Birthday Greetings # 44

Happy birthday to Marcus Ulpius Traianus, Roman emperor, better known (to me at any rate) as Trajan.  Trajan was living proof that being an alcoholic pederast wasn't necessarily a barrier to a successful army or political career (a truism that has received much extra proof since his time).  Trajan hailed from the Baetica region in Spain (no, I don't know where that is, I'm just reading it off wikipedia) and took enough time off from getting shitfaced with groups of well sculptured fifteen year olds to be one of the greatest of all Roman emperors.

Trajan inherited the empire from his father, a polite legal fiction which can be explained by the fact that the Roman upper classes seemed to be perennially short of offspring and as a consequence adoption was widespread even when the subject had a perfectly serviceable set of parents.  Trajan joined the army and a combination of obvious talent and a high placed father (the real one) set him on the path to promotion.  Fortunately for Trajan there seemed to be quite a lot for a skilled military commander to do.  He served in most of the empire's trouble spots and built a formidable reputation while doing so.

Back in Rome the emperor Domitian was working hard to make himself the most hated man in the empire and was achieving a fair measure of success.  Before he could quite get to the horse as consul stage however he was murdered which was both a relief and an embarrassment.  The senate were relieved because it meant the morbidly suspicious Domitian wouldn't be killing them any more but they were embarrassed because now they had to find another emperor.  They settled on a guy named Nerva for reasons which must have been clearer to them than they are to us.

Nerva was old, childless and if he had done nothing to irritate anyone this was largely because he didn't seem to have attracted anyone's attention.  Still, Nerva got the gig and settled down to rule.  It took him about fifteen minutes to really piss off the army and suddenly his rule was looking shaky.  One principal problem was the usual one that simply being hated by the senate didn't make an emperor unpopular with the population at large (indeed, it was frequently a recommendation).  The army and the mob had both been quite fond of Domitian and weren't inclined to cut his successor much slack.  Nerva hit on a bright idea to keep breath in his body little while longer.  He cast around for the most frighteningly dangerous thug in the army and adopted him.  This was our boy Trajan.  The army settled down and Nerva lived out his few remaining months without having to worry about either the succession or its premature occurrence.

With Nerva dead and safely deified Trajan took over the empire.  There was a new sheriff in town and he cleaned house.  Confiscated property belonging to Domitian's victims was returned to their families, military discipline was tightened and a whole raft of vigorous foreign policy initiatives (wars) were undertaken.  Trajan conquered the kingdom of Dacia.  A couple of years later he conquered it again, this time for keeps and converted it into the province of Dacia.  This was still in the days when war was supposed to help the economy rather than bankrupt it and Dacia had a lot of goldmines.  The loot from Trajan's Dacian campaigns paid for social programmes (certainly no less effective than the ones we have now), monument building (always good for occupying the unemployed) and improving infrastructure (this was back in the days when the government thought that was part of their job).  The most impressive evidence we have of all this is Trajan's column which is a really tall column covered in bas reliefs depicting Trajan bringing civilisation to the Dacians, a lot of it focuses on him killing them.

After Dacia the annexation of Nabataea was pretty standard stuff and the empire bulked large on the international scene.  A sudden outbreak of peace allowed Trajan to prove he was capable of doing more than just commanding armies.  The senate liked him because he pretended to respect them, the army liked him because he led them to victory (and loot) and the people liked him because they didn't really have any reason not to.  Arches were being built, animals, slaves and criminals were being butchered by the thousands in celebratory games, columns were going up all over Rome and everybody thought "well, this is a bit of all right really".  Trajan is one of the few Roman emperors whose reputation is as good today as it was back then.  After that really the only thing left to do was have a war with Parthia.

Parthia figured prominently in the Roman consciousness as being the one nation they could never really crush.  The reason was simple logistics.  Parthia was right at the end of the empire which meant the legions had to march a long way before they even got there.  Once there they had to march even further to find anything the Parthians could be bothered to defend by which time they were tired, hungry and at the end of terribly extended supply lines.  Wars with Parthia had sometimes gone well and sometimes badly but they had never been decisive.  This didn't stop Trajan getting into a war with Parthia.  The immediate cause was Parthian meddling in Armenia which the Romans considered to be within their sphere of influence.  Or it might have been because of Roman meddling in Armenia which the Parthians considered to be within their sphere of influence.

At this remove it isn't quite clear what Trajan was trying to do.  Conquer Parthia?  Awesome if successful but highly risky.  Reinforce Roman influence over Armenia?  Possibly, they'd certainly fought a bunch of other wars for this rather implausible reason.  One view is that Trajan was simply trying to push the frontier back a bit and anchor it on some viable defences.  This would be a slap down to Parthia and simultaneously make it more difficult for Parthia to make a comeback.

By this time Trajan was growing old and starting to slow down a bit.  Capable he certainly was but drinking at six o'clock in the morning will start to take its toll of your health even if your mind is left intact.  Still the war went well at first, the Parthians were beaten although not decisively.  Parthian resistance mounted, fortified cities held out in his rear and it was really really hot.  Eventually Trajan beat the Parthians sufficiently to place a puppet king on the Parthian throne but the territory he actually occupied fell short of either empire conquering dreams or even the more pragmatic "defensible positions" objective.  He might have tried a little harder but at that point the Jewish population of the empire rose in revolt and he needed his legions to put it down.  They succeeded but by the time they did Trajan was dead.

With something akin to victory (he'd certainly come out better than the Parthians) and aware that his health was failing him he started to make his way back to Italy but died enroute.  On his deathbed he adopted Hadrian as his son and heir.  At least that's what the official record states and it would be churlish to point out that the official record was written by Hadrian after the event.