Trajan's Column

Stand at the railing and look down first, not up. The ground of ancient Rome lies several metres below your feet, a sunken field of broken columns and pale paving stones. Traffic hums behind you along the modern road. And rising out of that old ground is a single shaft of white marble, wrapped from bottom to top in a band of carved figures. It looks like a scroll that someone has unrolled and wound around a pillar.

This is Trajan's Column. It was dedicated in the year 113, during the reign of the emperor Trajan, one of the most successful military rulers Rome ever had. The column celebrates his victories in the Dacian Wars, two campaigns fought in the early second century against the kingdom of Dacia. Dacia covered much of the land we now call Romania. Its conquest brought Rome new territory and, crucially, rich gold mines.

The shaft is built from large drums of Carrara marble, the same white stone from northern Italy that Michelangelo would carve many centuries later. The drums are stacked one on top of another, and each one is hollow inside. Carved into that hollow core is a spiral staircase of around 185 steps, climbing all the way to the top. Small slit windows cut through the marble let in light. From where you stand, look for those narrow openings dotted along the frieze — most visitors never notice them.

Now follow the carved band with your eyes. It winds around the column about 23 times and, if you could unroll it, it would stretch for roughly two hundred metres. Scholars count somewhere around 2,500 human figures in it. Soldiers march, build forts, cross rivers, and fight. Dacian warriors defend their hills. It is one continuous story, told in stone, with no breaks between the scenes.

At the very bottom of the spiral, the story begins with water. A large bearded figure rises out of the river — this is the god of the Danube, watching as Roman troops cross a bridge of boats into enemy land. It is a lovely detail. Before a single battle is fought, the river itself seems to give its permission. Then the army moves forward, and the long campaign begins.

Here is something many visitors miss. Much of this frieze is not about fighting at all. It shows soldiers cutting timber, digging ditches, building walls, and loading supplies. The Roman army won its wars as much with shovels as with swords. The emperor himself appears again and again — around sixty times by most counts — speaking to his troops, offering sacrifices, and receiving envoys. He is shown as a working commander, not a distant god.

The obvious question is how anyone was supposed to read this. The answer lies in the ruins below you. The column once stood in a small courtyard inside the Forum of Trajan, a vast public complex. Two libraries flanked it, one for Latin texts and one for Greek. Viewers could climb to their upper floors and see the higher bands of the frieze from closer up. The column was framed by buildings, not standing alone in open air as it does today.

The design of the forum is traditionally credited to Apollodorus of Damascus, Trajan's favourite architect and military engineer. Many historians believe he also planned the column, although the ancient sources do not say so directly. What we do know is that the project required enormous engineering skill. Each marble drum weighed many tonnes, and the carvings on separate drums had to line up perfectly once they were stacked.

Look now at the square base. Its sides are carved with heaps of captured Dacian weapons — shields, helmets, swords, and banners, piled together like trophies. On one face is a long inscription. The column was more than a monument. When Trajan died in the year 117, his ashes were placed in a chamber inside this base. Few Roman emperors were ever buried within the city itself, so this was a rare honour.

That inscription holds a second surprise. Its letters are some of the most admired in the history of writing. Type designers and calligraphers have studied these elegant Roman capitals for centuries. In the twentieth century, a popular typeface was even named after this column. So if you have ever seen a film poster or a book cover in classic Roman capital letters, you may have seen a distant echo of this very stone.

Now raise your eyes to the very top. A statue of Trajan once stood there, but it disappeared during the Middle Ages. In 1587, Pope Sixtus the Fifth placed a bronze statue of Saint Peter on the summit instead. Peter still stands there today, holding his keys. It is a very Roman solution: a pagan monument to an emperor, kept alive by giving it a Christian crown.

That sense of care helps explain why the column survived at all. Over the centuries, Rome's ancient buildings were stripped for stone, burned for lime, and buried under new streets. This column, however, was protected. In the Middle Ages, the city authorities issued a decree forbidding anyone to damage it. Many scholars also think the carvings were once painted in bright colours, though very little trace of that paint remains, and the question is still debated.

Before you move on, take one last slow look. Notice the twin domed churches just behind the column, built many centuries after Trajan. Notice how the frieze grows harder to read the higher it climbs, until the figures blur into texture against the sky. Then turn toward the curved brick walls of Trajan's Markets, rising on the hillside nearby. You are standing at the edge of the old forum, where Romans once walked between libraries and looked up at this same spiral of soldiers.