Trajan

The first historic figure is the Roman emperor Trajan. When I was studying Ancient Culture and Society, he was always my favorite emperor. A seemingly good man, caught up in a difficult time. Ironically, though he seemed to have no taste for war and fighting, he was the Roman emperor credited with achieving the greatest expansion of the Roman empire. His life’s work has been documented on a monument in Rome, Trajan’s Column. There you can follow his career on what could be described as a sort of cartoon. In some images of Trajan he looks quite handsome. I imagine they are from his youth. So there you have him, one of the few Roman emperors about whom even the ancient Roman gossip columnists couldn’t find anything scandalous to say.