Trajan's Column
About
This 38-meter freestanding marble victory column, with pedestal, rose between the Basilica Ulpia and the twin libraries, its shaft wrapped in a continuous helical relief nearly 190 meters long that spirals around the drum 25 times across 155 carved scenes populated by 2,662 figures, Trajan himself appearing 58 times. Inside, a spiral staircase of 30 meters was cut from 19 marble blocks weighing about 40 tons apiece, each stair already carved before the blocks were hoisted into place and stacked with enough precision that the passage still works today. Dedicated on 12 May 113 CE, the column stood newly erected and gleaming in 117 CE; Trajan's ashes were interred in its base after his death that August.
What happened here
A single shaft, standing alone, carrying a statue or a story. The freestanding column is a Roman way of putting one thing above everything else in a crowded skyline, and where it is set matters as much as what is on it. Some carry a spiral relief read from the ground with difficulty and never meant to be read closely — the point is the sheer weight of narrative. Others carry a portrait, and the portrait is replaced when the politics change while the column stays. The drums are hollowed for an internal stair in the ambitious ones. At the base there is usually an inscription and, often enough, a burial. Around it, day to day, people sell things and arrange to meet.
In ancient writing
- Cassius Dio, Roman History 68.16.3
The column is set up in the forum both to mark how high the ground stood before the hill was cut away, and as the emperor's tomb.
- CIL VI 960, dedication 113 CE
The pedestal records that the Senate and People of Rome set the column up to Trajan, and — famously — to show how high the ground and hill stood before the works for his Forum cut them away.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →