Trajan’s mission was clear. He had to demonstrate that he was worthy of power, with the good qualities of Augustus and Vespasian and none of the bad qualities of Nero or Domitian. He would show that he was a statesman, a conqueror, a benefactor, and a builder, favored by the gods, and endowed with a model and obedient family. He had no intention of surrendering a drop of Domitian’s power but planned to rule with a smooth tongue and an open hand. Trajan was no republican. “Everything is under the authority of one man” is how one contemporary described Trajan’s rule.
Perhaps the word that best sums up Trajan’s rule is paternalistic. He was not the first emperor to accept the title of Father of the Fatherland (pater patriae) from the Senate, but, more than most, he tried to be as benevolent as he was severe.
Although a military man, Trajan had the qualities of a good politician. He was affable, even-tempered, and untroubled by personal attacks. He never forgot that he had three constituencies to please—the Senate, the people, and the army—and he delivered to each of them.
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Senate. When he became emperor, Trajan sent the Senate a handwritten letter promising not to execute or disenfranchise any good man, and he followed up with oaths then and later. He was as good as his word in this and executed no senators. He also kept his hands off their money. He treated the Senate with respect and dignity. Behind the scenes, Trajan concentrated power in his hands but he did so with tact and a light touch. A flattering speech claims that unlike the tyrant Domitian, Trajan respected a Roman’s freedom to speak freely; even to criticize him. This is no doubt an exaggeration, but Trajan surely relaxed the mood. He banished professional informers, the terror of the elite in Domitian’s last years.
For all his pretension to divinity, Trajan could be warm and approachable. He had a habit of taking three others into his carriage and even of entering citizens’ houses without a guard and enjoying himself. When friends accused him of being too accessible, he said that he behaved toward private citizens the way he had wanted emperors to behave toward him. Trajan enjoyed playing the role of host. We hear, for example, of how he invited his imperial council to his country villa north of Rome for a series of working sessions and entertained them every evening. A senator describes being charmed by the relative informality and simplicity of the dinner parties, by the recitations or conversation, and by the beauty of the place.
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People. That pales in importance compared with the “hospitality” that Trajan offered to the poor of Italy. Trajan expanded a system begun by Nerva that offered subsidies to poor children in Italian towns; probably several hundred thousand boys and girls. The arrangement was complicated and limited, but it offered significant help. It also highlighted Italy’s privileged status in the empire, since the benefit did not extend to the provinces. Other welfare measures included extending the distribution of grain and making generous cash disbursements from war booty. Trajan also remitted taxes after he filled the Treasury with loot acquired from foreign conquest.
Trajan lavished resources on games and races. As one ancient writer observed, Trajan knew that the Roman people were interested in only two things: “grain and spectacles.” It wasn’t far from a poet’s complaint about “bread and circuses” or an orator’s observation that people wanted only “plenty of bread and a seat at the chariot races.”
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Army. Trajan had a passion for soldiering. He loved the military life, or what one contemporary called “the camps, bugles, and trumpets, sweat and dust and heat of the sun.” Trajan was styled a military man of the old school but wiser and kinder.
Trajan cared deeply about the troops, whom he referred to as “my excellent and most loyal fellow soldiers.” He ordered special rules to make it easier for soldiers to make wills, and he founded veterans’ colonies on the Rhine and Danube frontiers and in North Africa. He campaigned in person and paid special attention to the soldiers. Trajan ate in the military mess. He shared his men’s hardships, marching on foot and fording rivers with the rank and file. When bandages gave out during one of his battles, he is said to have had his own clothing cut into strips to serve. He honored his fallen soldiers with an altar and an annual ceremony.
Like Augustus, Trajan had a gift for friendship. He was closest to Licinius Sura, who was his Agrippa. Like Trajan, Sura came from Hispania. A leading statesman and military commander under Domitian, Sura had supported Trajan’s rise to the throne. Afterward, Sura was rewarded with high office and a position by Trajan’s side in wartime. Sura used his wealth to serve as a patron of the arts and to build a public gymnasium in Rome. Apparently, he did nothing to hide his close friendship with the emperor, which incited jealousy and slander.
As a show of support for Sura, Trajan went to his friend’s house uninvited and without a bodyguard. He let Sura’s physician apply ointment to his eyes and allowed Sura’s barber to shave him, followed by a bath and dinner. The next day, Trajan told his jealous courtiers, “If Sura had desired to kill me, he would have killed me yesterday.” After Sura died circa 108, Trajan gave him outsized honors: a state funeral, a statue, and public baths in Sura’s name.
The new emperor was no intellectual, but he did not lack intelligence. Two of his passions were wine and boys, but he held his liquor, and he did not force himself on any lover. We hear of affairs with various imperial page boys, with an actor and a dancer, and even, according to gossip, with Nerva and Sura. Two of his other passions were vanity and war, and in these he was not as moderate.
TRAJAN’S IMPERIAL WOMEN
Trajan presented his family as the First Family, Roman style. Like Vespasian and Nerva, he came to the throne without any blood tie to a previous emperor. So he had to work harder to seem legitimate. One way was to show his family as a return to the pristine Roman ideal of simplicity and obedience. Sure, the Flavians talked about restoring family values after Nero’s bacchanalia, but they brought Caenis, Berenice, and Domitia. Nerva was a widower. Finally, with Trajan, Rome would see virtue restored to the imperial house.
When he ascended to the throne in the year 98 Trajan was childless, but he had a large family nonetheless. Although he appeared to embody Roman masculinity, his palace was a feminine place; he shared it with his wife, Pompeia Plotina, his widowed sister, Ulpia Marciana, and her widowed daughter, Salonia Matidia, and Salonia Matidia’s daughters, Mindia Matidia and Vibia Sabina. He wanted the world to see them as virtuous, helpful, and obedient. Imperial propagandists did the job.
Official art portrayed Trajan’s women as regal and austere. They all have styled but never luxuriant hair; they all have downturned mouths and steady gazes. Plotina’s portrait busts show a calm, noble, and impeccably coiffed woman. Marciana is rigid and commanding. Her hair is carefully braided in a tight coil. She lacks the bravura, the riot of curls in portraits of Flavian women such as Domitia. Coin portraits are similarly restrained. Domesticity is a theme. Plotina appears with symbols of house and home and of Chastity—the latter a goddess to whom she had an altar erected. Marciana is seen with her daughter and two granddaughters. The several busts of Salonia Matidia depict a stately and imperturbable-looking woman with an aquiline nose and probing eyes. Her long and almost masculine-looking face bears a resemblance to her uncle Trajan, which might have been the artist’s intention.
Official discourse is even more tightly wound. In 100 a newly apppointed consul named Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, known as Pliny the Younger, delivered a speech in praise of Trajan to the Senate and later published it. The Panegyricus, as it is called, lavishes praise, and Pliny’s successful career afterward shows that Trajan approved. In addition to serving on Trajan’s council and being elected one of the augurs, who were religious officials, Pliny was appointed governor of the important province of Bithynia and Pontus (northwestern Turkey).
In his speech, Pliny specifically mentions the women in Trajan’s family. He points out that many distinguished men have been embarrassed by a poor ch
oice of wife or by weakness in not divorcing one, because people believe that a bad husband cannot be a good citizen. But Trajan’s wife is a model of chastity and Rome’s ancient virtues. Plotina is modest, moderate, and devoted to her husband. Like Trajan, she prefers silence to having a fuss made over her, and she follows his example of walking on foot “as much as her gender allows.” Above all, she is content to seek no greater glory than her obedience. It is all a tribute, says Pliny, to the way Trajan had trained Plotina.
Pliny also praises Marciana for being a good sister and behaving with the same candor and simplicity as Trajan. While noting cattily that rivalry can arise between women in close proximity, he praises the two imperial ladies for getting along without rancor or disagreement. He also applauds their modesty for refusing the title of Augusta that the Senate had wished to award them. Declining the title was another way of striking a difference with Domitia and the previous regime.
Official art creates a similar scene of harmony between the two imperial sisters-in-law. For instance, the names of Marciana and Plotina are inscribed on an arch erected at the new harbor built by Trajan in the Italian port city of Ancona, and statues of the two might have once decorated the top, alongside the emperor. Reality, of course, was probably messier.
We should not believe for a minute that either Plotina, Marciana, or Matidia was as obedient and retiring as Pliny or imperial art suggests. Just as Augustus’s Res Gestae falsely portrayed his regime as a men’s club, so did Trajan’s official art and literature undervalue imperial women. Each of them was a wealthy property owner with numerous slaves and freedmen. Plotina’s property was probably the most important, including an estate in central Italy with a flourishing brickyard—run by a woman, no less! Her freedmen included officials in the imperial bureaucracy.
In addition to having financial resources of their own, Trajan’s imperial women had prestige. Each of them eventually did take the title of Augusta: Plotina and Marciana in 105, Matidia in 112. It strains credulity to believe that they never exercised power or influence, and, indeed, the sources show that they did. Plotina was an educated person with an interest in literature, philosophy, and perhaps also music and math. Ambitious writers were eager to have her read their work; a student of music and math seems to have dedicated a book to her, and she took a personal interest in a philosophical school in Athens.
Certain ancient sources claim that Plotina intervened in politics. Although some scholars reject this as gossip, she did nothing that other emperors’ wives hadn’t done before. Thus Plotina lobbied senators and Trajan himself on behalf of the Jewish community of Alexandria in its quarrel with the Greek community there. She traveled with Trajan on important missions abroad, including during wartime—although naturally she stayed far from the front. Plotina upbraided Trajan about corrupt administrators who were extorting money from their provinces by making false accusations. She warned him that they were hurting his reputation, so the emperor stopped their abuses and returned the money they had taken. Afterward, Trajan called the Treasury the spleen because when it was enlarged, it got in the way of other organs. Most important, as we shall see, Plotina played a big role in choosing her husband’s successor.
We might imagine a reference to Plotina’s active role in the work of a Greek politician and orator of the day. Dio Chrysostom (born circa 40; died sometime after 115) wrote a series of speeches, titled collectively On Kingship, and he may have delivered the third one before Trajan in 104. The two men enjoyed a warm relationship, at least according to one story about the brainy Greek and the blunt Emperor, in which Trajan supposedly told Dio, “I have no idea what you are talking about, but I love you as myself.” In one of his speeches in On Kingship, the smooth-talking Dio says that a good king regards his wife “not merely as the partner of his bed and affections, but also as his helpmate in his counsel and action, and indeed in his whole life.” If this refers to Plotina, Dio gives her a much greater role than Pliny does. In any case, Dio offers a counterpoint to Pliny’s notion of the silent and obedient wife.
Later generations looked back fondly on Plotina. Even an ancient writer who is sometimes critical of Plotina considers her behavior throughout Trajan’s reign to have been above reproach.
When his sister, Marciana, died in 112, Trajan asked the Senate to deify her, and it agreed. No emperor’s sister had ever received such an honor before. It was another way of legitimizing Trajan’s rule while also potentially widening the base of his support. It allowed him to reach out to the women of the empire, as the tombstone of one wealthy Italian lady shows.
Her elaborate, altar-shaped tombstone once stood in an Italian hill town two hundred miles north of Rome. Cetrania Severina, who lived in Sarsina in the second century, was a priestess of the cult of the deified Marciana. In her day, Roman women could not vote or hold political office, but they could be priests—and by serving in a leadership role in the imperial cult, Cetrania reached one of the highest of priesthoods. Her husband, who survived her and put up the monument, refers to her as a “woman of the highest moral integrity,” using the same word, sanctissima (“most morally pure”), that Pliny uses in a letter to describe Plotina. It looks like a case of a local trying to show that he had made it by imitating the elite.
Cetrania lived in a period in which a woman could control her property, and, like Plotina, the priestess had extensive holdings. It was enough for Cetrania to set up a foundation, and a detailed inscription on the stone records the terms. In exchange for a hefty annual gift of olive oil on her birthday, the town’s major craft guilds would carry out yearly rites in her memory. Cetrania appealed to the good faith, or fides, in Latin, of the guildsmen to uphold their end of the bargain. That same word also sums up the ties of loyalty that bound elites together around the empire. By honoring the memory of the emperor Trajan’s sister, a prominent local woman showed that her town kept faith with Rome. She also demonstrated the important role a woman could play in holding together the empire.
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE HERCULES
When it came to his public image, Trajan was not subtle. He presented himself as almost a demigod; the representative of the gods on earth. He claimed to have a divine mission to bring victory, virtue, and benevolence to the Roman world. Arrogant as this sounds, it was an improvement upon Domitian’s claim to be lord and master. Trajan, in fact, embraced the role that the philosophers urged in vain on earlier emperors: to be a moderate king. Unlike Domitian or Vespasian, he did not expel philosophers from Rome. Instead, Trajan, and Nerva, too, before him, made friends with them.
Trajan’s two divine points of reference were Hercules, the greatest ancient hero, and Jupiter, the king of the gods and the father of the human race. Unlike Domitian, who was devoted to the goddess Minerva, Trajan gave her little attention. That allowed him to mark his difference from his predecessor and to brand himself as a man’s man.
Hercules sometimes appears as a rogue or bully in ancient myth, but more often he is a symbol of virtue: a virile and courageous person who labors selflessly and fearlessly for the common good. This was how many ancient philosophers saw him. The Romans, too, warmed to this image, and none more so than Trajan. According to Roman mythology, Hercules came to Rome on his way back to Greece from Hispania, where he had completed his tenth labor on an island off the coast. As a native of Hispania and a soldier, Trajan took to the comparison. Hercules was popular in Trajan’s hometown, and he often had the demigod depicted on his coins. A new legion, the Second Trajan, took Hercules as its symbol. Pliny says that, like Hercules, Trajan was called from Hispania to do dauntless labors for a lesser man who was king—in Trajan’s case, Domitian. And he compares Trajan’s hardy body to that of a son of a god.
Jupiter was the king of the gods for the Romans; they called him the Best and Greatest (optimus maximus). Trajan adopted a similar status, as literature and art both show.
In Panegyricus in 100, Pliny praises the emperor for dispensing justice with calm reason, like a god.
Then he compares Trajan to Jupiter. The father of the world no longer has to trouble himself with affairs on earth because he gave Trajan the power to stand in for him in regard to the whole human race. A sculpted relief on the Arch of Trajan in central Italy has much the same message. It depicts Jupiter giving his thunderbolt to Trajan, as if to say that he ruled the empire by divine authority and with all-but Olympian power. Meanwhile, Trajan’s coins recognized him as “the Best Prince” (optimus princeps).
Although Trajan didn’t accept the title of Optimus at first, he did so in time. Jupiter and Hercules were his two reference points in his self-presentation. So was a third symbol of power, Alexander the Great. The famous conqueror traced his ancestry to Hercules and claimed that his father was no less than Jupiter himself. Trajan compared himself to Alexander and said that he aimed to emulate his conquests. It’s hard to say whether Trajan was serious about the comparison or whether he aimed merely at flattering Greeks by referring to their famous ancestor.
TRAJAN AND THE CHRISTIANS
Pliny served as governor of the rich and populous province of Bithynia and Pontus in Asia Minor from 110 to 113. Later, he published his correspondence with Trajan from this period. The letters show how decentralized Roman government was, with much leeway given to provincial governors. Sometimes, however, the emperor had to step in. Consider a famous exchange between Pliny and Trajan on the treatment of Christians.
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