Trajan's Column: A War Comic in Marble
Why is it significant?
Tilt your head back and follow the band of carved marble as it winds around the column, round and round, all the way to the bronze saint at the top. Soldiers march, rivers are crossed, forts are built, battles rage.
Key Facts
| Place | Trajan's Column: A War Comic in Marble |
|---|---|
| Address | Via dei Fori Imperiali, 00187 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.89580, 12.48430 |
| Part of Walk | Emperors, Saints and Alchemists: Monti & the Esquiline Hill |
| Generated | Generated |
Tilt your head back and follow the band of carved marble as it winds around the column, round and round, all the way to the bronze saint at the top. Soldiers march, rivers are crossed, forts are built, battles rage. You are looking at a story told like a comic strip, almost two thousand years before comics existed.
Trajan's Column was dedicated in 113 to celebrate the emperor's two wars against the Dacians, in what is now Romania. The frieze is about one hundred and ninety metres long if you could unroll it, and it shows more than two thousand five hundred figures. The emperor himself appears some sixty times: speaking to his troops, making sacrifices, receiving envoys.
But here is the strange thing. No one could ever really read it. The top scenes are almost forty metres up, and the column was originally surrounded by libraries and colonnades. Some historians think it was meant less to be read than to be felt, a sacred spiral of victory, perhaps once brightly painted. Inside, a spiral staircase of one hundred and eighty-five steps, lit by tiny slit windows, climbs to the top.
And the base was a tomb. When Trajan died in 117, his ashes were placed in a golden urn in a chamber at the foot of the column, an extraordinary honour, since Romans normally buried their dead outside the city. The urn vanished long ago. So did the bronze statue of Trajan at the summit. In 1587, Pope Sixtus the Fifth replaced it with Saint Peter, who has stood up there ever since.
One more detail: the inscription on the base says the column shows how high a hill once stood here, a hill that Trajan's engineers cut away to make room for his forum. The column is a measuring stick of human ambition. Now look to your right, toward the great curved brick building climbing the slope. That was a shopping mall... of sorts.