Was Trajan the best Roman emperor?

Trajan was born on 18 September 53 CE in the city of Italica, located in the Roman province of Hispania Baetica (modern-day southern Spain), and his rise to the imperial throne broke new ground.

He became the first emperor born in Hispania, and one of the few emperors born outside of Italy, a fact that signalled a shift in how the Roman state understood power and citizenship.

His father, Marcus Ulpius Traianus, had been a successful senator and military commander who held the governorship of Syria, and the younger Trajan followed a conventional path through Roman military service. 

By the time Emperor Nerva adopted Trajan as his heir in 97 CE, the decision was driven by political necessity rather than any personal affection.

Nerva was an elderly senator who had taken power after the assassination of the unpopular Domitian, and he faced serious pressure from the Praetorian Guard.

He needed a respected military figure to stabilise his regime. At the time of the adoption, Trajan commanded forces on the Rhine frontier, and that fact reassured soldiers who distrusted Nerva.

Trajan’s reputation as a competent and well-liked general made him the obvious choice, and when Nerva died in January 98 CE, Trajan assumed power with broad support from both the army and the Senate.

He did not rush to Rome after taking power. Instead, he stayed on the Rhine frontier to secure the army’s loyalty and manage the northern defences.

He eventually travelled to Rome in 99 CE and entered the city as a ruler who had already taken control of the military situation. 

Trajan’s military record is perhaps the most celebrated aspect of his reign, as his campaigns brought the Roman Empire to its greatest territorial extent.

His two wars against the Dacian kingdom, fought between 101–102 CE and 105–106 CE, resulted in the complete annexation of Dacia (roughly modern-day Romania).

The Dacian king Decebalus had been a formidable opponent who had previously humiliated Emperor Domitian’s forces, which made Trajan’s eventual victory all the more significant to Roman prestige. 

After the fall of the Dacian capital Sarmizegetusa in 106 CE, Trajan seized enormous quantities of gold and silver from the kingdom’s mines.

Roman forces cut Sarmizegetusa’s water supply during the siege, and Decebalus took his own life after Roman troops pursued him following the collapse of organised resistance.

Ancient sources offered striking figures for the treasure haul. One modern estimate, often attributed to Jérôme Carcopino, suggested approximately 165.5 tonnes of gold and 331 tonnes of silver.

Scholars have challenged this reconstruction, and the totals should be treated as uncertain.

Another frequently repeated ancient-style claim described roughly half a million pounds of gold and a million pounds of silver.

These figures varied, but they still give a clear sense of just how much the Romans plundered after the conquest. 

He commemorated the Dacian Wars with the famous Trajan’s Column, a monument that rose about 30 metres for the shaft alone and about 38 metres including its base.

The column carries a continuous spiral frieze of about 200 metres, arranged in 155 scenes, and it depicts more than 2,500 individual figures across the campaigns. 

In the same year as the annexation of Dacia, Trajan expanded Roman territory in a less well-known but strategically important move.

In 106 CE, he annexed the Nabataean kingdom, and Rome organised the new province of Arabia Petraea, which secured routes and towns in the region of Petra and the Red Sea approaches. 

In 113 CE, Trajan launched an ambitious eastern campaign against the Parthian Empire, Rome’s long-standing rival in Mesopotamia.

In 114 CE, he annexed Armenia and declared it a Roman province, and he pushed further downriver after that decision.

He captured the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon in 116 CE and installed a client king, Parthamaspates, during his brief high point of eastern success.

He also announced new Roman provinces in Mesopotamia, and Roman officials attempted to organise administration and garrisons in newly occupied cities.

According to the historian Cassius Dio, Trajan reportedly gazed out at the Persian Gulf and lamented that he was too old to follow Alexander the Great’s path to India. 

The eastern conquests proved difficult to hold, because uprisings erupted across the newly occupied territories.

Jewish revolts flared between 115 and 117 CE in several eastern provinces, and later writers often called this wave of fighting the Kitos War.

Violence and counter-violence struck communities in places such as Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia, and Trajan relied on commanders such as Lusius Quietus and Marcius Turbo to restore Roman control. 

Away from the battlefield, Trajan invested heavily in infrastructure and social welfare programmes that improved daily life across the empire.

His most notable domestic initiative was the alimenta, a system of government loans to Italian farmers at low interest rates.

The interest payments from these loans funded food subsidies for poor children.

Pliny the Younger claimed that the programme supported about 5,000 children across Italian communities, and an inscription from Veleia, dated to 112 CE, preserved the administrative detail of a Trajanic alimentary scheme in action. 

Trajan also commissioned an extraordinary building programme in Rome itself. He employed the architect Apollodorus of Damascus to design Trajan’s Forum, which included a massive public square, two libraries (one for Greek texts and one for Latin), and the Basilica Ulpia, the largest basilica ever constructed in Rome at that time.

The forum became a centre for legal proceedings, public gatherings, and commerce, giving ordinary citizens access to impressive public spaces. 

Outside of Rome, Trajan improved the empire’s road network and harbour facilities.

In 109 CE, he opened the Via Traiana, a major road that improved travel and transport in southern Italy, and in the same year, he dedicated the Aqua Traiana, an aqueduct that increased Rome’s water supply.

He expanded Rome’s main harbour system near Ostia by building the hexagonal basin at Portus, a design that increased capacity and helped stabilise grain shipments into the capital.

He also improved roads in Italy and the provinces, including a remarkable bridge across the Danube designed by Apollodorus.

The Danube bridge, built around 103–105 CE near Drobeta, stretched about 1,135 metres, and it gave Roman armies a reliable crossing point for movement into the Danubian theatre.

Around 114 CE, the Roman Senate officially awarded Trajan the honorific Optimus, meaning “the Best,” an unprecedented title that no previous emperor had received.

Coins from 114 CE used legends that emphasised the title, including forms such as OPTIMO, and the wording continued in issues through to 117 CE.

The Senate’s decision could be seen as a kind of 'reward' for Trajan’s deliberate cultivation of a respectful relationship with that body.

In fact, he consistently avoided the autocratic behaviour that had made emperors like Domitian so despised. 

Pliny the Younger, a senator and close associate of Trajan, delivered a famous speech called the Panegyricus in 100 CE, which praised the emperor as a model of moderation and accessibility.

According to Pliny, Trajan walked through the streets of Rome without excessive bodyguards, entertained senators at dinner as equals, and consulted the Senate on important matters of state.

Whether Pliny’s portrait was entirely accurate is debatable, since the speech was clearly intended as flattery.

That said, even accounting for exaggeration, Trajan’s relationship with the senatorial class was noticeably cooperative. 

His correspondence with Pliny, preserved in Book 10 of Pliny’s Letters, offers a rare window into the practical administration of the empire.

Around 112 CE, when Pliny, as governor of Bithynia-Pontus, wrote asking how to deal with Christians who refused to sacrifice to Roman gods, Trajan replied with measured instructions: Christians should not be actively hunted down, anonymous accusations should be ignored, and only those who refused to recant when formally charged should be punished.

In the same exchange, Trajan accepted sacrifice to the gods and a curse against Christ as proof of repentance, and that test guided how officials judged the accused.

A fair assessment of Trajan must acknowledge that his military campaigns came at a considerable human cost.

The Dacian Wars involved brutal fighting, and ancient sources reported large-scale enslavement and displacement after the conquest.

Cassius Dio recorded that Trajan held 123 days of gladiatorial games to celebrate the victory, during which approximately 11,000 animals were killed and 10,000 gladiators fought.

That kind of spectacle shows the violent underside of Roman imperial celebration. 

His Parthian campaign, for all its initial success, ended in strategic failure. The revolts that broke out in Mesopotamia and among Jewish communities in several eastern provinces forced Trajan to withdraw from much of the territory he had conquered.

He died on 8 August 117 CE at Selinus in Cilicia (modern-day Turkey) during his return to Rome, and his successor Hadrian promptly abandoned the Mesopotamian provinces soon after taking power, reversing Trajan’s eastern expansion.

Roman officials returned Trajan’s ashes to Rome and placed them in the base of Trajan’s Column in his forum.

Assessing whether Trajan truly deserves the title of “best” Roman emperor depends on what criteria you apply.

If military expansion and public building programmes are the primary measures, then Trajan has a solid claim.

Augustus, who established the imperial system itself and brought decades of peace after a century of civil war, arguably had a more lasting impact on Roman civilisation.

Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, is often cited for his intellectual contributions, particularly his Meditations.

Each emperor operated under different circumstances, which makes direct comparison difficult. 

What distinguished Trajan from many of his predecessors and successors was his ability to maintain good relations with the Senate, the army, and the common people at the same time, a balance that few emperors ever achieved.

The fact that the Senate’s blessing invoking his name persisted for centuries after his death suggests that, for the Romans themselves, the answer to whether Trajan was the best emperor was clear.