Seeing as the Romans Saw:
Trajan's Column and the 2nd Century
Jeffrey T. Winkle (Calvin College)
The frieze on Trajan’s Column remains a puzzle for many reasons. The loss of Trajan’s commentaries on the Dacian Wars limits our understanding of the Column as the possible illustration of a text. The lack of archeological remains limits our understanding as to how and from where the Column was viewed and experienced. The complete lack of eyewitness testimony from the 2nd century shrouds our original audience in a frustrating darkness. However, as this paper argues, all of the above questions and gaps need not be necessarily answered with a collective shrug.
By holding up the frieze next to various types of contemporary and near-contemporary evidence, I argue that we can, to a degree, recreate the experience of the 2nd century viewer and gain a better understanding of why the Column frieze was created the way it is, and how its ancient viewers experienced and understood the piece. First, we see that “visual theory” and the “eye” are very hot topics for the 1st and 2nd centuries. Authors such as Quintillian, Plutarch, and Pliny the Elder all emphasize “realism”, “vividness”, and “motion” as desirable qualities in works of art. Burgeoning Middle Platonic theory praises artworks which seek to “break free of the static” and imitate life as close to reality as possible. All these things coincide nicely with the frieze’s cinematic qualities.
Second, by using ancient novels (both Greek and Roman) as comparanda, we see a repeated play with works of art and narrative. In Apuleius the narrative oscillates between static and motion, living and dead, animate and inanimate. Here a character imitates a famous piece of art to give color and layer to the narrative; there the text solidifies an action scene into a statue or a mosaic. Both Longus and Petronius use works of art as springboards for narrative. The whole of Daphnis and Chloe is born out of an interpretation of a fresco. Petronius’ Encolpius and Eumolpus add narrative to pictures in a gallery, both as personal analysis and as an excuse to show off rhetorical skill. These examples and also the works of Philostratus show that “narrative art” and especially the art of ekphrasis was alive and thriving in the 2nd century.
Lastly, this paper considers the visual repertoire of the ancient audience and famous works (especially the shields of Achilles and Aeneas) which viewers may have “brought” to the Column. All these approaches, I contend, can help us better understand the Column as an artifact of its times, and give us a basis for interesting speculations.
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