gives a trustworthy plan of the buildings called by the name of Trajan and built during his reign and that of his successor, Hadrian. The modern buildings and streets are shown, and it is seen from these how the actual plan can only be inferred by that which has been discovered by digging here and there, or by investigations in cellars of modern structures. Still the general type of the old design can be seized: a great open square, 270 by 370 feet and this surrounded on three sides by a covered portico fifty feet wide with two rows of great columns in addition to the wall outside, which itself was pierced by many openings filled with columns in antis.[31] Across one end of this great square, stretched the Ulpian basilica, as long as the whole square was wide, including its portico, and half as wide as that: in other words, the open interior of the basilica was about 180 by nearly 400 feet and the roof of all this was carried by two rows of columns on every side in addition to the outer wall which again was in parts opened up into a colonnade. The basilica may or may not have been covered in the central part: various conjectural restorations have been made, but nothing is absolutely certain. It is evident that it was very open to persons coming and going—that they were allowed to cross it almost as freely as one crosses through a great cathedral in France or in Italy, going in at the north door and out at the south door, almost at pleasure. Beyond it, was a court where stood the Column of Trajan, still erect, though without its accompanying minor buildings, and beyond that again and across what may have been an entirely open street was the temple erected to the deified Trajan, after his death, by the Senate, which temple was surrounded by another portico and covered nearly as much ground as the great forum itself. In this way a continuous space of nearly a thousand feet in length by a width of from three hundred to four hundred feet was either covered by the roofs of porticoes or open to the sky within belts of these same porticoes. To walk once around the whole, following the outside ambulatory of the porticoes would be to walk the best half of a mile, and this one could do without ever passing out under the open sky, except perhaps in crossing to the temple enclosure. Nor does this account of the whole composition include in the least the great semicircular buildings projecting from the forum and from the basilica on the northeast and southwest. Now as all of this vast congeries of splendid buildings must be assumed to have been entirely of trabeated[32] structure, a mere series of columns and horizontal lintels resting upon them with superstructure, it is evident that the Greek spirit and the Greek taste controlled all parts of this vast composition.
Mile upon mile of colonnades, as Greek in taste as the later age would allow, enclosed and led up to superb interiors of a dignity and magnificence immeasurably beyond anything conceived by the Greeks. This is the Roman signet, as it were, the stamp which the great Empire put upon the world.