variety; it combines utility, a monumental quality, and the scenic. Its backbone is the major east-west street, the decumanus, nearly a mile long, and once colonnaded, which runs from the Porta Romana straight to the Forum. Beyond the line of the west castrum wall it forks sharply to the left, ending at the Porta Marina, which once fronted directly on the sea. The main north-south street, the cardo, began at the Porta Laurentina on the south—Ostia’s triplicity of gates is an Etruscan heritage—and ran, shaded and porticoed, northwestward to the dazzling whiteness of the colonnaded, marble-enriched Forum. Then it split in two on either side of Hadrian’s Capitolium and passed north between balconied houses to the river. Sixteen per cent of Ostia’s total area, exactly the same proportion as a modern city such as Madison, Wisconsin, was devoted to streets. Twelve per cent of Ostia was taken up by baths, fifteen per cent by warehouses (for Ostia was first and foremost a commercial town), and fifty-seven per cent by houses, most of which are middle-class apartment blocks. Knowing the total housing area available, and calculating twenty-six square meters of space for each person, Calza reckoned the maximum population at 35,000 to 40,000.

The evidence for Ostia’s municipal life comes mostly from inscriptions, over 6000 of them, many unpublished. They show that Ostia, like most Italian towns, imitated Rome: since Rome had a pair of chief municipal officers, the consuls, Ostia had a pair also, the duoviri. There was a town council of 110 members, which met in a marble-floored council house facing the Forum. Legal activity went on across the street in the basilica, also paved with marble, and with a pleasant portico facing the Forum. It had a charming frieze of Cupids carrying garlands. Both buildings are of Trajanic date; the prevalence of marble in them can be explained by the ease with which the stone could be brought by ships in ballast. There was a municipal plutocracy, whose names occur and recur on honorific decrees (praising them for benefactions), and on tombs near the Porta Romana and Porta Marina. The names are those of businessmen and freedmen, not of the old Roman aristocratic families. And as the years wear on men seldom hold office more than once, for it grew to be an expensive honor. If taxes assessed by the Imperial treasury were not collected in full, town officers had to make up the deficit out of their own pockets.

Public amenities included a theater, baths, and a fire department. The theater, built in Augustus’ reign (about 12 B.C.), and often restored and enlarged, seats 2700, and is used nowadays for outdoor performances of Greek and Roman plays. Behind it is a portico where theater patrons might saunter, with a temple in its midst built by Domitian. In a combination of business with pleasure typical of Ostia, seventy offices face the four sides of the portico. These offices, to be discussed in more detail below, were maintained by local branches of firms from all over the Empire.

Ostia was well equipped with public baths. The three most interesting belong to the middle years of the second century A.D. The Baths of Neptune, near the theater (Regio II, Insula iv), have a large entrance hall paved with a spirited mosaic showing Neptune driving four sea-horses, surrounded by Tritons, Nereids, dolphins ridden by Cupids, fabulous sea monsters of every kind, and two young men swimming. The Baths of the Seven Sages (Reg. III,x) are named from a painting in their dressing room which depicts the seven wise men of Greece, each labelled with an off-color couplet describing in some detail the intimate connection between constipation and the intellectual life. The most interesting of all are the Forum Baths (Reg. I,xii). A recent study by an American heating engineer, E. D. Thatcher, underlines how well the Romans understood the principles of radiant heating (of floors, walls, bathing pools, and even vaults), and orientation of bathing rooms to catch the maximum amount of sunlight, and to provide a windbreak, so that, although the large windows were not glazed, the rooms were usable on most days of the year, even in winter, with additional provision, proved by put-holes, of a rigging of canvas for the coldest days. If the windows had been glazed, bathers could not have acquired a tan, whose therapeutic and fashionable implications were the same for an Ostian as for us. Thatcher calculates that an unglazed room in the Forum Baths was usable ninety-eight per cent of the time: hence glazing was not worth while. The Romans knew, as the Forum Baths show, that the flow of heat is always from a hotter body to a colder one, and that air temperature alone is no criterion of comfort. In fact one may be comfortable in a much lower air temperature than that found in most American houses and public buildings, provided one does not lose more heat than one is generating at the time. The floor and wall surfaces of the Forum Baths radiated enough warmth to keep bathers comfortable in relatively cool air with unglazed windows. The courtyard of the baths was paved with white mosaic to reflect light and heat. A room which commanded a maximum of sunlight has radiant heat in the floor only, not in the walls. The various rooms of the baths were heated to different temperatures; Romans achieved with differently heated areas what we achieve with thermostats. The whole complex of the Forum Baths, Thatcher concludes, shows a sophistication in the use of radiant heating well beyond what modern engineers have achieved.

Though brick construction made Ostia more nearly fireproof than a modern city of frame dwellings, the grain for the dole stored in the city’s numerous warehouses was too valuable a commodity to risk, so a cohort of firemen detached from the main corps in Rome was kept at the ready in barracks behind the Baths of Neptune (Reg. II,v). The barracks, built under Hadrian, surround an arcaded courtyard with rooms opening off. A latrine with a shrine in it thriftily combines cleanliness with godliness. At the end of the courtyard opposite the entrance is a platform which still bears the bases of statues of Emperors worshiped by the firemen as a part of the Imperial cult.

As at Pompeii, so at Ostia, the houses are the most interesting part of the city, not least because Ostian houses differ completely in plan from Pompeian ones. The great majority are apartment houses, tall, many-windowed brick blocks, with or without shops on the ground floor. They were designed to be rented out in flats, with separate access to the upper stories from the street. Some have balconies, opening both on the street and on garden courtyards where many families shared the pergolas, fountains, trees, shrubs, pools, and statue-studded lawns, as they shared also the large common latrines. The Casa dei Dipinti (Reg. III,iv; see Fig. 10.3) is such a block, built in Hadrian’s reign. The ground-floor flats have mosaic floors and paintings of mythological scenes, figures of poets and dancers, landscapes, and fantastic motifs. At the end of the garden is yet another of Ostia’s combinations of the useful with the ornamental: a number of large dolia, terracotta jars sunk in the ground for storing oil or grain. Despite the panegyrics of the excavators, there is a certain deadly sameness about these flats where the lower middle class lived their lives of quiet desperation, as they do in the unfashionable quarters of Rome today.

The occupants of Ostia’s flats were largely tradesmen or minor civil servants. Their livelihood came from Ostia’s two artificial harbors (Fig. 10.4). The earlier, begun under Claudius in A.D. 42, is now the site of a military airport, whose engineers have preserved the traces (Fig. 10.5) of the two curving moles which enclosed a basin over 850,000 square yards in area. Ancient sources say there was an artificial island between the arms of the moles, with a lighthouse on it which became the symbol of Ostia: it is often figured in mosaics. A canal, now the Fiumicino branch of the Tiber, connected the harbor with the main stream.

Grandiose as it was, the harbor was ill-protected from prevailing winds: a storm in A.D. 62 wrecked 200 ships anchored or berthed in it. Trajan therefore built a smaller but more efficient basin (Fig. 10.6), hexagonal in shape and with numbered berths where ships might tie up to discharge their cargoes directly into warehouses on all six sides. A complicated entrance with a right-angled turn protected it completely from the hazards which had plagued Claudius’ harbor; it also was connected with the Claudian canal. Nowadays it forms a pool on the Torlonia estate, and access to it is almost invariably refused.

The ships that unloaded at the quays of Claudius’ or Trajan’s harbor came from all over the Mediterranean. Their agents had their in-town offices in the portico behind the Augustan theater, called by the Italians the Piazzale delle Corporazioni. Each office had an emblem in mosaic before its door, indicating the commodity it imported or the service it rendered. These mosaics, plus inscriptions, document the greatest variety of goods and services, giving a clear idea how busy the port of Rome was in the high Empire. The commodities included furs, wood, grain, beans, melons, oil, fish, wine, drugs, mirrors, flowers, ivory, gold, and silk. Among the service personnel were the caulkers, cordwainers, grain-measurers, maintenance-men for the docks, warehouses, and embankments, shipwrights, bargemen, carpenters, masons, muleteers, carters, stevedores, and divers for sunken cargoes. The home offices, often recorded in the mosaics, include ports famous or forgotten in North Africa, Sardinia, Gaul, and Spain. Ostia proper, as well as the ports, was full of warehouses where these multifarious goods were stored. Their plan, multistoried around a courtyard, was to influence the luxurious palazzi of the Renaissance. (When McKim, Mead, and White built the Boston Public Library, for example, their ultimate model was an Ostia warehouse.) The headquarters of the various guilds grew, in the second and third centuries, very luxurious, with airy courtyards and temples in imported marble, testifying to the power and prosperity of these ancient labor unions. Perhaps, then as now, the labor leaders were more prosperous than the rank and file, for in Ostia as in Pompeii, the multitude of small shops, of fishmongers, fullers, and millers, and the omnipresent thermopolia or bars, are humble enough, often with dark, cramped living quarters behind or on a mezzanine.

Ostia’s world-wide trade made her a melting-pot, and her temples reinforce the point. Besides the temples of the Imperial cults and the official religion, like the Temple of Rome and Augustus, Hadrian’s lofty Capitolium, and the half-scale Pantheon, all in the Forum, there is, near the Porta Laurentina (Reg. IV,i) the temple of the Phrygian Great Mother, where her emasculated priests once clashed their cymbals. Near the Porta Marina (Reg. III,xvii) is the temple of the Egyptian Serapis, conveniently located for sailors just in from the Levant. Everywhere there were shrines of the Persian Mithras: eighteen of them have been found, ranging in date from A.D. 160 to 250. They always occupy a retired, obscure corner of a pre-existent building; they are apparently intended to symbolize the cave where Mithras was born to his life of struggle with the powers of darkness for the immortal souls of men. They are usually oblong with shallow benches along the sides, with an altar or cult statue at the end. The favorite cult statute is of Mithras slaying the bull; being washed in the blood of a freshly slaughtered bull brought redemption into immortality to Mithras’ votaries. One Ostian Mithraeum, that of Felicissimus (Reg. V,ix; see Fig. 10.7) has a mosaic pavement representing the seven stages of initiation, somewhat like the degrees of freemasonry. Each has its appropriate symbol: the Crow, the Bridegroom, the Soldier, the Lion, the Persian (with a scimitar), the Sun-runner, and the Father, or Worshipful Master. The cult was for men only: it appealed to merchants, freedmen and soldiers.

In the fourth century in Ostia some of these were won away by another Oriental religion, Christianity. A house (Reg. IV, iii) with a mosaic of the communion chalice, set with the Christian symbol of the fish (the initial letters of the word for “fish” in Greek stand for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”) may have been the residence of the bishop. A remodeled bath (Reg. III,i) made over into a humble Christian basilica, may be the place where Augustine worshiped in A.D. 387, as recorded in his Confessions. Part of the tombstone of his mother Monica, who died in Ostia, was found a few years ago in the neighboring modern village of Ostia Antica. The altar of the Mithraeum next to the basilica was found smashed by Christian wrath into a thousand pieces.

When Saint Augustine worshiped in Ostia, the city was already in full decline. The Emperor Constantine had revoked its municipal status, and assigned it to the village called Portus which had grown up around Trajan’s harbor. The cemetery of Portus, on Isola Sacra, the island between the Fiumicino and the principal mouth of the Tiber, contains a few Christian burials. It is chiefly noteworthy for the class distinctions it reveals between the wealthy in their fine vaulted brick tombs, embellished with paintings and mosaics (very like those found in the cemetery under St. Peter’s), and the poor, whose ashes rest in the miserable amphorae stuck in the low-lying ground. By the end of the fourth century, burials in this cemetery ceased, mute and pathetic evidence of the decline of Portus itself. Ostia proper agonized on to its end. The flat slabs of inscriptions are re-used as shop-counters, or to mend pavements. Architectural marbles are sawed up into latrine-seats. Statues are reduced to lime or used, whole or decapitated, to repair breaches in the city wall. The water-pipes break and are not repaired, fallen house-walls are left lying, rubble piles up forty feet deep. Sacked by the barbarian, decimated by malaria, Ostia by the fifth century was desolate, and the road to Rome overgrown with trees. Only a Christian chapel by the theater, marking the spot where a Christian was martyred, was left to mark the spot.

Besides embellishing the Forum at Ostia with its basilica and council-house, Trajan, through his architect, the Syrian Apollodorus of Damascus, adorned Rome with the last, largest, and finest of the Imperial Fora (see Figs. 5.13 and 9.4). We know from an inscribed record, the Fasti Ostienses, found in re-use to repair a floor in an ancient private house in Ostia, that its dedication day was May 18, A.D. 113. Its general plan has been known since the French excavations of 1812. Its inspiration is the porticoes of Caesar’s Forum and the apses and the Hall of Fame of Augustus’. In conception it is axially symmetric and tripartite: the Forum proper, the basilica, and the famous Column behind, flanked by a pair of libraries. Hadrian added the Temple of the Deified Trajan, now destroyed, which closed the vista to the west.

The Forum proper lay at right angles to the Forum of Augustus, its façade bowed slightly out, like the Forum Transitorium. Its entrance was through a triumphal arch, added in A.D. 117, after Trajan’s death. In the middle of the great porticoed square, over 620 feet wide, with apses on either side, was placed a great equestrian statue of Trajan; the Romans used to say that never did a horse have such a stable.

At the back of the open square which forms the Forum proper lay the basilica, its two short sides curved, like the sides of the Forum, into apses. The basilica presents its long side to the Forum as Italian basilicas regularly did, but was much grander than the basilicas of Alba, Cosa, or even the Basilica Julia in the old Forum. The basilica had two double rows of columns, in gray granite and polychrome marble: the yellow giallo antico, from Numidia; the striated green cipollino, “onion-stone”; the purple-streaked pavonazzetto, “peacock-stone”—Italian masons have over 500 different names for marble. The architraves were marble, crystalline white from Mt. Pentelicus in Attica. The walls were veneered with marble, from Carrara. The roof was plated with gilt bronze. It was this magnificence which the Christians sought to imitate in their great early basilica churches in Rome, where the high altar stood in the place of the judges’ tribunal: Old St. Peter’s, Santa Sabina, St. John Lateran, St.-Paul’s-Without-the-Walls, San Lorenzo. Trajan’s goodness as optimus princeps was legendary to early Christians; Trajan’s basilica supplied a noble model for early Christian churches; Pope Sixtus V did Trajan a grave injustice when he replaced his statue at the top of the Column with one of St. Peter.

Behind the basilica a pair of small libraries, one Greek and one Latin, faced the tiny square in the midst of which rose Trajan’s 100-foot column. Its shaft, of Parian marble, was wound about with 155 scenes on the twenty-three spirals of the great scroll, whose bands grow wider the higher they go, so that they were “readable” to a great height, especially from the library balconies. Unrolled, the scroll would be 650 feet long. It described in 2500 figures the events of Trajan’s two campaigns, of A.D. 101–102 and 105–106, against the Dacians, ancestors of the modern Rumanians. It is because of Trajan’s conquests, imposing Roman culture, that Rumanians speak a Romance language, derived from Latin, today.

To what that great scroll has to tell us about the Roman attitude—and the sculptor’s—to the art of war we shall return. For the moment another matter is of interest: the inscription on the column-base. It states that the column marks the height of earth that was removed to make room for it. For centuries it was inferred that Trajan’s engineers had cut away a whole saddle connecting the Esquiline with the Capitoline Hill. But in 1907 Boni published the results of excavations around the base of the column, which revealed a street, a wall, and houses, dated by their pottery—Arretine and earlier—to the late Republic. Hence there probably never was a saddle of hill here. What then does the inscription mean? Boni fixed his eye on the terraced slope of the Quirinal to the north of the Forum, and concluded—rightly, as later excavation proved—that what Trajan was referring to was the cutting down and terracing of this slope for some purpose to be connected with the Forum. What that purpose was did not transpire until 1928, when Corrado Ricci cleared the area of medieval and later accretions and discovered the six levels of Trajan’s Market (Fig. 10.8).

The terrace treatment clearly goes back for inspiration to the Sanctuary of Fortune at Praeneste. Brick stamps show that the Market was built before the Forum: the shape in which the hill was dug out left space for the Forum apse when it came to be built. Form follows function: the hemicycle shows the classical virtues of symmetry, regularity, and creative exploitation of tradition, but the shape is practical, too: it allows space for nearly twice as many rooms as would have been possible with a rectilinear front. The shop fronts are good-looking as well as utilitarian. The ground floor rooms are handsomely framed in travertine; the second level windows are arched, and framed with pilasters, much as at Praeneste, with pediments alternately curved and triangular, the triangular pediments are sometimes deliberately broken, never coming to an apex, a trick of style imitated with success by eighteenth century English furniture designers like Chippendale. But this is an old thing in a new way, for here the material is not stone but brick, the beautifully-proportioned rose-red Roman kind, used unashamedly without veneer of stucco or marble, like the rose-red arcades of Renaissance Bologna.

Some of the rooms have drains in the floor for carrying of spilled liquid; the inference is that these were wine or oil shops; those without such provision would be for dry commodities like grain. There are 150 of these shops altogether, all more or less identical. The whole complex has the air not of private enterprise but of a government project, and it seems a reasonable guess that here we have the headquarters of the annona, the government dole of wine, oil, and grain, the cargoes of the ships that docked in Trajan’s port of Ostia.

Access to the second level is by stairs at either end of the hemicycle, not in the middle. The split approach is borrowed from the exedra of Terrace VII at Praeneste. (It was brick stamps in these stairs that enabled Bloch to date this complex in the first decade of the second century A.D.). The second-floor shops open onto a semicircular vaulted corridor with windows opening on the Forum. On the third level variety within unity, plus ease of access for wagons, is achieved by a semicircular street on which the third level shops face. A straight stretch of paving running north and south, called the Via Biberatica—“Pepper or Spice Street”—and concealed by the façade, contains shops with balconies, as at Ostia. Stairs ascend from this level to a great rectangular cross-vaulted basilical hall, with shops opening off it at two levels. Some archaeologists think this was the place where the dole was distributed; others see in it ancient Rome’s wholesale grain, oil, and wine market, like the Pit in Chicago where bidding fixes the day’s commodity prices. The interconnecting suites of rooms on the fifth and sixth levels are clearly not shops, but offices for administrative personnel. One large centrally-located room, with a view over the whole complex, would be a good place for the office of the superintendent of the entire affair, the praefectus annonae.

Trajan’s Market did not let his people forget his generosity. Trajan’s Column did not let them forget his prowess in war. Though casts have often been made of the reliefs on the column—the earliest to the order of Francis I of France, in 1541—the best photographs were not taken until 1942, when a scaffolding erected around the column to protect it from air attack made close-ups possible. The optimus princeps appears more than fifty times, larger than life. He dominates the sea voyages (he handles the tiller personally), the marches, the river-crossings, the councils of war, the reviews, the encounters in the open field, the sieges, the sacrifices, the submissions of enemy chiefs.

Because of the fascinating detail of the reliefs, Trajan’s Column tells us as much about the Roman army and navy as Pompeii and Ostia do about civilian life. Nor is this all: we learn a great deal, too, about provincial and native customs and culture. Most important, the unknown sculptor has impressed his personality and his feelings upon what he carved. There is an occasional touch of rough humor—a slave falling off a mule, a Dacian ducked in the Danube—and a scene or two in which Trajan, deprecating the humility of submissive native chiefs, seems to be following Vergil’s advice to spare the meek. But the dominant note is Vergil’s, too: the horror of war. Some of the detail is worth recording.

The army and navy first. The transports, with cars in two banks, and auxiliary sail, have ramming-beaks, adorned with an enormous eye, for luck, or with a sea monster. The soldiers are jacks-of-all-trades: we see them woodcutting and reaping, but most often at the interminable work of building palisaded camps, with tents of skins, a new camp every night when they were on the march. They built their permanent camps of squared stones: the sculptor shows the soldiers carrying them in slings on their shoulders, or in baskets. The walls had towers, with balconies, from which flaming torches gave signals by night. Catapults were mounted on the battlements; other catapults are horse or mule drawn, or mounted on improvised wooden bases like stacked railroad ties. We see the standards of the legions—the famed Eagles—and the standard-bearers, wearing animal heads for helmets, like Hercules. On the march the men carry their gear in bundles on the ends of their pikes, like tramps with their worldly goods done up in a bandanna.

We see something of provincial towns and their citizens. The army embarked from an Adriatic port, Ancona or Brindisi, and sailed across to Illyricum. Here the cities ape Rome, with arches, columned temples, theaters, and amphitheaters. The citizens turn out in a body, leading their children by the hand, to greet their Emperor with upraised right arms, as in a Fascist salute, and to offer sacrifice. The Danube is crossed on a great bridge, the work of Apollodorus, with masonry piers and wooden superstructure. Then one is in wild country, with exotic flora and fauna, including an especially bloodthirsty wild boar. The natives live in straw huts, and wear trousers: this last, to a Roman, sure proof of barbarism. In battle they use short hooked swords, and carry sinister dragon-head standards. Their cavalry, horses and all, are protected from head to foot with scaly armor.

It is exciting, but it is terrible. Dacian women burn Romans alive; Romans impale the severed heads of Dacians before the walls of their camp (Fig. 10.9), or present them, dripping with gore, to the Emperor. A Dacian is assassinated with a sword thrust as he pleads for mercy. Bodies are trampled underfoot in battle, prisoners are dragged along by the hair. The Dacian king commits suicide rather than fall into Roman hands; his subjects burn their capital to the ground to deny it to the Romans. The story of the first campaigns is separated from the second by a Victory writing on a shield; immediately thereafter the deadly, monotonous round begins again. The pathos of some of the scenes heightens the horror, as when two comrades carry tenderly from the field the limp body of a mortally wounded Dacian youth, or a whole tribe, with babies in arms, or children carried on their fathers’ shoulders, comes to make the act of submission. At the end looting, with the Dacian treasure loaded on the backs of mules. These scenes, with their implied criticism of warfare, are the closest the Romans ever came to pacifism.

The province won with so much blood, sweat, and tears by Trajan was consolidated by his successor Hadrian (who had fought in the campaigns) and taught the arts of peace. Hadrian, that restless traveler, spent little of his reign in Rome, but he adorned the city with some of its grandest buildings, for which he himself probably drew the plans, and he built near suburban Tivoli a villa greater than Versailles.