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The Trajan's Column Frieze as a Confluence of Military Geography and Triumphal Painting
The conquests that created the Roman Empire were conquests of space, of lands and territories.
Armies mobilized across the land in great linear columns, and then returned to Rome in the spectacle of
the triumphal procession, as it wound its way into the city and through the forum. 1 Commanders
advertised their achievements in these campaigns by writing their commentaries, and by commissioning
images in the form of triumphal paintings, statues and reliefs. Just as history and geography join in the
written accounts, triumphal images deployed topography in creating settings for the actions of war. In
these highly fraught visual tableaux, space itself and its depiction became charged elements with
communicative power. As Eleanor Leach claims, “depiction of space in coherent topographic patterns
fixes a relationship between the spectator and his environment that indicates man’s confidence in his
capacity for organization and control…not only on a practical or political plane but also intellectual
plane.”2 This paper examines topographic depiction on the reliefs of the Column of Trajan, that
remarkable monument to the Dacian Wars of AD 102-103 and 105-106. The narrative of the two
campaigns into (present day) Romania unfolds on the column as a continuous, 625 foot-long frieze,
placing a bewildering array of more than 2500 figures and over 200 built structures into a continuous
‘cartographic landscape.’ The column reliefs represent the first appearance of such a historiated spiral
frieze, and as such, questions of sources, subjects, style of depiction and reception have long fascinated
scholars.
The frieze depicts the armies leaving the center at Rome and marching, riding and sailing to the
periphery and beyond to engage the Dacians and their allies. Traveling on a northwest route on the
order of a thousand miles each way, the Roman armies followed the course of the Danube and its
tributaries and upward into the southern Carpathians, which reach 8,000 feet in height, and finally to
the mountain fastness of the Dacian capital. So Cassius Dio writes that “Trajan set about scaling the very
peaks of the mountains, capturing, not without danger, crest after crest, as he drew near the royal city
1
“The head of the troops entered the camp for their overnight rest before the last of the troops were able to leave the sight
of the previous overnight stay,” writes Josephus of a column estimated at eighteen miles; triumphs could run for three days
straight.
2
Eleanor Leach, The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome,
Princeton, N.J., 1988, 79.
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of the Dacians.” The armies’ inexorable forward push was enacted by hacking roads out of forests and
building bridges over rivers and causeways across challenging terrain. Near the Iron Gates on the
Danube, they carved an elevated roadway into the sheer rock cliffs over the river, near the site where
Trajan’s chief military engineer Apollodorus of Damascus built his famous bridge, the longest arch bridge
in the world for a thousand years. The real masters of this Roman conquest of space were not only the
armies but more specifically Trajan’s engineers and surveyors, who planned the routes with their maps
and oversaw road and bridge building and laid out the marching camps each day. The column reliefs
celebrate the achievements of these specialists in particular, while the linear form of the whole
metaphorically conveys the remarkable Roman accomplishment of road building, a hallmark of the
Empire at this moment of its greatest extent.3
Roman surveyors were called mensores or agrimensores, and Trajan brought a number of these
specialists on his Dacian campaigns. Trajan’s chief mensore was one Balbus, a civilian surveyor and
theoretical geographer called to duty for the wars, who later wrote an account of his work. Balbus and
his team were indispensible to Trajan, as among their manifold duties they laid out the lines of each
road, marching camp and fort, but were also charged with recording the topographical accounts of Dacia
that Trajan would later include in his commentary, the Dacica.
Geography and conquest had been linked in Mediterranean military history long before Trajan.
The campaigns of Alexander were an important milestone, as Alexander brought bematistai, experts to
measure distances and record place names and features in the land.4 Roman commanders seized upon
Alexander’s model, and early began to send dispatches or commentarii from the theater of war to Rome,
which increasingly included geographical description. As such, geography became a part of a uniquely
Roman aristocratic desire to memorialize personal achievements in biography. Geography serves in
these contexts not only to provide local color and an aura of factual reporting, but also to equate
topographical knowledge with dominance --- to see and know the land is to own it: “veni, vidi, vici.”5
3
Roman surveyors were known for laying dead-straight roads where possible; Hugh Davies, Roman Roads in Britain,
Charleston, 2002, 39.
4
A discussion of ventures such as Nero’s expedition into the upper Nile at Nubia and Polybius’ studies of the environs of the
Tunisian coast during the sack of Carthage are discussed by Robert K. Sherk, “Roman Geographical Exploration and Military
Maps,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II, Principat 1, 1974, 534-562.
5
Written on a placard carried in Julius Caesar’s triumph, as described in Suetonius, Life of Caesar37.2.
3
Pompey, Julius Caesar, Germanicus and Vespasian are known to have published commentarii which
included geographic information including maps.
In a manner not unlike the works of ancient geographical writers such as Strabo, who “regard[s
the earth] as a stage, its relief…the background and the setting in which historical events take place,” the
actions of the Trajan’s column reliefs unfold against a wealth of imagery relating to setting. 6 These
portrayals of geographical locations and human constructions, and also the form of their depiction,
within the continuous spiral frieze, create an apt metaphor of conquest. Just as Roman imperial
ideology focused on the concept of empire ad termini orbis terrarium, “to the ends of the earthly globe,”
the column reliefs describe a process of incursion and ‘securing and holding’ of distant lands by which
empire was made. As Geographer Anne Buttimer describes human spatial experience itself as a tension
and interchange between journey and destination, the column reliefs deftly integrate a strong sense of
both path and place in the depiction of conquest.7 It is the linear aspect of the frieze that so well
expresses the Dacian campaigns as a relentless penetration of territory, and as a narrative that unfolds
both in time and space. In this respect, the designers created a unique solution to an enduring problem
in the depiction of history, analogous to the relationship between written history and geography. “Every
relation between objects in space is bound up with a relation between events in time. Consequently
every geographical fact has its historical aspect, and every historical fact its geographic aspect,” writes
J.L. Myres.8
The remarkable sense of place in the column reliefs has been noted by numerous writers.9 The
scenes unfold within a continuous panorama of unifying scenery, composed of geographical features
such as rivers, forests and mountains, interspersed with numerous human constructions, especially the
cities and towns and forts and camps of both Romans and Dacians. In fact there are more scenes of
building than of battle, reflecting the realities of military campaigns, but also delivering a message about
Roman ingenuity. As Ian Richmond states, these depicted “events compel a rational, commonsense view
6
C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the
Eighteenth Century, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967, 103.
7
Anne Buttimer, “Home, Reach and Place,” in Anne Buttimer and David Seamon, The Human Experience of Space and Place,
London, 1970, 108.
8
J.L. Myres, ‘Ancient Geography in Modern Education,’ in Myres, Geographical History in Greek Lands, Oxford, U.K., 1953, 745.
9
See Frank Lepper and Sheppard Ferere, Trajan’s Column: A New Edition of the Cichorius Plates, Wolfboro, N.H., 1988, with
bibliography.
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of glory…conveying a truly remarkable interpretation of war. It is something indeed of history, but more
of the labour by which history was made.”10 The combination of geographic setting and emphasis on
building activities in the reliefs forefronts the role of surveyors, geographers and engineers in the
campaign.
Beyond the goal of imparting information about engineering exploits, an ideological message is
revealed in the depictions of the many construction projects on the column. At the end of every day on
campaign in enemy territory, Roman surveyors would move ahead of the troops and lay out a new
marching camp. They would lay out the outlines of the camp using their surveying instrument, the
groma. Then they would lay out the design of the headquarters and shrine, the principia and aedes,
where the battle standards stood at the locus gromae the conceptual center point of the camp. The plan
was then executed by the soldiers on arrival.11 Marching camps with a standardized internal
organization were considered a distinctly Roman construction, and a chief reason for Roman military
superiority, reflecting a strong discipline. The ability to choose a good campsite was a mark of a good
emperor and expert surveyors. Camps were usually left intact: remains of camps could provide a
reminder to local peoples of the discipline and presence of the Roman army, as permanent symbols of
the power of Rome.
A comparison of the depictions of marching camps on the column to the archaeological record of
actual camps reveals discrepancies that point to a further articulation of the ideological message.
Roman marching camps were normally large turf forts, made with sections of earth and grass cut with
special knives and then stacked to create low walls. The resulting walls resembled long mounds with
profiles angled in from a wide base. In contrast, camps depicted under construction on the column
frieze depict sharp edged ashlar masonry structures, apparently formed of cubic blocks and with
squared corners (their scale is radically reduced relative to that of the soldiers as compared to actual
forts, in accordance with a convention adopted here which forefronts the human actors). A primary
reason for this discrepancy must derive from the associative power of the ashlar stone block and its
associated architecture in Roman imperial culture. Ashlar was a synecdoche for Roman monumental
buildings, and by association, the greatest collection of those buildings, at Rome. Thus the imagery of
stone architecture that peppers the column reliefs places primary symbols of Roman civilization in the
10
11
Ian Richmond, Trajan’s Army on Trajan’s Column, London, 1982, 3.
C. M. Gilliver, The Roman Art of War, Charleston, 1999, 65.
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heart of foreign (but soon to be absorbed) territory, ranging from near the center all the way to the
capital of the Dacian kingdom. “The camp is the soldier’s second homeland; with ramparts for city walls,
and his tent is his hearth and home,” spoke Aemilius Paulus before the battle of Pydna. 12 The military
writer Vegetius compared the construction of a Roman camp to a town springing up. 13 Men gather in
camp at the center around the locus gromae, “as if to a forum,” says Hyginus Gromaticus, writing in the
time of Trajan.14
Thus the image of the ashlar marching camp in the reliefs signifies the transplantation of Roman
culture ‘virally’ into the world, where new centers bloom in the periphery. Each fort is a little Rome,
expressing the ideology of expansion and building that was central to imperial policy since Augustus. “I
found Rome a city of clay and left it a city of marble,” wrote Augustus in his Res Gestae; Trajan outdid
even Augustus in the jewel of his building program, the Forum of Trajan: “Its grandeur defies description
and can never again be approached by mortal men,” writes Ammianus Marcellinus after Constantius II. 15
If the Res Gestae described “the spatial extension of [imperial] conquest to the limits of the world…as
established and guaranteed by Augustus,” Trajan extended the reach of the empire to its maximum. 16
That process is encapsulated in the vignettes of Trajan’s column.
These depictions of military actions within a comprehensive framework of landscape and
architecture had a series of precedents, both literary and artistic. A visual counterpart to the written
commentarii of commanders were the pictorial monuments erected at Rome: propagandistic billboards
meant to display the events and settings of battles fought. Numerous literary references to these
images attest to their growing importance during the Republic.17 Pliny relates that M. Valerius Maximus
Messala, for instance, was the first to erect in public a painting showing a contemporary battle, soon
after the defeat of Carthage in 264 BC.18 Livy writes that in 177 BC, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus
erected in Rome a map superposed with his battles fought in Sardinia. These images developed a quality
12
Livy, 44.39.
Vegetius 1.21, discussed by Gilliver, Roman Art of War, 65.
14
Sherk, “Roman Geographical Exploration and Military Maps,” n. 58.
15 Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10.15.
16
So Ovid writes, “Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem (The circuit of Rome is the circuit of the world); see Claude
Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, Ann Arbor, 1991, 9.
17
Described by Richard Brilliant, “’Let the Trumpets Roar!’ The Roman Triumph,” in The Art of Ancient Spectacle, eds. B.
Bergmann and C. Kondoleon, New Haven and London, 1999, 221-230.
18
Katherine Clarke, Between Geography and History, Oxford, U.K., 1999, 25.
13
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of continuous narrative, as they assembled a series of actions originally discrete in time within a single
unifying format of place.19
The most spectacular visual portrayals of war must have been those created for triumphal
processions, where painted boards, banners and floats depicting battles were carried aloft among the
spoils and trophies paraded through the streets of Rome.20 “Between the displays of prisoners come the
floats, images of lakes, mountains, rivers and forts, the names of which we are familiar,” writes Ovid.21
Josephus marvels at the procession of images in the triumph of Titus and Vespasian after the Jewish
wars in 70: “Here was seen a prosperous country devastated…walls of surpassing size demolished by
engines,
strong
fortresses
overpowered,
cities
with
well
manned
defenses
completely
mastered…temples set on fire, houses pulled down over their owners’ heads.”22 Here too topography
served to ground and locate actions, while a narrative sequence could be effected through the
procession of images, expressing movement through time and space. If the traditions of triumphal
painting formed a basis and inspiration for the column reliefs, the reliefs represent innovation over their
forebears. Rather than a parade of moving pictures, the designers of the column reliefs in a sense
depicted time as space, employing elements of landscape to meld on the 625 foot spiral what are
actually independent scenes, into a continuous narrative of the campaigns. In so doing they achieved a
novel solution to a central problem in historiography, that of a tension on the one hand between human
cognition of space as a collection of discrete places, and of time, as a continuity.23 The visitor to Trajan’s
Forum was recruited into this ‘moving narrative’ when they circumambulated the column base, in order
to read the first bands of relief from the opening scenes on the Danube shore.
19
“During the year a tablet was placed in the temple of Mater Matuta…there was a representation of the island and pictures
of the battles on the tablet;” Livy, History of Rome, 41.28.
20
See Brilliant, 1999. In many ways the triumph is a reflection and mirror of the column reliefs: both share linearity,
multiplicity, visual spectacle, land and war mediated through culture; but with massive crowds of spectators at the
ephemeral triumph, versus thousands of massed figures frozen in time on the column, returning versus going out.
21
Ovid, Tristia, Ex Ponto, 9.2.
22
Along with piles of silver, gold and ivory “flowing like a river,” Josephus, Bellum Iudicum, 7.142-144.
23
So Clarke, Between Geography and History, 44, writes, “The fact that our predominant spatial conception is of discrete
places, but our temporal experience is of continuity, suggests that accounts of the world could not be constructed from
either exclusively discrete or exclusively continuous notions of time and space.”
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In all of these representations, topographical imagery served to facilitate the vivid recreation of
battles and conquests in the minds of spectators, serving in a manner similar to its use in myth.24 Strabo
declared that topographical knowledge contributed to the understanding of myth, as well as lending a
sense of verisimilitude to a legend set in a geographical location.25 Vergil’s topography in the Aeneid has
been shown to stem from the genre of the periplus, an account of sea exploration. In fact, this type of
geographic description provides one model for understanding the column reliefs, since the periplus
describes a journey as a linear progression, but one, as the name implies, that takes the form of a circle.
In the periplus, a collection of disparate geographic localities is joined in a continuous description, where
narrative forms the link between places.26
If the function of the triumphal paintings was to convince the viewer of the “simple truth” of
their subjects, however propagandistic and mythologized those depictions might be, the inclusion of
topographical and locational details in them served to enhance the feeling of veracity and specificity in
the telling.27 This impression was the result also of the specific pictorial conventions employed in
landscape, which were drawn in part from the realm of cartography, lending an air of scientific
objectivity to the scene. The effectiveness of these representations would in turn depend on a
sophisticated “topographical consciousness” of space and mapping among the Roman audience. 28
The reliefs of Trajan’s Column may share with triumphal painting the style of their treatment of
depicted space. Of the conventions of spatial depiction in ancient art, two have arisen that contrast in
their communicative effects. One style is revealed in the Alexander Mosaic from Pompeii, where a low
horizon is depicted, with an apparent groundline of 90 degrees into the picture plane, and with
convincing projection of figures in and out of the background. This spatial convention had been
24
A comparison with myth is valid given that, “rather than objective views of world, history and geography provide
authorially determined, subjective views of the world,” as Clarke, Between Geography and History, 25 observes; a discussion
of landscape in ancient discourse regarding myth appears in Leach, 1988, ch. 2.
25
Leach, 55-56.
26
Discussed by Clarke, 37.
27 “A Roman citizen of the late Republic or early principate was accustomed to a simple sequence: Roman army marches out
to meet barbarian army, Roman army fights barbarian army, Roman army beats barbarian army,” John C. Mann, “The
Frontiers of the Principate,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II, Principat 1, 1974, 508-533 and 509.
28 The degree to which Romans can be understood to have a ‘topographical consciousness’ is one that is currently under hot
debate; see for instance, R. Talbert, with the Ancient World Mapping Center at UNC Chapel Hill, writing in “Cartography and
taste in Peutinger’s Roman map,” in R. Talbert and K. Brodersen, eds., Space in the Roman World: its Perception and
Presentation, Münster, 2004, 113-131; and see also Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, eds. Travel and Geography in the Roman
Empire. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
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developed by the Hellenistic Greeks. On the other hand, the column reliefs employ what is commonly
known as a ‘bird’s eye’ view of space, showing a high horizon and with features tilted up at an angle as if
seen from slightly above.29 Landscape often runs to the top of the scene. Figures and elements are
‘stacked’ vertically, and to be read as farther away as they appear higher in the scene.30 This is an
abstract and formulaic rendition of space which is designed to convey information--- or to suggest that
information is being imparted. While in fact this convention does not always convey more information
than a head on view, “the apparent conviction that bird’s eye drawing is informational must be
considered one of the factors shaping the aesthetics of Roman landscape,” as Eleanor Leach notes. 31 The
bird’s eye view is occasionally employed elsewhere in Roman art.32 This convention may have arisen in
response to the open Mediterranean architectural forms of the courtyard and peristyle, as it allows a
view inside open interiors.
The use of the bird’s eye view is an important link between the column reliefs and cartography,
as the convention appears in ancient mapping guidebooks, and in practical maps known as itineraria
picta. The only extant example of such a road map is the Tabula Peutingeriana, an 11th or 12th century
copy of an original that may date originally to the Antonine period, although its details range into the 4th
century.33 Ultimately the Peutinger Table may derive from the great map commissioned by Agrippa at
Augustus’ request, and set up in the Porticus Octaviae in Rome.34 That map had included topographical
features such as rivers, mountains and cities. The Peutinger Table depicts the territory of the Roman
Empire and beyond, on parchment in an extremely elongated volumen form now approximately 22 feet
long and just over a foot tall, but originally up to 30 feet long. This map depicts the thousands of miles of
Roman roads traversing the empire, on a field including summary landforms and locational icons.
The greatly elongated form of this map is of interest for the present study, since it is not unlike
the linear form of the column reliefs themselves. In this sense, the reliefs may be understood to unroll
29
The convention is examined in its application in Roman paintings by Von Blanckenhagen, 1962, 54-57.
Katherine Clarke contrasts analogous styles of perspective painting and Cubism, as attempting to conceptualize time and
space from one viewpoint on the one hand, and as the acknowledgement of many viewpoints on the other hand, Between
Geography and History, 22-23.
31
Leach, The Rhetoric of Space, 83.
32
Compare with the imagined viewpoint in oneiric or dream writing, as epitomized in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, discussed by
Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, Baltimore, 2001, 49-50.
33
Discussed by R. Talbert, “Cartography and Taste in Peutinger’s Roman Map,” in R. Talbert and K. Brodersen, eds., Space in
the Roman World: its Perception and Presentation, Münster, 2004, 113-131.
34
A “veritable billboard advertising Rome's progress toward world domination,” writes T. Corey Brennan, Bryn Mawr Classical
Review 03.02.18.
30
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their scenes as a populated itinerarium map. Trajan himself would have carried such an itinerarium on
campaign, and in scenes where he holds a scroll, it is likely a depiction of such a map.35 If the column
reliefs were planned using a series of cartoons, these may well have been preserved in a linear scroll
form similar to the Peutinger Table. And if these cartoons were preserved for viewing in Trajan’s Greek
and Latin libraries flanking the Column, they may have served as a means of viewing the myriad of
details invisible to the viewer of the column itself, partly solving one of the chief modern questions
regarding the column reliefs, their visibility. Thus it seems likely that elongated itinerarium maps like the
Peutinger Table were a conscious source of inspiration for the Trajan’s Column reliefs. The reliefs also
share elements of the map’s symbolic landscape system, especially the bird’s eye views of architecture.
The conventions of topographical depiction in the map fall somewhere between pure symbolism and
representation: a ridge of bumps equals a mountain chain, several trees stand for a great forest, and
towns and hostels are indicated by summary representations of buildings, including ‘bird’s eye’ views of
a peristyle enclosure for certain cities. I suggest that this system was employed on the column reliefs
specifically to signal that the events depicted were a transparent, matter-of-fact, technical dispatch
straight from the front lines, and not the highly synthetic and artful piece of propagandistic
communication that they were.
One scene on the column actually incorporates a conventionalized representation of a road as
depicted in an itinerarium, and serves thus as strong evidence that the relief designers had recourse to
military maps in the creation of the reliefs. Trajan stands before a zigzag pattern running upward in
raised relief, above two arches. Four rhomboids line the turns in the zigzag. This motif parallels the
conventions of the agrimensores in depicting roads with jogs at each town.36 Here the rhomboids
probably symbolize military camps, and the arches stand for a bridge. Gerhard Koeppel argues that this
cartographic element was intended to show that Trajan had crossed the Danube at this juncture,
separately from the main body of troops.
If the column reliefs draw in part on the pictorial traditions of itinerarium maps to impart an air
of impartial reporting, new studies of the Peutinger Table suggest that it too may be a highly
35
So Alexander Severus is described as owning a complete itinerary for a campaign: “Then were listed in order all the haltingplaces, next the camping-stations, and next the places where provisions were to be found, for the whole length of the march
as far as the boundaries of the barbarians' country,” SHA Alexander Severus, 45.2.
36
Noted by Gerhard Koeppel, “A Military Itinerarium on the Column of Trajan: Scene L,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen
Archaeologisches Institute, Romische Abteilungen, 1980, 301-306.
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constructed and creative document, ‘masquerading as a map.’ Eleanor Leach found that a chief
characteristic of the Peutinger Table “is the idiosyncrasy of its longitudinal distinction, which describes
geographical configurations in a shape that is so distorted that the informational function prevails over
the representational.”37 However, Richard Talbert at UNC Chapel Hill, commenting on the results of
recent intensive study of the details of the map, finds that it appears to be designed to provide the
impression of a vast practical guide to the roads and places of the empire, rather than an actual usable
itinerarium.38 Talbert writes that “we ought to consider an alternative view, proceeding on the bolder
assumption that the map was never intended to be useful and that its maker’s purpose was primarily
artistic, not practical or geographic.”39 Elsewhere he argues that the overarching purpose of the map
was to boost a Roman’s “pride in the range and greatness of Rome’s sway.” 40 Its plethora of place
names, and vast network of Roman roads extending across an empire with no marked boundaries
appears designed to impress more by the effect of its shear overabundance than its informational value.
This could be said also of the Column reliefs, whose 2500 figures and over 200 buildings could never be
fully visible.41 Like the reliefs, the Peutinger map speaks eloquently the message of ecumenism, that
“the borders of Roman rule coincide with those of the habitable earth itself.”42 Thus we come full circle
and find the same kind of message of territorial dominance in the map as on the column.
The Peutinger Table and the column reliefs may both descend from innovations in geographic
depiction that were early subsumed into triumphal art. “Triumphal culture as a whole provided a crucial
arena within which issues of representation were explored and debated…as if representation itself--- its
37
Eleanor Leach, The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome,
Princeton, N.J., 1988, 89.
38
See Richard Talbert and Tom Elliott, “New Windows on the Peutinger Map of the Roman World,” in Anne K. Knowles, ed.,
Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship, Redlands, Ca., 2008, 200-218; R.
Talbert, Review of Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, eds., Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire, London and New York,
Routledge, 2001, in American Journal of Philology v. 123, no. 3, Fall 2002, 529-534 and 534; also R. Talbert, “The Roman
World in the Traveler’s Hand and Head,” in Richard Talbot and Richard Unger, eds., Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle
Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods, Leiden, Brill, 2008, 109-127.
39 The chief arguments involve a redundancy of information in certain geographic areas and a lack in others, leading to an
impression of Rome’s greatness at the expense of other regions, and the placement of Rome at the center of the map,
reflecting more an ideological statement than a geographic reality in the Mediterranean; Talbert surmises that the map could
in some medium have decorated a space such as the aula of a late Roman emperor, perhaps hanging with Rome centered
over the throne; R. Talbert, “The Roman World in the Traveler’s Hand and Head,” 114.
40
Talbert, “Cartography and taste,” 128.
41
A similar, cumulative effect in overabundance is witnessed in the triumph itself; thus Ovid’s narrator in the Ars Amatoria
(1.223-8), guessing and making up the names of places and people as their images pass by in procession. The visual reception
of the column reliefs might be compared to newspaper columns with bold headlines: many read the heading for the big
picture, and delve only superficially into the details of the story.
42
Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, Baltimore, 2001, 47.
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conventions, contrivances, and paradoxes---was central to the show,” writes Mary Beard. In any case,
the achievements of the military surveyors and engineers loom large on the column reliefs, as well as in
the Forum of Trajan itself, all paid for with the spoils of Dacian conquest. Since Apollodorus of Damascus
was Trajan’s chief military engineer as well as his chief architect and designer of the Forum, this may
come as no surprise.43
43
Apollodorus and the other engineers and designers were directly responsible for the transformation of Dacian wealth into a
memorial to the glory of Trajan, empire, and themselves, in a manner comparable to the conversion of enemy spoils and
weapons into objects of Roman spectacle in the triumph; see Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph, Cambridge, Mass., 2007, 175177.