Trajan's Column

The column was dedicated on 12 May 113, a date recorded in the Fasti Ostienses, to mark Trajan's conquest of Dacia. It was probably built under the architect Apollodorus of Damascus, and the pedestal inscription, held up by Victories, records the gift of the Senate and People of Rome. The shaft proper stands 29.78 metres, almost exactly 100 Roman feet, and it is built of marble blocks weighing more than 1,100 tonnes in all.

The ordinary Roman treadwheel crane, which could not reach beyond about 15 to 18 metres, was inadequate for such loads. A timber tower was put up around the site instead, and the blocks hauled up inside it by pulleys, ropes and capstans worked by a large gang of men: the capital, at 53.3 tonnes, had to go up 34 metres. Simultaneous work on the neighbouring Basilica Ulpia narrowed the ground so far that the capstan crews had proper access from one side only.

The helical frieze winds from base to capital — some 190 to 200 metres, more than twenty turns — and carries about 2,500 figures. The lower half narrates the campaign of 101–102 and the upper that of 105–106, the two divided by a Victory writing on a shield between trophies. Battle is a minority subject: marches, camp-building and the ceremonies of address, sacrifice and departure fill most of the band. Among the sharper episodes are Dacian women torturing naked Roman prisoners, the chiefs' suicide by poison and the presentation of Decebalus' head to Trajan. Trajan himself appears 59 times.

Whether the column could be read at all has been argued over. Two libraries, Greek and Latin — the Latin chamber probably holding Trajan's lost commentary on the Dacian wars — flanked it closely; their upper floors gave platforms onto the higher spirals, but from the ground they blocked any wide view, and following the spiral on foot meant walking in circles with the head thrown back. The archaeologist Paul Veyne noted that the frieze can instead be read vertically, the emperor picked out band by band.

Trajan died in 117, and the Senate voted to bury his ashes in the column's square base, carved with captured Dacian arms, eagles holding a laurel garland at its corners. His ashes and those of his wife Plotina were placed there in golden urns, later lost from the monument. A door beneath the inscription opens into that chamber, where a spiral stair of 185 steps climbs to the top platform, lit by 43 slits thought not to belong to the original design. The inscription has long been read as recording the height of the ridge between the Capitoline and Quirinal that Trajan's excavations removed; digging has shown the column does not stand on that saddle, and the words are now taken to cover his whole building programme in the imperial fora.

The column stayed upright as the rest of Trajan's complex fell to ruin. A small church at its foot, San Niccolò de Columna, is recorded from 1032, along with an oratory on the summit. A medieval Senate document of 1162 declared the column public property and forbade damage to it. The church was probably cleared for Charles V's visit to Rome in 1546; in the same century private buildings around it were pulled down and the pedestal partly dug out of the accumulated ground.

A bronze statue of Trajan stood on the summit and vanished in the Middle Ages. In 1587, under Sixtus V, Domenico Fontana set a bronze figure of Saint Peter in its place, which remains, and walled the monument round; the crowning is dated 4 December 1587 in one record, while a Roman notice of 24 June that year describes the statue blessed at Santa Maria di Loreto before nine cardinals. Goethe climbed it in 1787 and wrote of the view over the city.

Under the French occupation Napoleon's commander in Rome, General François René Jean de Pommereul, sought a way to remove the column to France; his assistant Daunon wrote on 15 April 1798 that “we shall ship an obelisk”, meaning this one. Transport costs and papal obstruction stopped the plan, and the French raised the Colonne Vendôme in Paris in 1810, after Austerlitz, in imitation. Plaster casts taken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Museum of Romanian History in Bucharest among others, now read more clearly in some details than the acid-weathered original; Conrad Cichorius published a complete survey between 1896 and 1900. The column leans less than half a degree after many earthquakes, and stands nearly intact but cut off from the forum that framed it.