Philolog

Posted by Patrick Hunt

Why is this Trajan sculpture bust so striking? What does Dante have to say about the Roman Emperor Trajan and why? Certainly Dante must have known that Trajans was regarded as one of the Good Emperors and as a Virtuous Pagan as well, especially given the traditions and legends associated with Pope Gregory, as Singleton, Vitto and others attest. (1)

Trajan's decennial bust in the British Museum (2) is one of many celebrating his first decade as emperor and thus dated at least from CE 108. I offer some bold and no doubt speculative ideas about this Trajan sculpture in a brief essay. This bust may be the best likeness of him surviving from Roman sculpture; perhaps even one of the most remarkable of all Roman sculptures. There may be some cultural hybridity in this bust: not only is the general idea of veritas followed in his unidealized features - like the Flavian return to portraits of traditional austerity (3) - but the overall effect appears to simulate Hellenistic style in its athletic upper torso. It is certainly the least flattering of all his surviving portraits (4) and is even more realistic than his relief triumphal portrait crowned by Victory in the Arch of Trajan at Benevento, marked by its pietas and whose stark features are likely exaggerated for viewers to compensate for its lofty height. (5)

Perhaps as an evidence of its representational truth, this is a Roman bust whose face has one of the strongest imprints of character in Roman art. While observation makes it clear that this is an unidealized portrait, interpretation beyond this fact suggests that Trajan's visage here is not what would be traditionally called a handsome face by any stretch. It is asymmetric, almost horsy and his forehead is not going to be high enough for those who have at times foolishly measured intellect thereby. Yet if there is any strong likeness to the real Trajan, this is not a complimentary image of good looks but more likely one rather governed by an aesthetic of mimetic honesty even as a carryover of Hellenistic pathos where the portrait ought to convey its own narrative.

What might be conveyed in this anonymous honest narrative? Is it that Trajan's strength of character and strong determination made him among the wisest rulers in Roman history? If he is not easily bent by any flattery in his personal image, preferring instead the truth of his powerful will to be shown, what a mark of good character this sculpture carefully articulates. This is the real Trajan.

No wonder, having long been cited by his contemporaries as taking his responsibilities seriously, (6) that he is often the very first listed among the Good Emperors. After the immediate damnatio memoriae of Domitian following his death in CE 96, Trajan's rule beginning in CE 98 was welcomed as a meritocratic change and a restimulus for the cursus honorum of public service. His correspondence with Pliny the Younger, Governor of Bithynia, (Pliny, Epistula 10.96-97) over the fate of Asia Minor Christians was enlightened not only in comparison to his predecessor but to most pre-Constantine emperors as he mandated that "Christians are not to be sought out" and he repudiated "anonymously-posted accusations" as dangerously wrong.

Apparently, as a Virtuous Pagan, Dante regarded Trajan so highly that he was said to be rescued by the prayers of St. Gregory when first mentioned in Purgatorio X.68 and converted, a likely result of his known tolerance of Christians relieved after Domitian's persecutions. Then Dante places him even higher in Paradiso XX.44-48. Knowing the answer already, we might ask how many Roman emperors thus end up both first in Dante's Purgatorio, but it's merely rhetorical:

"The exalted glory of the Roman prince
whose mighty worth moved Gregory to earn
his great conquest, Trajan the Emperor."

Secondly, Trajan is elevated even to the Paradiso where the constellation of the heavenly eagle of divine justice describes past just and temperate rulers, this time in the asterism of its eye:

"The one whose glory shines closest to my beak...
he has known the bitter way though he now learns the sweet life".

Dante cleverly has Gregory "conquer" Rome in the salvation of Trajan in this passage above with the very eye of the constellation of the eagle Aquila so connected to heavenly flight. The "bitter way" was Dante's perception of the futility of Trajan's paganism despite his imperial status. Dante also alludes to the story of Trajan, while with his troops, consoling a widow who had lost her son as part of earthly proof of his virtue. (7)

In the British Museum sculpture of Trajan's face, there are several character aspects combined: both a farsightedness and a rigorous sternness - as one who surveys and guards the whole Roman world and whose frown can almost correct Senatorial corruption - demonstrated in this bust of the emperor who ruled over Rome's greatest geographic stretch from Spain, his birthplace as the first provincial-born emperor, and Mauretania in the west to far Dacia edging the Black Sea and Armenia in the east and from Egypt and Nubia in the south to Britannia in the north. There might also be the suggestion in this sculpture that Trajan honestly rather than nobly bears in his deeply furrowed brow the dignified entire weight of empire.

Notes

(1) Cindy Vitto. The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature. Transactions of the American Philosphical Society, 79.5, Philadelphia, 1989, esp. pp. 45 ff.; Charles Singleton, Journey to Beatrice, vol. 2 Dante Studies, Harvard University Press, 1954.

(2) British Museum number GR-1874.7-12.11; acquired from the Charles Townley Collection in 1893.

(3) Susan Walker. Roman Art, London: British Museum Press, 1994, 28.

(4) Eleanor Leach at Indiana University has carefully recorded the range of surviving Trajan portraits in her course on Roman Art and Archaeology "Trajanic Portrait and Relief Sculpture" where she surveys at least 28 portraits (http://www.indiana.edu/~leach/c414/trajport.html).

(5) Bernard Andreae. The Art of Rome. New York: Harry Abrams, 1977, 204.

(6) Gregory Starikovksy, Columbia University (2002) "Letters of Pliny the Younger", reminds that "Tr[a]jan, according to Pliny’s Panegyric becomes princeps because of his high moral principles." (http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/showcase/starikovsky2.html)

(7) Fiore di Filosofi e di mosti savi (also in Novellino LXIX). cf. Gospel of Matthew 25:34-40.

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