Back on the middle Danube (spiral seven) Trajan again leads the army across a bridge of boats. The campaigning season of 102 has begun and a second invasion of Transylvania is underway. So the frieze returns to the main story, re-establishing it with a scene which cleverly echoes the start of the first season. This time, however, the troops, streaming off the pontoon bridge, separate into what appears to be three columns of march, with Trajan in the nearest. For this the Vulcan, Tergova and Turnu Rossu passes all have their advocates; but the presence of supply carts with the upriver group suggests a less mountainous route for the left flank. This could only be the front-door approach via Tapae, the way taken by Trajan in the previous spring. Heavy matériel implies that this column’s role will be siege or blockade, while the less encumbered armies, including Trajan’s, will swing in from the rear.
In spirals eight and nine Trajan’s force crosses the Carpathians by an arduous, flanking route, aiming to approach the almost impregnable environs of the Dacian capital from the less heavily fortified, eastern side. Again the Dacian army retreats, leaving local dignitaries to sue for peace. Trajan’s force breaks into groups, in single file, with roughened marble signifying the uneven ground of mountain passes. Spiral ten sees the army across the divide at last. Another of the central citadels is encountered. A fort is built and gun-pits dug. An infantry attack is accompanied by an artillery duel, in which Dacians man a captured or copied ballista.
In spiral eleven a final assault on the hilltop redoubt begins. German irregulars, half naked and armed with clubs, lead for Rome, backed by oriental or African archers and slingers. While the Dacians are lured out to fight before their palisades a legion attacks from the rear, storming a gateway under locked shields: the celebrated testudo (tortoise) formation. The Romans appear to have won a decisive victory and taken key strongholds commanding the approach to Sarmizegetusa.
Realizing that the game is up and wishing to preserve his capital and some vestiges of influence, the king pleads for an armistice. In spiral twelve, under the part-glimpsed walls of Sarmizegetusa, the Dacians kneel in mass surrender: rank on rank, with arms imploringly outstretched. Behind them on a rock stands Decebal, his palms raised skywards. So ends the First Dacian War.
A penultimate scene shows families being brought down from the hillforts. Resettlement in valleys was a standard first step in the Roman pacification of mountain country. Meanwhile other Dacians are dismantling walls in obedience to the peace terms. But some remain in hiding on the hill and their whispering implies an intention to subvert the treaty. Dio describes the surrender:
Trajan took some hillforts, where he found the weapons, engines and standards captured from Fuscus.37 Because of these reverses and the fact that his own sister had fallen into Maximus’ hands,38 Decebal now accepted all the Roman conditions, though only as a ruse to buy time. So he consented to the surrender of armaments, engines and engineers, the extradition of deserters, the demolition of forts and the evacuation of captured land. Hencefoward he would align himself with Roman foreign policy, cease to harbour deserters and desist from employing fugitives from within the empire; for the biggest and best part of his army had been made up of those enticed from Roman territory. All this followed from his meeting with Trajan, to whom he prostrated himself, swore submission and surrendered his sword. After concluding this peace the emperor left the camp at Sarmizegetusa. Having placed garrisons throughout the conquered territory he returned to Italy where he celebrated a Triumph and received the title Dacicus.39
So Dacia was reduced to protectorate status. Though there appears no intention to depose Decebal and annex his kingdom, precedent suggests this would follow, either when the Roman grip had tightened or upon his death. Dio reveals a factor which an official source like the Column would never admit: the embarrassingly large scale of Roman desertion to the Dacian side. Soldiers, veterans and engineers had long been improving Decebal’s defences, equipping him with artillery, drilling his men and even fighting alongside them. This appears to belie all we have said about fear of the lands beyond the frontier. Dacia was, however, an exception. Where the less advanced regions of the European Barbaricum offered Roman runaways the likelihood of slavery or death, Decebal promised gold, plus a respected role in a stable state. The deserters’ motive was no doubt gainful employment rather than opposition to Rome. Since the ancient world had not invented political viewpoints in the modern sense, there was little ideological basis for treason. By the same token there was little ideological or moral basis for loyalty, especially among provincials of non-Roman origin. The empire’s subjects were, after all, a miscellany of conquered or overawed races, largely cemented by Roman success.
The final scene, a victory salute, is followed by an angel-like figure of Victory, flanked by trophies. This ensemble, half way up the Column, separates the First and Second Dacian Wars and is equivalent, in terms of modern theatre, to the interval. Some two-and-a-half years now pass unrecorded. Dio takes up the story; and we note that defection works both ways:
Because Decebal was reported to be breaking the treaty in all its clauses the Senate once more declared him an enemy. Rather than delegate the war to others Trajan again took personal command. But this time many Dacians began to desert to the Romans and Decebal soon seemed ready to throw in the sponge. And yet the stumbling block was that he would neither give up his arms nor accept personal captivity. As a result he continued to muster men and call on the adjacent peoples to join his cause.
Though losing in the field, Decebal attempted to hit back by means of terrorism, slipping deserters into Moesia40 with orders to assassinate Trajan. The emperor was an easy target due to his accessibility and his wartime habit of holding open situation-conferences. But the plan miscarried thanks to the arrest on suspicion of one, who revealed the others under torture.41
The Column’s narrative recommences with Trajan’s embarkation by night from an Italian Adriatic port. It is the spring of AD 105. Two spirals are now devoted to the emperor’s journey back to the war theatre. His itinerary may have been via Greece, to the head of the Aegean, then overland. These spirals can be closely inspected at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the replica is divided into two and the beginning of its second half is at floor level. Unfortunately, from the standpoint of historical events, this is the least important part of the frieze and was probably included as makeweight. Because the first war was eventful and hazardous, while the second was relatively quick and easy, their stories are of unequal length. The designer was thus obliged to pad the second half of the narrative with these two bands at the beginning and two more, devoted to mopping-up operations, at the end.
With spiral fifteen the scene switches to Dacia, where hostilities have already begun. Roman forts are under fierce attack. The enemy’s intention is to cut the new Danube bridge. This project, pushed forward during the ‘phoney peace’ of 103–4, is the first known work of the Syrian-Greek engineer and architect, Apollodorus of Damascus. The bridging point was Drobetae (Turnu Severin) between today’s Serbian and Romanian banks and just below the Iron Gates gorges, where routes branched out toward the key passes into Transylvania. At almost a kilometre (1,087 yards, including approaches) it would be the longest permanent bridge in antiquity.
A second project, no less remarkable, was the widening of the cliff road through the Iron Gates of Orsova. This deep, limestone gorge, eighty miles long, formed by the Danube cutting through the southern Carpathians, separates the middle Danube of Hungary and Serbia from the lower of Romania and Bulgaria. Today its whirling waters are stilled and their level raised by the dam of the Djerdap power station. During the Roman period the Iron Gates had frustrated efforts to build a continuous frontier road. Tiberius, Claudius and Domitian all attempted to cut a path into the vertical face on today’s Serbian side; finally creating a throughway only three feet wide, increased to six by planking, supported on timber brackets keyed into the cliff from joist holes below. Presumably this had been stripped awa
y by spring floods and the crashing ice for which the gorge is infamous. It was a link Trajan must mend, for his entry points to Dacia were at either end of it. Accordingly, over a distance of twelve miles in the canyon’s sheerest stretch, the ledge was widened to six feet, producing a permanent rock road, dependent on wooden cantilevering for its safety-rail only. The ledge and beam holes were well preserved before the reservoir engulfed all trace; excepting a commemorative inscription, which was raised above the new high-water mark and may still be read.
Trajan’s projects made unwelcome reading in Sarmizegetusa; especially the bridge, whose destruction was considered a matter of urgency. The Column shows the Romans stubbornly holding the bridgehead fort of Pontes. Behind is the bridge itself, its stone piers and timber spans depicted in meticulous detail, their number scaled down from twenty to five. Even carpenters still working on the superstructure are thrown into the line and fight with their axes. At this desperate moment, in finest Hollywood style, Trajan and his escort gallop to the rescue along the Iron Gates road. As they thunder by, two masons, seemingly unconcerned, are still smoothing the cliff, while a third is cutting the lettering of the inscription.
In spiral fifteen, then, the bridgehead is under attack, Trajan arrives in the nick of time and the day is saved. After dedicating the bridge the emperor gives audience to ambassadors from friendly or frightened tribes. These are of both German and Sarmato-Dacian racial groups, distinguishable by dress and hairstyles. The setting, in the bridge’s shadow, is at once a propaganda exercise and a threat, for not only was the bridge an accomplishment beyond barbarian capability, but also a warning that technology gave Rome the keys to all lands east of the Danube and Rhine. Students of the Column have proposed that Apollodorus appears in this scene, standing behind Trajan (viewer’s right). If true it is his only known portrait.
In spiral sixteen the army spills across the Danube for a third time, now by the bridge. On the Dacian bank the units divide into two strands, separated by the rusticated marble which represents mountain. Once again Trajan leads the further or left arm of a pincer which will meet near the enemy capital. The crossing was in the spring of 106; and in spiral seventeen, after scenes of footslogging on upward paths, a transition to high summer is implied by legionaries with sickles, reaping the alien corn (another cinematic trick, in which tedious time is overstepped and its passage implied by a seasonal symbol). Crossing the mountains and fighting his way toward Sarmizegetusa has cost Trajan three months. But now a change is seen in the enemy’s attitude. On the walls of a stronghold close to the capital the defenders are shouting at one another, with vigorous gestures, arguing whether to resist or surrender.
Sarmizegetusa comes into sight, its awesome ramparts stretching much of the length of spiral eighteen, perhaps four times longer than those of lesser citadels. The Romans fell trees and construct siege towers. The two army groups reunite before the walls. These appear to be of polygonal blocks, some variant of the murus gallicus. In the foreground a heap of rough stones, probably core filling, implies last-minute efforts to strengthen the defences. Upon this are strewn three sets of bizarre equipment, whose function surely mystified the artist who recorded them and has puzzled commentators since. They consist of poles, with discs at each end. The poles are nailed together to form triangles. Across the centre of each lies what seems to be a trident. Other poles are supposedly attached to objects resembling casks or small barrels!
Here the artist may have linked separate items, thrown together on a heap, into one fanciful structure; the ‘poles with barrels’ being large mallets or tamping instruments; the ‘tridents’ being rakes or forks and the ‘poles with discs’ being the bracing members by which the inner and outer wall-faces were tied together.42 Again we see an uncannily photographic eye without the specialized knowledge to support it.
The walls are stormed and breached; and spiral nineteen shows disheartened Dacians already setting fire to their own defences. Further along the rampart distraught defenders raise their hands to heaven. Others are grouped round a pot, ladling out the contents, presumably poison. In spiral twenty the Romans occupy and loot the city. Trajan receives another salutation.
Spirals twenty-one to twenty-three are largely devoted to pursuit of the Dacian remnant through forest and mountain, beyond the river Muresh and into north-western Transylvania. Hard fighting still lies ahead; and the drama is heightened by the presence of the king, who has escaped the débâcle and leads his hard-core loyalists in a desperate rearguard action. During twenty-one, however, there is a flashback to a very different scene, also described by Dio:
Decebal’s treasure was found buried beneath the River Sargetia, which runs past his palace. Prisoners of war had been used to divert the river. A pit was then dug in the bottom to take gold and silver in great quantities, plus other valuables impervious to water. The river bed was reinstated and the stream returned to its course. The royal robes and other perishables were hidden in caves and the same prisoners – used for this work also – were then butchered to ensure secrecy. But when Bicilis, a courtier who knew what had happened, was captured, he gave away the secret.43
Dacia was rich in precious metals. The massif north of the royal capital is to this day called the Muntsii Metalici (Metal-Bearing Mountains). The Column shows goblets, plate and other valuables being loaded onto mules. This was estimated as more than half-a-million pounds of gold plus a million of silver; in cash terms 700 million denarii:44 Rome’s last great loot from a foreign war. Meanwhile, in a mountain retreat, Decebal addresses his followers for the last time. Some kill each other in suicide pacts. Spiral twenty-two sees the king and his bodyguard cornered in a wood by Roman cavalry. Under a tree, bareheaded and on one knee, Decebal cuts his own throat with a diagonal sweep of the sword. A Roman officer, arm outstretched, leans from his galloping horse in an attempt to take him alive. He is a second too late. Decebal’s head is displayed on a tray in the Roman camp. It would later be sent to Rome, there to be rolled down the Gemonian Steps, a fate usually reserved for the bodies of executed criminals. The Dacian Wars are over.
In 1965 the tombstone of this same cavalry officer, one T. Claudius Maximus, was discovered in northern Greece.45 It describes the incident and carved upon it is almost the same scene as on the Column: a small but important confirmation of the latter’s historicity.
The last turn of the topmost spiral, twenty-three, shows Roman army veterans, marching into Dacia. Before them a Dacian family is fleeing the country. The men carry large bundles. One drags a reluctant child by the wrist. A man and woman look longingly backwards. Men and boys drive cattle and sheep before them. As the spiral tapers toward ‘final fade-out’, the leading animal wanders from the Dacian homeland, perhaps through one of the north Carpathian passes into the Ukrainian plain and exile. On this poignant note the frieze of Trajan’s Column ends.
Comparing the Column’s first and last scenes we are reminded of the frontier Rome had given up and that which she would now take on. The new boundary would be a huge bulge protruding into Sarmatian territory. Three hundred inbending river miles had been bartered for five hundred outbending mountain miles. The northern Carpathians, which touch 7,000 feet, are not a single ridge but a tangle of peaks up to fifty miles deep. The army had no experience of defending Alpine crests, extremely difficult to supply and almost untenable in winter. Trajan’s answer was to keep his forts within the Transylvanian basin and guard its mountain approaches through watchtower networks. The plan seems to have worked, for the Dacian province would last 165 years, as long as Rome had strength to hold it. Trajan’s victory was followed by sixty years of almost unbroken peace on the Lower Danube.
The other military imperative was to prevent Dacia becoming a vacuum. Hence the implanting of veterans. In fact these were only the van of a migration without precedent in the conquered territories: poor Italians to plough the new province and Dalmatian miners to win its metals. Those Dacians who remained became an underclass, their identit
y diluted or lost. So pronounced an ethnic and cultural displacement provides antiquity’s closest approximation to the land-runs and gold-rushes of the 19th-century New World; though government control of mineral exploitation and the huge army presence made it less of a free-for-all.
Our evidence is less archaeological than philological: disappearance of the Dacian tongue and the persistence of Romanian, a wholly Romance language, closely resembling Italian in sound and substance. Situated in the Greek-speaking half of the empire, Dacia would stay culturally Western. Some 3,000 Latin inscriptions have been found, compared with only thirty-five Greek. Though later surrounded by Slav, Magyar and Turk, part Orthodox and part Moslem, Romania has survived as an island of Latinity in speech and sentiment, as well as in her very name. Even her Black Sea province of Dobruja, Greek from the Bronze Age, today speaks Romanian; and it is one of history’s small ironies that Ovid’s verses may be better understood in modern Constantsa than in the Tomis of his own day. The survival of Romanian is especially remarkable in view of the eventual loss of Latin from all other Roman frontier provinces.
Romanian does not resemble Italian in all respects. It seems normal to look inwards to the Romance languages, toward an Italy or a France at the heart of the West; drawing on them for the vocabularies of sophistication. With Romanian one looks outwards, beyond the Balkans; and one will not be surprised to find a simpler tongue, as if Italian had survived only in the Apennines or Alps. Trajan’s name is enshrined in the language. The word Trajan signifies anything Roman and by extension almost anything old: a defensive work, an ancient road, a tumulus or barrow; even a snowdrift, in the sense that this may resemble a barrow. Hence the verb introeni = to be snowed under (literally, to be entrajanned!).46
Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Page 24