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XVII. Trajan
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170 no one wanted to stand in their way. The whole crowd, men and women, looked out for themselves by getting out of the way until the master was burnt up. When the man was dead and the horse no longer jumped, the king told his men to take the mechanism out of the horse and ordered that valuable creation burnt in the fire, so that its wondrous power has not been rediscovered to this very day; nor has human knowledge been able to find out how the master made it work. That was the end of the great trouble it threatened to bring. Everyone praised the king’s wisdom. King Nerva judged the Empire until podagra struck him down. He did not rule more than one year; that is the truth. He was a well-loved and fabled king; the Romans lamented his passing. XVII Trajan Modern accounts of Trajan (r. 98–117), whom Nerva adopted and named as his successor, are full of praise for his military genius and administrative talents. They retain the ancient enthusiasm for the fairness of his rule of Rome and the provinces. In non-Christian Roman histories, Trajan’s record as a just ruler is unchallenged. His uncertain pursuit of a policy of persecuting Christians, who were, as he advised Pliny the Younger, not to be sought out by the state but were nonetheless to be condemned if denounced,1 earned him the contempt of the Christian polemicist Tertullian, writing at the end of the third century. Eusebius of Caesarea, however, in the glow of excellent church-empire relations under Constantine, “rehabilitated” many of the pagan emperors to respectability from 1. Letters on Christians: Pliny, X. 96. Trajan’s reply, X. 97. Trajan 171 a Christian standpoint in his Church History and professed to see in Trajan’s wavering a policy of quasi-toleration. Orosius, like Trajan of Spanish provincial origin, heightened that ruler’s reputation for justice, and he rapidly grew into the medieval prototype for good rulership. The story of the emperor’s stopping to hand down justice to a widow who approached him as he rode off to war was originally attached to Hadrian, also an ancient epitome of excellent rulership but much less favored in the Middle Ages. The episode’s connection with Trajan was suggested by a stone relief in the Forum of Trajan, symbolically depicting a conquered province as a female supplicant before that emperor. The story of Pope Gregory the Great’s successful attempt to have Trajan’s soul released from hell goes back to an early eighth-century Life of Gregory of Anglo-Saxon origin, which found its way to the continent with Irish missionaries to Germany . Since Trajan’s redemption was linked with Pope Gregory the Great, who died in 604, this legend would seem to have grown up rapidly in the century after the latter ’s death; however, the author’s phrase “over two hundred years” in fixing Gregory after Trajan may point to a fusion with the legend of Saint (but not Pope) Gregory, traditionally dated 257-337, whose own great suffering and healing of the King of Armenia may have lent material to the growing legend of Gregory the Great. The author’s account is significant for reducing the role of Gregory and magnifying that of Trajan to the point that the emperor is the main figure. The depiction of Trajan was one of the elements in his work most widely borrowed by later German histories. Where contemporary sermons and Gregory legends left the details of Trajan ’s campaign vague, the author imparts vividness to his story by sending Trajan’s second-century expedition in an arc over time to meet the Normans, who had wrought havoc on the ninth-century Carolingian Empire and who remained potentially formidable enemies of German rulers in the twelfth century. [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:01 GMT) 172 Chapter Seventeen the Book goes on to tell us that Trajan held the Empire. He conducted his royal court very wisely, and all the Romans were bound to show him every earthly honor. When the Romans sought justice from him, he was painstaking in observing the laws; and he judged the lord and serving man alike, taking no fees at all from poor people. Nor did any man ever attain such great wealth as to be of any avail to him in dealing with Trajan. Neither their silver nor their red gold...