Rome

It is carved from seventeen drums of Luna marble. Each drum is about ten feet in diameter and hollow inside, to accommodate a cramped spiral staircase of 185 steps, so that (with difficulty) one can climb to the top; the stair is lit by forty-three small slit windows, which are virtually invisible from the outside. Even though the drums were cut separately, the matching of the figures, and the lack of damage at the joints, make it look like one seamless cylinder.

The sculptors were Roman artisans, many of whom must have been Greek slaves: the scenes are full of figures that descend from Hellenistic prototypes, and Greek-trained sculptors were usually preferred to Roman craftsmen. How many carvers worked on this enormous project is of course unknown, but there must have been many.

Dedicated in 113 C.E., it commemorates Trajan’s campaigns in the Dacian Wars on the Danube frontier in 101–2 and 105–6 C.E. For anyone with good binoculars, a sustaining interest in Roman military history, and a crick-proof neck, this is a mesmerizing document, if “document” is the right word for something so big, stony, and solid. Nothing tells us so much about the Roman army at work—not just killing and capturing barbarians, but marching, bridging, foraging for supplies, maintaining weapons, building camps, listening to the speeches of its commanders, and bearing its standards. Every detail of uniform, armor, and weaponry is correct. So is the depiction of barbarian arms, which are prominently shown as military trophies on the column’s rectangular base as well as in the scenes of conflict along the band. Throughout the narrative helix of twenty-six hundred figures there are some sixty Trajans, speaking to the troops, receiving envoys, conferring with his generals, offering sacrifices to the gods. One may also notice a large river-god, the personification of the Danube, blessing the Roman army as it crosses. The dexterity with which this story is unrolled is still as amazing as the clarity of detail with which it is set forth in the stone.

Unfortunately, the bronze statue of Trajan himself which used to stand atop the column was removed and melted down in Christian times, to be replaced in 1588 by one of Saint Peter, who had nothing to do with the Dacian Wars. If you look closely at the base, you can make out another relic of Christianization over the door to the column’s interior—the outline of the roof of what was once a tiny church, San Nicola de Columna, recorded in the early eleventh century but demolished by the sixteenth. The main feature of the interior, a gold urn containing Trajan’s ashes, was inevitably looted long ago.

Of the phrases that have survived into English from classical Latin, certainly one of the best known stands for social irresponsibility, fatuous hedonism: the public’s desire for “bread and circuses.” It comes from a satire by Juvenal, launched against the “mob” of his fellow Romans of the first century C.E. Juvenal had seen mob violence directed against Tiberius’ right-hand man Sejanus, through his many public effigies:

??????The ropes are heaved, down come the statues,

??????Axes demolish their chariot-wheels, the unoffending

??????Legs of their horses are broken. And now the fire

??????Roars up in the furnace, now flames hiss under the bellows:

??????The head of the people’s darling glows red-hot, great Sejanus

??????Crackles and melts. That face only yesterday ranked

??????Second in all the world. Now it’s so much scrap-metal,

??????To be turned into jugs and basins, frying-pans, chamber-pots.

??????Hang wreaths on your doors, lead a big white sacrificial

??????Bull to the Capitol! They’re dragging Sejanus along

??????By a hook, in public. Everyone cheers.…

They follow fortune as always, detest the victims.

??????If a little Etruscan luck has rubbed off on Sejanus,

??????If the doddering Emperor

??????Had been struck down out of the blue, this identical rabble

??????Would now be proclaiming that carcase an equal successor

??????To Augustus. But nowadays, with no vote to sell, their motto

??????Is “Couldn’t care less.” Time was when their plebiscite elected

??????Generals, Heads of State, commanders of legions; but now

??????They’ve pulled in their horns; only two things concern them:

??????Bread and the Games.

“Duas tantum res anxius optat,/panem et circenses”—the public which once cared passionately about serious matters of power and public welfare, such as consulships and the army, now merely longs for two things, bread and circuses. One might suppose this was a poet’s license, but it was closer to fact. The Caesars had discovered one of the better aids to governing a large, potentially unruly state, once the capacity for power inherent in citizenship of a republic had been collapsed into the single power of the dictator: keep the citizens diverted, at state expense. The immense political power of amusement, and the social anesthesia it fosters, was something that no one had fully acknowledged before. The Romans would use it to spectacular effect.

To wit, the Caesars underwrote leisure, the blank tablet on which amusement is written. First, they created more public leisure than any state had ever imagined giving its citizens, or ever would. This became addictive. The Roman year was divided into days on which ordinary business could be done (dies fasti) and days on which it could not, for fear of offending the gods (dies nefasti). As the number of leisure days or dies nefasti grew, so the number of dies fasti had to shrink. Earlier on, in the time of the Republic, Rome had holidays on which ludi or games were held in honor of various gods; the Ludi Romani, lasting two weeks, began in 366 B.C.E., and these were joined over the next couple of centuries by the Ludi Plebei, the Ludi Florales (in homage to the goddess Flora), and various others. In all, there were fifty-nine such holidays. But then, on top of these, one must add the thirty-four days of games instituted on various pretexts by Sulla, and the forty-five feriae publicae or general feast days, such as the Lupercalia in February (celebrating Romulus and Remus’ nurture by the lupa or she-wolf), the Volcanalia in August, and the riotously entertaining Saturnalia in December. Then there were the various days that Roman emperors designated