Aqua Trajana: Pliny and the Column of Trajan

Eleni Manolaraki (University of South Florida)

This paper discusses the parallel aquatic motifs that are featured in some literary and artistic narratives related to the Dacian wars: Trajan’s Column, contemporary coin issues, Pliny’s Panegyricus [Pan. 12.3-4; 16.2-5; 30-31; 81-4-82.5], and a sample of Pliny’s letters [8.4; 6.31]. The prominence of such motifs on the Column hardly needs introduction. Out of the 181 panels, 30 tell various tales of water including river crossing, boat building, sailing, swimming, etc. By connecting Pliny’s literature to the visual narratives of the Column and the coins, I demonstrate that water control is an important rhetorical trope within the larger narrative of the conquest and Romanization of Dacia.

Pliny’s aquatic imagery serves the foreign ideology of Trajan’s reign as Pliny presents it in the Panegyricus of 100 C.E., and in its subsequent revisions for publication. Pliny’s real and metaphorical associations of Trajan to the Danube, the Rhine, and the Nile foster pride over the imperial fleet and Trajan’s aggressive integration of ‘barbarians’ into the empire. Relevant images on the Column, (the first crossing of the Danuvius, the drowning Dacians, the long wooden bridge at the modern ‘Iron Gates,’ the fleet crossing the Adriatic, etc.) concur with Pliny about the central role of aquatic motifs for the promotion of imperial ideology. My general conclusion is that visual and literary artists operate within the same physical, political, and intellectual climate, in which the mastery of water is an important means of celebrating Trajan’s expansion and his integration of Dacia into the empire.

Since we possess few textual sources on Trajan, and Pliny’s Panegyricus, our most extensive source on this era, has been commonly dismissed as mere senatorial flattery, there is little scholarship integrating the literary and material records of Trajan’s reign. Unlike Augustus, whose literary biographies are commonly examined against his own Res Gestae and visual narratives such as the Ara Pacis and the Augustus Prima Porta, Trajan has been mainly considered from an archaeological point of view. Rooted in the criticism of Roman historiography, my discussion combines literary interpretation of marine motifs with the art appreciation of such iconography in Trajan’s Rome.