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The Trajan's Column Frieze as a Confluence of Military Geography and Triumphal Painting
The conquests that created the Roman Empire were conquests of space, of lands and territories. Armies mobilized across the land in great linear columns, and then returned to Rome in the spectacle of the triumphal procession, as it wound its way into the city and through the forum.[1] Commanders advertised their achievements in these campaigns by writing their commentaries, and by commissioning images in the form of triumphal paintings, statues and reliefs. Just as history and geography join in the written accounts, triumphal images deployed topography in creating settings for the actions of war. In these highly fraught visual tableaux, space itself and its depiction became charged elements with communicative power. As Eleanor Leach claims, “depiction of space in coherent topographic patterns fixes a relationship between the spectator and his environment that indicates man’s confidence in his capacity for organization and control…not only on a practical or political plane but also intellectual plane.”[2] This paper examines topographic depiction on the reliefs of the Column of Trajan, that remarkable monument to the Dacian Wars of AD 102-103 and 105-106. The narrative of the two campaigns into (present day) Romania unfolds on the column as a continuous, 625 foot-long frieze, placing a bewildering array of more than 2500 figures and over 200 built structures into a continuous ‘cartographic landscape.’ The column reliefs represent the first appearance of such a historiated spiral frieze, and as such, questions of sources, subjects, style of depiction and reception have long fascinated scholars.
The frieze depicts the armies leaving the center at Rome and marching, riding and sailing to the periphery and beyond to engage the Dacians and their allies. Traveling on a northwest route on the order of a thousand miles each way, the Roman armies followed the course of the Danube and its tributaries and upward into the southern Carpathians, which reach 8,000 feet in height, and finally to the mountain fastness of the Dacian capital. So Cassius Dio writes that “Trajan set about scaling the very peaks of the mountains, capturing, not without danger, crest after crest, as he drew near the royal city of the Dacians.” The armies’ inexorable forward push was enacted by hacking roads out of forests and building bridges over rivers and causeways across challenging terrain. Near the Iron Gates on the Danube, they carved an elevated roadway into the sheer rock cliffs over the river, near the site where Trajan’s chief military engineer Apollodorus of Damascus built his famous bridge, the longest arch bridge in the world for a thousand years. The real masters of this Roman conquest of space were not only the armies but more specifically Trajan’s engineers and surveyors, who planned the routes with their maps and oversaw road and bridge building and laid out the marching camps each day. The column reliefs celebrate the achievements of these specialists in particular, while the linear form of the whole metaphorically conveys the remarkable Roman accomplishment of road building, a hallmark of the Empire at this moment of its greatest extent.[3]
Roman surveyors were called mensores or agrimensores, and Trajan brought a number of these specialists on his Dacian campaigns. Trajan’s chief mensore was one Balbus, a civilian surveyor and theoretical geographer called to duty for the wars, who later wrote an account of his work. Balbus and his team were indispensible to Trajan, as among their manifold duties they laid out the lines of each road, marching camp and fort, but were also charged with recording the topographical accounts of Dacia that Trajan would later include in his commentary, the Dacica.
Geography and conquest had been linked in Mediterranean military history long before Trajan. The campaigns of Alexander were an important milestone, as Alexander brought bematistai, experts to measure distances and record place names and features in the land.[4] Roman commanders seized upon Alexander’s model, and early began to send dispatches or commentarii from the theater of war to Rome, which increasingly included geographical description. As such, geography became a part of a uniquely Roman aristocratic desire to memorialize personal achievements in biography. Geography serves in these contexts not only to provide local color and an aura of factual reporting, but also to equate topographical knowledge with dominance --- to see and know the land is to own it: “veni, vidi, vici.”[5] Pompey, Julius Caesar, Germanicus and Vespasian are known to have published commentarii which included geographic information including maps.
In a manner not unlike the works of ancient geographical writers such as Strabo, who “regard[s the earth] as a stage, its relief…the background and the setting in which historical events take place,” the actions of the Trajan’s column reliefs unfold against a wealth of imagery relating to setting.[6] These portrayals of geographical locations and human constructions, and also the form of their depiction, within the continuous spiral frieze, create an apt metaphor of conquest. Just as Roman imperial ideology focused on the concept of empire ad termini orbis terrarium, “to the ends of the earthly globe,” the column reliefs describe a process of incursion and ‘securing and holding’ of distant lands by which empire was made. As Geographer Anne Buttimer describes human spatial experience itself as a tension and interchange between journey and destination, the column reliefs deftly integrate a strong sense of both path and place in the depiction of conquest.[7] It is the linear aspect of the frieze that so well expresses the Dacian campaigns as a relentless penetration of territory, and as a narrative that unfolds both in time and space. In this respect, the designers created a unique solution to an enduring problem in the depiction of history, analogous to the relationship between written history and geography. “Every relation between objects in space is bound up with a relation between events in time. Consequently every geographical fact has its historical aspect, and every historical fact its geographic aspect,” writes J.L. Myres.[8]
The remarkable sense of place in the column reliefs has been noted by numerous writers.[9] The scenes unfold within a continuous panorama of unifying scenery, composed of geographical features such as rivers, forests and mountains, interspersed with numerous human constructions, especially the cities and towns and forts and camps of both Romans and Dacians. In fact there are more scenes of building than of battle, reflecting the realities of military campaigns, but also delivering a message about Roman ingenuity. As Ian Richmond states, these depicted “events compel a rational, commonsense view of glory…conveying a truly remarkable interpretation of war. It is something indeed of history, but more of the labour by which history was made.”[10] The combination of geographic setting and emphasis on building activities in the reliefs forefronts the role of surveyors, geographers and engineers in the campaign.
Beyond the goal of imparting information about engineering exploits, an ideological message is revealed in the depictions of the many construction projects on the column. At the end of every day on campaign in enemy territory, Roman surveyors would move ahead of the troops and lay out a new marching camp. They would lay out the outlines of the camp using their surveying instrument, the groma. Then they would lay out the design of the headquarters and shrine, the principia and aedes, where the battle standards stood at the locus gromae the conceptual center point of the camp. The plan was then executed by the soldiers on arrival.[11] Marching camps with a standardized internal organization were considered a distinctly Roman construction, and a chief reason for Roman military superiority, reflecting a strong discipline. The ability to choose a good campsite was a mark of a good emperor and expert surveyors. Camps were usually left intact: remains of camps could provide a reminder to local peoples of the discipline and presence of the Roman army, as permanent symbols of the power of Rome.
A comparison of the depictions of marching camps on the column to the archaeological record of actual camps reveals discrepancies that point to a further articulation of the ideological message. Roman marching camps were normally large turf forts, made with sections of earth and grass cut with special knives and then stacked to create low walls. The resulting walls resembled long mounds with profiles angled in from a wide base. In contrast, camps depicted under construction on the column frieze depict sharp edged ashlar masonry structures, apparently formed of cubic blocks and with squared corners (their scale is radically reduced relative to that of the soldiers as compared to actual forts, in accordance with a convention adopted here which forefronts the human actors). A primary reason for this discrepancy must derive from the associative power of the ashlar stone block and its associated architecture in Roman imperial culture. Ashlar was a synecdoche for Roman monumental buildings, and by association, the greatest collection of those buildings, at Rome. Thus the imagery of stone architecture that peppers the column reliefs places primary symbols of Roman civilization in the heart of foreign (but soon to be absorbed) territory, ranging from near the center all the way to the capital of the Dacian kingdom. “The camp is the soldier’s second homeland; with ramparts for city walls, and his tent is his hearth and home,” spoke Aemilius Paulus before the battle of Pydna.[12] The military writer Vegetius compared the construction of a Roman camp to a town springing up.[13] Men gather in camp at the center around the locus gromae, “as if to a forum,” says Hyginus Gromaticus, writing in the time of Trajan.[14]
Thus the image of the ashlar marching camp in the reliefs signifies the transplantation of Roman culture ‘virally’ into the world, where new centers bloom in the periphery. Each fort is a little Rome, expressing the ideology of expansion and building that was central to imperial policy since Augustus. “I found Rome a city of clay and left it a city of marble,” wrote Augustus in his Res Gestae; Trajan outdid even Augustus in the jewel of his building program, the Forum of Trajan: “Its grandeur defies description and can never again be approached by mortal men,” writes Ammianus Marcellinus after Constantius II.[15] If the Res Gestae described “the spatial extension of [imperial] conquest to the limits of the world…as established and guaranteed by Augustus,” Trajan extended the reach of the empire to its maximum.[16] That process is encapsulated in the vignettes of Trajan’s column.
These depictions of military actions within a comprehensive framework of landscape and architecture had a series of precedents, both literary and artistic. A visual counterpart to the written commentarii of commanders were the pictorial monuments erected at Rome: propagandistic billboards meant to display the events and settings of battles fought. Numerous literary references to these images attest to their growing importance during the Republic.[17] Pliny relates that M. Valerius Maximus Messala, for instance, was the first to erect in public a painting showing a contemporary battle, soon after the defeat of Carthage in 264 BC.[18] Livy writes that in 177 BC, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus erected in Rome a map superposed with his battles fought in Sardinia. These images developed a quality of continuous narrative, as they assembled a series of actions originally discrete in time within a single unifying format of place.[19]
The most spectacular visual portrayals of war must have been those created for triumphal processions, where painted boards, banners and floats depicting battles were carried aloft among the spoils and trophies paraded through the streets of Rome.[20] “Between the displays of prisoners come the floats, images of lakes, mountains, rivers and forts, the names of which we are familiar,” writes Ovid.[21] Josephus marvels at the procession of images in the triumph of Titus and Vespasian after the Jewish wars in 70: “Here was seen a prosperous country devastated…walls of surpassing size demolished by engines, strong fortresses overpowered, cities with well manned defenses completely mastered…temples set on fire, houses pulled down over their owners’ heads.”[22] Here too topography served to ground and locate actions, while a narrative sequence could be effected through the procession of images, expressing movement through time and space. If the traditions of triumphal painting formed a basis and inspiration for the column reliefs, the reliefs represent innovation over their forebears. Rather than a parade of moving pictures, the designers of the column reliefs in a sense depicted time as space, employing elements of landscape to meld on the 625 foot spiral what are actually independent scenes, into a continuous narrative of the campaigns. In so doing they achieved a novel solution to a central problem in historiography, that of a tension on the one hand between human cognition of space as a collection of discrete places, and of time, as a continuity.[23] The visitor to Trajan’s Forum was recruited into this ‘moving narrative’ when they circumambulated the column base, in order to read the first bands of relief from the opening scenes on the Danube shore.
In all of these representations, topographical imagery served to facilitate the vivid recreation of battles and conquests in the minds of spectators, serving in a manner similar to its use in myth.[24] Strabo declared that topographical knowledge contributed to the understanding of myth, as well as lending a sense of verisimilitude to a legend set in a geographical location.[25] Vergil’s topography in the Aeneid has been shown to stem from the genre of the periplus, an account of sea exploration. In fact, this type of geographic description provides one model for understanding the column reliefs, since the periplus describes a journey as a linear progression, but one, as the name implies, that takes the form of a circle. In the periplus, a collection of disparate geographic localities is joined in a continuous description, where narrative forms the link between places.[26]