A Structure Singular Under Heaven:
Trajan’s Column and the Imperial Roman Habitus

Thomas N. Sizgorich (University of New Mexico)

This paper examines Trajan’s Column vis-à-vis the narrative of Ammianus Marcellinus to consider the role of monumental sites in the production of a specifically Roman imperial habitus. Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that in 357 CE, the Roman emperor Constantius II visited the city of Rome for the first time. Constantius stands transfixed in the Forum of Trajan, surrounded by magnificent emblems of a time that has now passed. With the Column of Trajan set before him, which Ammianus describes as “a structure singular under heaven,” Constantius spins with wonder at the grandeur of Trajan’s Forum and the imperial power its structures were meant to evoke. Constantius’ visit to Trajan’s Forum affords Ammianus an opportunity to compare the current emperor with the majesty of former Roman rulers. He finds Constantius very much wanting when measured against Trajan, who by the fourth century was already acknowledged as the ‘optimus princeps.’ This inability to surpass the past extends beyond imperial succession. Ammianus also tells us that Trajan’s monuments evaded the capacity of speech to convey their grandeur, just as the possibility of ever again creating such monuments evades humanity in his own time.

The role assigned to Trajan’s monuments in Ammianus’ text suggests much about the role of material culture and inscribed public spaces in the imperial Roman imaginary, particularly insofar as Trajan’s Forum serves in Ammianus’ composition as a site in which the fourth century Roman present may be evaluated in accordance with a very specific narrative of the Roman imperial past, and in which contemporary Romans, most notably the emperor himself, could be measured against abstract ideals of Romanitas enshrined in accordance with a semiotics of Roman imperial ideology. This semiotics imbued to the public spaces with a visual grammar and a lexicon of narrative forms that, both reflected certain organizing beliefs of Roman society and incited unreflective acceptance of those beliefs by affording them a place in the “natural order of things,” or public “habitus” [Clifford Geertz 2000; Pierre Bourdieu 1998]. This habitus meets the eyes and forms the ideology of those who move through the highly elaborated visual texts inscribed across the public face of the ancient Roman capital.