11 August 117: The Day the Empire Peaked

Every place on this map is shown as it stood on 11 August 117 CE — the day the emperor Trajan died at Selinus in Cilicia, on the southern coast of modern Turkey, and the day the legions at Antioch acclaimed his cousin and ward Hadrian as his successor. Rome's territory had just reached its largest extent it would ever hold: from Britain's northern frontier to the edge of the Sahara, from the Atlantic coast of Spain to a province of Mesopotamia that Trajan's own conquests had carved out of Parthia only a year before.

Trajan had left Rome in 113 CE to fight Parthia over control of Armenia, and by 116 his armies had taken the Parthian capital Ctesiphon and pushed a fleet down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf — the farthest east a Roman army ever operated. By early 117, revolts across the newly won territory and a wave of Jewish uprisings from Cyrenaica to Mesopotamia (the Kitos War) were unwinding those gains faster than Trajan's generals could hold them. Ill and worn out, Trajan started home, got only as far as Selinus, and died there — the succession decided, by his widow Plotina's own account, in his final hours.

Hadrian did not attend the death. He was already governing Syria from Antioch, and it was there, two days later, that word reached him and the legions declared him emperor before the Senate in Rome had even been formally told. He would spend his first year as emperor undoing much of what his predecessor had just finished — abandoning Mesopotamia and Armenia as indefensible, and turning the empire's posture from conquest to consolidation for good.

Below is a sample of who else was alive and where they stood that same week — soldiers, philosophers, provincial governors, ordinary people caught up in the Kitos War — plus the year's other dated events, from the earthquake that nearly killed Trajan at Antioch two years earlier to the new colonies still being planted in conquered Dacia.

Sources

• Cassius Dio, Roman History, book 68
• Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian
• Public data: public/data/people_117.geojson, public/data/events_117.geojson
• CAH XI, The High Empire, 70–192 CE (Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed.)
• Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337
• Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World

More to read

• The Roman Road Network →
• The Roman Army in 117 CE →
• Trade, Coinage & the Roman Economy →
• Religion & the Sacred Landscape →