![]() Trajan was just the latest potentate to build his own thermae. Yet even the poor could enjoy what Juvenal called “bread and circuses”-the bloody spectacles at the Colosseum and the Circus with 50,000 and 200,000 seats***-and the baths. His most touching poem was in praise of a beloved enslaved female who died young: “A child with a voice as sweet as the fabled swan’s.”* He hated the cruelty of sadistic slave masters: “You say that the hare isn’t cooked, and ask for the whip / Rufus, you prefer to carve up your cook than your hare.” Yet he had a heart too. “With your giant nose and cock /,” he wrote, “I bet you can with ease / When you get excited / Check the end for cheese.” “I live in a little cell, with a window that won’t even close,” wrote Martial, “in which Boreas himself wouldn’t want to live.” Martial, another well-born Spaniard doing well in Rome, had been in and out of imperial favor but chronicled the hypocritical lubricity of high and low with irrepressible mischief. Rome was now a seething mega-city of a million people, with the emperors enjoying vast palaces, the rich in sumptuous villas and the poor piled high in insulae, ten-story blocks of flats. The rich, served by droves of slaves, enjoyed luxury and ease-“Red Sea pearls and polished Indian ivory” in the words of the poet Martial-but the realities of urban life, imperial power and Roman society remained gritty and messy, corrupt and brutal. Between wars to annihilate the Dacians (Romania), he embarked on a massive building program in Rome, boasting of his grandeur and victories with new temples, his triumphal column and the new stadium called Circus Maximus. Trajan possessed the three essentials of greatness-acumen, vision and resources. But the spirit of this epoch was a lucky one of clement weather, lush harvests and plentiful revenues from an imperial population of between fifty and seventy million. ![]() No epoch realizes at the time quite how lucky it is until it is gone. “Everything depended,” wrote Trajan’s scholarly friend Pliny the Younger, “on the whims of a single man,” but the emperor’s decisions were usually sensible.* The rich, served by droves of slaves, enjoyed luxury and ease, but the realities of urban life, imperial power and Roman society remained gritty and messy, corrupt and brutal. Older autocrats are likely be touchy on such matters. But it is always dangerous to be the prime candidate: maybe Trajan’s wife protected him by not over-promoting him.īut at one point Trajan disapproved of his extravagant partying, and then Hadrian was caught hitting on Trajan’s male lovers. Hadrian had charmed Trajan’s wife and sister-in-law, who orchestrated his marriage to Sabina, the emperor’s beloved great-niece, positioning him perfectly. Like Trajan, he hailed from Hispania: Trajan had been Hadrian’s guardian when the boy’s father died young and he curated his protégé’s rise, but there was something about Hadrian that irritated Trajan. Trajan liked to tease his entourage about the succession, once asking them to name the ten best candidates for emperor: it is a strange feature of successful epochs that there are many men gifted enough to rule while in meagre times there appears to be almost none. When Empress Pompeia arrived at the palace, she told the spectators, “I enter here as the same kind of woman I’ll be when I depart.” “I like what I hear,” he gruffly told a philosopher, “but I don’t understand a word of what you’re talking about.” Yet he had an instinct for power.īorn in Italica, Spain, the emperor had no sons with his wife Pompeia Plotina, but he lived at the centre of a female household consisting of her sister, niece and two great-nieces, who all now moved to Rome. Trajan was plainspoken and sociable: when he travelled in a carriage, he always invited three friends to chat along the way and he had the rare confidence to have talented men around him. Trajan was never happier than when sharing the rations and camps with “my excellent and most loyal fellow soldiers.” His only indulgences were wine and boys, actors and dancers mainly. ![]() Trajan looked the part of the bluff, old-fashioned Roman soldier-tough, clean-shaven, severe grey hair worn in a classic Caesar and usually portrayed wearing a gleaming engraved breastplate-and played it well.
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