Italia Restituta: the Economic Policy of Trajanic Road Construction

Sailakshmi Ramgopal (University of Chicago)

In the second century C.E., Trajan constructed the Via Traiana by combining Republican and Augustan road building models to create his own model. Material evidence suggests that Trajan constructed the Via Traiana not only to serve basic transportation needs and to commemorate his administration in the manner of his road-building predecessors, but also to execute economic policies of his political ideology of Italia Restituta. As a result, the road’s construction suggests the existence of Imperial economic policies and an unprecedented function of policy commemoration and implementation.

Trajan’s ideological claim of a restored Italy comprised political, judicial, and economic reform. His fiscal policies are particularly significant for the infrastructural form in which they took shape, as represented by his restoration of peninsular land and water transportation systems. Italia Restituta becomes especially evident in his construction of the Via Traiana from Benevento to Brindisi.

The Via Traiana may have expedited troop movement, but coinage, monumental architecture, and topography associated with the road suggest that economic reform, not military transport, was the central aim of the its construction. Southeastern Italy in the second century suffered from severe economic depression. It would seem that the Via Traiana was built to provide the region with economic stimulation and the means for growth through employment and improved connectivity in the formerly isolated Adriatic coastline. Imagery from the Arch of Benevento and coin specie, as well as tablet inscriptions found in the region, suggest that the road facilitated Trajan’s reformed and well-publicized alimenta program. The implementation of the program would have provided the region with economic stimulation through its offer of loans to poor Italian farmers.

The Via Traiana sets Trajan apart from previous road builders through his adoption of Republican and Augustan elements of road building and imagery. The thematic familiarity of these elements would have assisted in the rural population’s acceptance of such a novel economic policy as the alimenta and would have improved the efficacy of economic stimulation. Through this progressive approach, the emperor contributed to the peninsula’s prosperity and internal stability, indicating a clear perception of Italia as a single, economic unit.