Apollodorus of Damascus

Emperor Trajan employs Apollodorus in Dacia to build a bridge across the Danube (pictured on Trajan's Column).

Its twenty stone masonry piers—one hundred and fifty feet (forty-five meters) high, sixty feet (eighteen meters) wide, and one hundred and seventy feet (fifty-two meters) apart—support the span’s wooden superstructure.

Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus, commonly known as Trajan, had been born into a wealthy patrician family in the Hispania Baetica province and had risen to prominence during the reign of emperor Domitian, serving as a general in the Roman army along the German frontier, and successfully crushing the revolt of Antonius Saturninus in 89.

On September 18, 96, Domitian had been succeeded by Marcus Cocceius Nerva, an old and childless senator who proved to be unpopular with the army.

After a brief and tumultuous year in power, a revolt by members of the Praetorian Guard had compelled him to adopt the more popular Trajan as his heir and successor.

At Nerva’s death on January 27, 98, he had been succeeded by his adopted son without incident.

As a civilian administrator, Trajan maintains good relations with the Roman Senate, and will be best known for his extensive public building program, which will reshape the city of Rome, leaving such multiple enduring landmarks as Trajan's Forum, Trajan's Market and Trajan's Column.

Trajan, provincial himself, lowers tax requirements for the provinces and sponsors the admission of provincials to prominent positions.

He gains a reputation for his benevolence through his institution of the "alimenta," a system of financial subsidies for poor children.

He also continues the official persecution of the Christians.

The emperor, on his departure from Dacia in 102, had ordered the construction of a permanent stone bridge across the Danube near the present Romanian city of Turnu Severin.

The celebrated bridge, constructed between 103 and 105 by the architect Apollodorus of Damascus, is the largest in the Empire.

The Danube is about twelve hundred meters (four thousand feet) broad at this spot; the bridge is composed of twenty arches supported by stone pillars (only two of which are still visible at low water).

In the year of the bridge’s completion, Decebalus breaks the treaty, annihilating a Roman garrison stationed in Dacia and invading Moesia to attack a neighboring people allied to Rome.

Trajan has ruled as a civilian emperor in the years since the final Dacian campaign, to the same acclaim as before.

One of his notable acts is the sponsorship of a three-month gladiatorial festival in the great Colosseum in Rome (the precise date of this festival is unknown).

Combining chariot racing, beast fights and close-quarters gladiatorial bloodshed, this gory spectacle reputedly leaves eleven thousand dead (mostly slaves and criminals, plus the thousands of beasts killed alongside them) and attracts a total of five million spectators over the course of the festival.

It is during this time that he corresponds with Pliny the Younger on the subject of how to deal with the Christians of Pontus, telling Pliny to leave them alone unless they are openly practicing the religion.

He builds several new buildings, monuments and roads in Italia and his native Hispania.

His magnificent complex in Rome raised to commemorate his victories in Dacia (and largely financed from that campaign's loot)—consisting of a forum, Trajan's Column, and a shopping center—still stands in Rome today.

He is also a prolific builder of triumphal arches, many of which survive, and rebuilder of roads (Via Traiana and Via Traiana Nova).

An effective administrator, Trajan undertakes a massive construction program, building impressive aqueducts, roads, theaters, and basilicas.

Trajan’s forum is constructed with the spoils of war from his conquest of Dacia, which ended in 106.

Apollodorus of Damascus, a skilled military architect and engineer as well as an ingenious urban planner, designs Trajan's Forum and Column, the Basilica Ulpia, and Trajan's Markets.

He perfectly integrates his vast ensemble of masterpieces with the street pattern and the other forums, but they necessitate the removal of a hill reputedly as high as Trajan's Column, one hundred and twenty-five feet (thirty-eight meters) tall.

To build this monumental complex, extensive excavations were required: workers eliminated the sides of the Quirinal and Capitoline (Campidoglio) Hills, which closed the valley occupied by the Imperial forums toward the Campus Martius.

It is possible that the excavations were initiated under Emperor Domitian.

Designed to Vitruvian proportions, 3:2, the Forum of Trajan contains, in addition to the Basilica Ulpia, Greek and Latin libraries and an equestrian statue of Trajan.

The Fasti Ostienses states that the Forum was inaugurated in 112, while Trajan's Column is erected and inaugurated in 113 to commemorate Trajan’s victory in the two Dacian Wars.

The lofty column, carved of Luna marble, features sculpture reliefs depicting nearly twenty-five hundred figures that ascend the shaft in a continuous spiral band about six hundred and twenty-five feet (one hundred and ninety meters) in length.

Ancient coins indicate preliminary plans to top the column with a statue of a bird, probably an eagle, but after construction a statue of Trajan is put in place; this statue disappeared in the Middle Ages.

The interior of the column is hollow: entered by a small doorway at one side of the base, a spiral stair of 185 steps gives access to the platform above, offering the visitor in antiquity a view over the surrounding Trajan's forum; forty-three window slits illuminate the ascent.

During the time of the construction, several other projects take place: the construction of the Markets of Trajan, and the renovation of the Caesar's Forum (where the Basilica Argentaria is built) and the Temple of Venus Genetrix.

Around this time, Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, known as Suetonius, writes De viris illustribus (“On Illustrious Men”), thirty-four biographies (now mostly lost) of Roman writers.

Ancona, taken by Rome during the second century BCE, becomes a flourishing port after Trajan enlarges the harbor, which is of considerable importance in imperial times, as the nearest to Dalmatia.

Trajan constructs the north quay with his Syrian architect Apollodorus of Damascus.

At the beginning of it stands the marble triumphal arch with a single archway, and without bas-reliefs, erected in his honor in 115 by the Senate and Roman people.

Hadrian has grown so frustrated with the continual problems in the territories north of the Danube that the new emperor contemplates withdrawing from Dacia.

As an emergency measure, Hadrian dismantles the wooden superstructure of Apollodorus’s bridge across the Danube, concerned about the threat posed by barbarian incursions across the Olt River and a southward push between a number of Trajan’s colonia and the castrum at Bersobis.

By 118, Hadrian himself has taken to the field against the Roxolani and the Iazyges, and although he defeats them, he agrees to reinstate the subsidies to the Roxolani Hadrian then decides to abandon certain portions of Trajan's Dacian conquests.

The territories added to Moesia Inferior (Southern Moldova, the southeastern edge of the Carpathian Mountains, and the plains of Muntenia and Oltenia) are returned to the Roxolani.

As a result, Moesia Inferior reverts once again to the original boundaries it had possessed prior to the acquisition of Dacia.

The portions of Moesia Inferior to the north of the Danube are split off and refashioned into a new province called Dacia Inferior, corresponding to the region of present Wallachia.

Trajan’s original province of Dacia is relabeled Dacia Superior, corresponding roughly to Transylvania.

It is at this time that Hadrian moves the Legio IV Flavia Felix from its base at Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, and orders it stationed in Moesia Superior.

Apollodorus of Damascus is widely credited as the architect of the Pantheon.

From well before his reign, Hadrian had displayed a keen interest in architecture, but it seems that his eagerness was not always well received.

According to Dio Cassius, when Trajan, predecessor to Hadrian, consulted Apollodorus about an architectural problem, Hadrian interrupted to give advice, to which Apollodorus replied, "Go away and draw your pumpkins.

You know nothing about these problems."

"Pumpkins" refers to Hadrian's drawings of domes like the Serapeum in his villa.

According to Dio Cassius (lxix.

4), Apollodorus later criticized Hadrian's plans for the Temple of Venus in Rome On the accession of Hadrian, Apollodorus was banished and, shortly afterwards, being charged with imaginary crimes, put to death in 130.

The story about Apollodorus' death demonstrates the persistent hostility felt towards Hadrian in senatorial circles long after his reign, for if Dio included it in his history, he must have believed it.

Many since have taken Dio's anecdote at face value, but there is much in this story that does not add up and many scholars dismiss its historicity altogether.

In addition to his architectural legacy, Apollodorus leaves several technical treatises (none survive), including one on Siege Engines, which is dedicated to Hadrian.

Juvenal, in his Satire 10, passionately essays on the vanity of all human wishes regardless of place or time.

(A later account that Juvenal suffers exile for his outspokenness and ends his days wretchedly in Egypt, the victim of Emperor Hadrian's malevolence, is possibly an apocryphal echo of the fate of Ovid a century before.)

Hadrian, a versatile emperor, likes to demonstrate knowledge of all intellectual and artistic fields.

Above all, he patronizes the arts: Hadrian's Villa at Tibur (Tivoli) is the greatest Roman example of an Alexandrian garden, recreating a sacred landscape, ultimately lost in large part to the despoliation of the ruins by the Cardinal d'Este, who will have much of the marble removed to build Villa d'Este.