Contextualizing Trajan's Column:
The 2006 NEH Summer Seminar

The present panel is the result of a summer seminar funded by the NEH, titled ‘Trajan’s Column: Narratives of War, Conquest and Commemoration,’ which took place at the American Academy in Rome in June-July of 2006. In this highly collaborative seminar, my colleagues and I used the famous monument as a starting point to discuss current sociopolitical concerns that relate to both domestic and foreign policies. We considered the Column in terms of Roman conquest and within the broader modern historiography of imperialism. We examined principles of visual storytelling, and particularly methods of representing warfare, victory, defeat, and heroism in public monuments of various epochs. We discussed the construction of historical memory and memorial practices within the Roman Empire itself and subsequent empires that have turned to Rome as a paradigm of conquest and acculturation. Keeping in line with the pedagogical mission of the NEH, we also shared specific suggestions as to how our own interdisciplinary interaction can be taken back into the classrooms of our respective institutions. In this context we decided to propose a panel at the 2007 CAMWS meeting, so that we could share our experience at the seminar and the Academy with our colleagues from classics.

Scholarly discussion of Trajan’s Column has often deplored the lack of literary context about this monument. Its imposing isolation in Trajan’s forum is almost symbolical of its unfortunate predicament. Since most sources on the Dacian wars are now lost, the Column’s spiraling narrative challenges the viewer to read it without the comfort of ‘supporting documents’ that could clarify or elaborate on the extraordinary story it unfolds. Our four panelists attempt to vest the Column with much needed literary context, and to gauge the conceptual registry with which ancient viewers approached this monument. The first panelist discusses inscriptional evidence for the Dacian wars from various provinces. These regional sources are compared and contrasted to the ‘official’ narrative of the Column, underlining the different representations of the Dacian king Decebalus as a hero and/or a villain. The second panelist presents various images of water control on the Column (river-crossing, sailing, swimming, etc.), providing literary parallels from Pliny’s Panegyricus and his letters. This speaker demonstrates that both visual and literary artists operate within the same intellectual climate, in which the mastery of water becomes shorthand for imperial success on the foreign front. The third panelist sets the Column next to various types of contemporary and near-contemporary evidence, to recreate the visual experience of the 2^nd century viewer. Examining general thoughts on ‘visual theory’ in Quintillian, Plutarch, and Pliny the Elder, as well as specific examples of viewing pleasure and ekphrasis in novels (Longus, Petronius, Apuleius) the speaker elucidates how contemporary Romans could fully perceive, supplement, and expand the elliptical and often disjointed narrative of the Column. Finally, the fourth panelist discusses the visual impact of the Column on later viewers. Considering an episode in Ammianus Marcellinus, where the historian relates the visit of emperor Constantius II to the forum of Trajan in 357 C.E., the speaker demonstrates that, already in the 4^th century, the Column symbolizes an idealized past that cannot be captured or recreated in the present context of ‘decline.’ Thus this last paper segues into a discussion of the Column in its present context, in the heart of Rome’s busy centro storico, across the street from another highly contested public locus: the Victor Emmanuel monument.

Each paper considers the Column carefully within a different literary context, spanning at least two centuries of its reception. Whether contextualized by inscriptional evidence, Roman oratory, epistolography, ‘scientific’ writings, novels, or later historiography, the Column of Trajan remains as imposing in its reticent eloquence as it was when it was first erected in 107 C.E. It is my sincere hope as a panel organizer, a participant, and a beneficiary of the NEH, that we can share some of our thoughts on the Column with our colleagues and fellow teachers.