Trajan's Column & Market
📍 Ancient CenterA marble column carved with war as a spiral comic strip, beside "the world’s first shopping mall."
- 🦅 Empire
Empire · Monument to Trajan’s Zenith
Trajan’s Column stands nearly 40 m, wound with a 200-metre relief of the Dacian wars.
To commemorate the conquest of Dacia and the empire at its greatest extent, Trajan raised this marble column here. Its shaft is wound top to bottom with a 200-metre relief, a stone comic strip from marches and river-crossings to sieges and triumphs — the most precious pictorial source for the Roman army. Beside it, Trajan’s Market climbs the hillside in tiers of arcades, once selling goods from across the empire, often called "the world’s first shopping mall."
Sources：The reliefs of Trajan's Column (AD 113) · The site of Trajan's Market
- ✝️ Faith
↑ Because of the last layer：Precisely because it was the city’s most conspicuous imperial monument, Christian Rome claimed its very summit.
Faith · St Peter Atop the Column
The column’s summit once bore Trajan; in the Middle Ages it was replaced by St Peter.
The column first bore a statue of Trajan himself. After the empire fell and Christianity rose, in 1587 a pope ordered the pagan emperor at the top replaced with a bronze statue of the apostle St Peter. So this pillar of glory to Rome’s "best emperor" was quietly taken over into Christian Rome — a classical body crowned with a head of faith.
Sources：1587 decree of Pope Sixtus V
🔭 Meanwhile in the world
In Rome：Trajan’s Column is completed, commemorating the Dacian wars.
At the same time, elsewhere：At the same time, Cai Lun of the Han had improved papermaking years before; both ends of Eurasia were writing their golden ages.
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