The reliefs are not mentioned by any ancient author. However, Trajanic coins show the Column, with diagonal lines to represent the frieze; their dates of issue suggesting that the final concept was in place at latest within eight years of the end of the Dacian Wars and well inside Trajan’s reign. The frieze is remarkable for the number and diversity of its scenes, the quality of its compositions and its narrative skills. Most extraordinary of all is the precision of its detail, though the sculptors were working to only 30 per cent life-size. Equally memorable is the sense of great events, despite the inhibitions of the three-foot band. In terms of technique and artistry it is unsurpassed.
In theory the continuous frieze offered a powerful form of expression. At the symbolic level its upward movement echoes the hard slog, from the Danube up into the Carpathians. At the level of propaganda its continuity allows Trajan’s quiet presence (sixty appearances in 165 scenes) to accumulate, with all the insistence of a drumbeat, culminating in the fanfare of his statue at the column’s summit. But in other respects this is an inadequate medium. The Column is perplexing to the viewer, its narrative continually disappearing round the corner as well as retreating further and further up the shaft. From any position the story is disjointed, since more than half of each loop is out of sight. To follow it an observer would have to walk twenty-three times round the Column, inviting eye strain and a cricked neck. These irritants were originally mitigated by the Forum’s design. Trajan’s libraries – one for Greek, the other for Latin books – flanked the Column on two sides. These must have been provided with balconies from which close inspection could be made, at least to about half the Column’s height. On the third side towered Trajan’s huge temple, the Basilica Ulpia,11 on which we may suppose there were also viewing provisions, this time to full height. We must remember, too, that in their original painted form the reliefs would have been bolder and their story clearer.
Owing therefore to the problems of a Column which begins from a base itself three times human height and ends at an altitude which almost defies the unaided vision, attempts to study it in situ will almost certainly end in frustration. Fortunately plaster casts are to hand in the Museum of Roman Civilization.12 These are from matrices made on the initiative of Napoleon III in the 1860s. A second set went to Paris and a third to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where the entire frieze is reconstructed in halves, the replicas skilfully mounted round two columnar brick cores. They have stood in the Plaster Casts Hall since 1873 and make a striking sight, but the frieze is scarcely more accessible than the original and the lighting less than perfect. Nevertheless these Napoleonic casts, as well as the photographs of them made in the 1890s by Conrad Cichorius13 of Leipzig University, are definitive sources for a masterpiece whose sharp and brilliant chisel work has since been dulled by sour air and acid rain.
The Column is plagued by problems of interpretation. Captions, so helpful in the Bayeux Tapestry, are entirely absent. We know that Trajan himself wrote a Commentary on the wars, whose original was housed in the adjacent Latin library. It is possible that this lost account and the frieze’s narrative were integrated. Modern commentators have produced a confusing range of theories; while counter-arguments have been devised to refute almost all of them, especially in relation to the Column’s intentions and meaning. The first and most common-sense supposition was that the frieze tells the story of the Dacian Wars. Though this failed to produce instant clarification it was hoped that, with further study, a cogent narrative would emerge, which would dovetail with field work and archaeology in today’s Romania. At the other extreme art historians, following Karl Lehmann-Hartleben,14 began to interpret the Column in aesthetic terms, seeing it as a work of creative imagination in which neither places nor events played a decisive role. Richmond stood somewhere between. Living and working in Rome on the eve of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, he had a close view of glory-seeking; of propaganda and its place in official art; of the need to rouse the nation, vilify the enemy and extol the armed forces, either as a preliminary to war or as justification in its aftermath. Is the carved shaft of Trajan’s Column, therefore, a record of events, a work of art, or an instrument of special pleading? Might it, indeed, be all three?
The Column has been described as a silent movie without captions,15 a foreign film without subtitles, or a ‘talkie’ bereft of its sound track. This is not entirely frivolous. Resemblances to cinematic technique are numerous. The transitions from one episode to the next resemble cuts. There are split-screen effects, with two strands of action developed simultaneously. There are tempo changes: gallops or charges alternating with static episodes, reminiscent of the way music and dialogue sequences alternate on the silver screen. There are even abrupt contrasts which the film editor calls shock-cuts. Such devices do not arise from precognition of the cinematic art but through the choice of a continuous band as the means of expression. It presented new opportunities in the sense of flow, timing and accumulative meaning. It is, however, too much to expect that the whole range of conventions resulting from the motion picture’s invention, like changes of angle16 and distance from camera, should be grasped all at once. Though daringly experimental in its progression from scene to scene, the Column clings to a single, visual standpoint: a side-on view, as it were, in medium-shot.
There is also the restraint of band size coupled with viewing distance. On a three-foot strip it is difficult to portray a crowd more than six deep, for beyond this the figures become too small to register. To suggest thousands of men in battle, hundreds of prisoners, scores of casualties; to show us the mountains of Transylvania, with their mighty hillforts; and finally to take us to the walls of the ultimate barbarian stronghold, Royal Sarmizegetusa; the frieze’s designer was faced with problems more comparable to those of the stage. In famous lines Shakespeare regrets his theatre’s inadequacies and suggests how these might be overcome:
O pardon! Since a crooked figure may
Attest in little space a million …17
Though the frieze includes many individual portraits in its foreground, in general it tends to work in this way: a clump of trees to represent a forest, a group of soldiers an army, three ships a fleet, a few houses a town, a handful of prisoners a victory. How else could a story involving 750,000 Roman soldiers, as well as the entire Dacian people and their allies, be told with a total of only 2,500 carved figures?
On the whole it is remarkably successful. To convey the impression of a mighty epic with a cast of thousands is in no small measure a vindication of the form chosen, for the continuous spiral gives an effect of totality which triumphal arches, with their separate panels, never achieved. Its designer has no need to apologize for underselling the Dacian, as Shakespeare does for the Hundred Years’ War:
Where – O for pity! – we shall much disgrace
With four or five most vile and ragged foils
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous
The name of Agincourt.18
He has, on the contrary, transcended the limitations of an untried and difficult form to produce the greatest of military art works.
In common both with theatre and cinema, the Column must wrestle with the problem of continuity. This may be defined as the guiding hand of consistency, which governs every aspect of action: time, place, direction of movement, costume and background. To reduce misunderstanding all must remain constant unless there is clear reason for change. The Column grasps the principle firmly. Its story is seen from a northfacing viewpoint, with Dacia (Romania) right and Roman territory (Serbia, Bulgaria) left. The Romans attack from left to right while the Dacians counter from right to left. Where parallel action occurs (such as Roman units advancing via two routes) those in foreground are supposedly to the south of those in background. There is also consistency in dress, manner, insignia and grouping, so that individual regiments, or characters like Trajan and Decebal, the Dacian king, are identifiable from scene to scene.
Dio’s abridged account of the Da
cian Wars, though itself of limited value, corroborates the narrative in useful and interesting ways. There is also assistance from archaeology as well as guidance offered by the topography of Romania. Finally there is the thinking of a century of Column scholars.19 Nevertheless, despite progress in squeezing information from the frieze’s 165 action-packed scenes, there persists a negative tradition, deriving from Theodor Mommsen, the most eminent of 19th-century Romanists, who believed that the plot and therefore the Column’s overall meaning were irredeemably obscure. ‘We are left’, he wrote, ‘with the impression of detail half understood and the disturbing sense of a great and moving historical catastrophe, faded for ever and lost even to memory.’20
Ian Richmond (1902–65) was in general agreement with this verdict, venturing so far as to conclude that ‘there was no intimate connection between the successive scenes’; in other words that their tendency was random and that narrative was not the main purpose.21 This eagle-eyed observer, born in Rochdale, became director of the British School in Rome at twenty-eight. As a lifetime student of the Roman army he was fascinated by the insight into its duties and methods which the Column offers; for it provides a closely observed record of constructing camps, digging ditches, bridging streams, laying roads and many matters related both to temporary and permanent fortification. It is also a unique source for the appearance of finished works: Roman forts, towers and camps, as well as Dacian citadels. Though the ruins of thousands of Roman and Iron Age military works litter the European landscape, this is our only visual record of how they looked in use. ‘The victories’, said Richmond, ‘are portrayed always in company with the toil which made them possible … It tells us something of history, but more of the labour by which history was made.’22
In concentrating upon subject-matter of this type Richmond was mining a rich vein, for 20 per cent of the frieze’s content deals with the army at work, exceeded only by combat scenes at some 25 per cent. In his eyes, however, the support activities seemed the more important. Indeed, among scholars from the former frontier provinces it has become an accepted view that the Column’s purpose was less to portray the Dacian Wars than to exalt the army. Apparently it was normal to emphasize the legions’ engineering skills, seeing them as a hallmark of civilization which even Rome’s auxiliary soldiers lacked. By contrast, to Italian scholars, close to the forum and far from the frontier, the Column is seen as recording Roman achievement in wider terms than military construction. Such a one is Lino Rossi, a Milanese medical practitioner and amateur Columnist, who took on this subject (including an exhaustive photo coverage, plus investigations in Romania) from his own resources.23 Though British scholars have damned Dr Rossi with faint praise, his view is not unbalanced by obsession with a thesis and his diagnosis of the frieze’s storyline is frequently helpful.
On the other hand, Richmond can never be taken lightly. Especially brilliant are his thoughts on how the Column’s information was gathered. Assuming the sculptors to have been professional artists – in fact the best available and probably Greek – it is highly unlikely that they were witnesses to battlefield events. In any case the idea of applying a frieze to the Column was an afterthought. Yet mysteriously, as Richmond observed, it contains ‘observation so detailed as to be almost photographic’. As an example of this detail, let us cite a scene in which we look over the rampart of a camp at the tents within. Not only can we see the leather panels with which the tents are made but also the knots with which the panels are tied and even the configuration of each knot. Did the sculptors have advice on such matters? This is belied by elementary mistakes. On more than one occasion legionaries are shown building turf ramparts. But instead of laying the turves flat they are being erected on edge, as if they were rigid blocks. This and similar errors would not have been made had the sculptors been working to military guidance. To what then were they working?
Richmond had no doubt that the Column drew on eyewitness evidence of a different sort:
The scenes must be the result of working up the contents of an artist’s wartime sketch-book … Each is based clearly upon a careful sketch, which must have been made in the war area from factual details on the spot, because nowhere else can such things have been seen or imagined in accurate combination.24
It is an attractive suggestion that Trajan had a war artist on his staff: the anonymous genius to whom this Episode is dedicated. It is, of course, impossible to prove his presence; or indeed that there was not a team of artists (though the existence of a fully developed Roman press corps may strain credulity). Assuming Richmond’s guess to be correct, he must have had exceptional gifts of reportage and the ability to commit what he saw to paper with the utmost speed. It is a talent comparable to that of the 19th-century draftsman-journalists, who were able to produce hand-drawn records of events like state occasions for their magazines in a remarkably short time; scenes sometimes involving hundreds of people, with scores of foreground faces rendered as recognizable portraits. Though we have no direct evidence for such experts in antiquity, the skills needed to supply the Column with its wealth of observation could not have been born, fully fledged, in this solitary instance. We may therefore suppose a tradition of graphic reporting whose fruits have not survived elsewhere.
That a civilian hand was at work is suggested not only by standards of draftsmanship far beyond anything elsewhere known of the soldier; but also, as we have said, by misinterpretations, particularly regarding constructional activities. Another example is a scene in which sawn lengths of bough or tree trunk, intended to be laid crosswise on a rampart top to make a walkway, become functionless circles; that is to say the rows of round timbers, seen end on, are depicted as a decorative pelmet along the rampart’s parapet. Such misunderstandings almost certainly arose from the original artist, though it is sometimes possible that they occurred in the translation to marble. In any case, these are exceptions. The majority of events are seen with an eye both sharp and true and appear to have passed from sketcher to sculptor, from paper25 to permanence, with uncanny veracity.
Nevertheless, despite Richmond’s faith in the Column’s exactitude, there remain scenes at which the war artist could not have been present, or which could not have happened as he shows them. One is a Dacian surprise attack on a diversionary front; another the army crossing the Danube on two pontoon bridges laid side by side. These bridging points were almost certainly at separate locations. In any case even the ablest of war correspondents cannot witness everything. We must therefore accept a degree of manipulation, albeit by someone close to actual operations; and indeed the experienced Column critic comes to sense it.
Be these matters as they may, it is feasible that the sketches were assembled into a picture book (perhaps supplementing Trajan’s own, written account) and that this would be in the normal form of a continuous scroll, wound from one rolling pin onto another. It is also feasible that such a scroll contained the Second Dacian War on one side, with the First on the reverse, to be read on the wind-back. Such a book may have inspired the frieze, for the latter resembles nothing so much as a scroll wrapped round a shaft. On the Column the narrative of the First War ends exactly half way up, with the Second War occupying the top half: possibly reflecting a division in a book.
Turning to the story told on the Column we will recall, in Episode Three, ominous clashes between Domitian and Decebal during the period AD 85–92. Following Trajan’s succession (in AD 98 and already in his early forties), ‘he could’, as Dio comments, ‘see how Dacian power and pride were continuing to grow’.26 Ambitious as ever, Decebal remained a menace to Roman security in the entire Balkan area. Unfortunately for the king, his was a bid for power which would meet, in the new emperor, a matching quest for glory. Trajan mustered his strength for a pre-emptive attack on the Transylvanian stronghold, launching it in the spring of 101. The narrative depicted on Trajan’s Column now begins. But before joining Trajan’s army on the Danube bank, it is timely to consider the character of the Dacians and
their Transylvanian homeland.
In about 500 BC a Sarmatian splinter-group, thwarted perhaps by Thracian cousins already occupying the south-eastern Balkans, branched northwards from the Black Sea and penetrated the Carpathian passes. That they included or were closely related to the Getans is suggested by the name of their future capital, Sarmizegetusa, which may have meant ‘Sarmatian-Getan place’. Whatever their composition they had found paradise: a green bowl with the Carpathians its rim; watered, sheltered, fertile, and rich both in useful and precious metals. Here was a land offering all the steppe lacked; and the new arrivals responded by settling down to farm it, mine it and work its metals.
Some two centuries later Celts began to cross the Carpathians from the opposite or Balkan direction. Luckily for the Dacians, Celtic numbers were small enough to be absorbed yet large enough to make a contribution; leading to significant improvements in ironcraft, husbandry and defensive architecture, with new plough types, the potter’s wheel and techniques of large-scale fortification. It was the beginning of a cultural miracle, continued and augmented by Greek and Roman influences; for Transylvania’s bounty was matched by her position, close to the outposts of the classical world yet protected by a fearsome mountain circuit from their predation.
Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Page 22