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.
Fig. 10.9 Rome, Trajan’s Column, detail. (P. Romanelli, La colonna traiana, Fig. 60)
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.