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Trajan: Optimus Princeps (Roman Imperial Biographies) 1st Edition

by Julian Bennett (Author)

4.4 37 ratings

Part of: Roman Imperial Biographies (22 books)

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Did Trajan really deserve his reputation as the embodiment of all imperial virtues? Why did Dante, writing in the Middle Ages, place him in the sixth sphere of Heaven among the Just and Temperate rulers?
In this, the only biography of Trajan available in English, Julian Bennett rigorously tests the substance of this glorious reputation. Surprisingly, for a Roman emperor, Trajan comes through the test with his reputation relatively intact.

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Julian Bennett

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (December 21, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0415241502
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0415241502
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.69 x 0.8 x 9.65 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,632,128 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #580 in Ancient History (Books)
- #897 in Reference (Books)
- #8,767 in Professional

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4.4 37 ratings

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Mark

Exhaustive biography of Trajan

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2019

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This is an excellent biography of Trajan. While definitely not popular, it eschews the "topical" format unfortunately favored by so many academics and becomes accessible to the layman by using the narrative journey of Trajan's life as the axle around which the rest of the book revolves. The book however is still very topical, and Bennett manages to tell us as much as we know about everything connected to Trajan, something made more amazing by the huge gaps in his life.

Indeed, Bennett is at his best making deductions about Trajan using every possible means, from the nature of Roman career institutions, by which he can date Trajan and his father's births, maturity, etc, to analyzing features from Trajan's reign that have survived into later periods but which have no contemporary record. This makes the biography all the more essential, for while there seem to be many scattered testaments to the Trajan period, it takes a skilled author to pull it all together into a compelling narrative.

I've read through this book twice now, having not completed it the first try because I was just interested in the basic narrative of Trajan's reign and ended up overloaded with tangential facts. On my second focused attempt I slowed down and absorbed everything Bennett wrote and came away learning a lot about the general administration of the empire and its provinces (I did however skim over detailed architectural and artistic analysis of Trajan's buildings, which seemed less useful).

As far as the thesis of the book, Trajan seems pretty great until the end with the imperialistic Parthian War which seems to come from nowhere. Bennett can't be faulted for not truly accounting for this as there's no contemporary history for the war and the author really has to reach to assemble what might have happened. Bennett uses this paucity of evidence to indicate that Trajan undertook the campaign for the sake of personal glory.

I want to remain skeptical. Bennett seems to imply that Trajan has become suddenly enamored with Alexander the Great and wished to emulate his conquests. If that's the case, I wish Bennett incorporated this into his thesis along the way and gave some indication into what made Trajan change. He alludes to the fact that many mature leaders like to undertake missions to enhance their prestige, but that speculation isn't necessarily evidence for the Parthian War.

The Wikipedia article for the Parthian War actually has more discussion than Bennett includes, and I encourage you to check it out.

At the end of the day, this campaign was a massive undertaking and I don't feel at this point I can confidently say I know what happened and why.

7 people found this helpful

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William Larsen

Perfect condition.

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2021

Perfect condition.

The Best of Emperors and the Master of Spin

Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2012

Reviewers have tended to either complain about or praise this book for what it is: a very well down academic book, which is thoroughly and comprehensively researched to the extent that, if you are no particular "fan" of Trajan or the Roman Empire, you might find this book "too difficult and boring" or "detailed beyond readability". I can understand that some, on both Amazon.uk and Amazon.com might have felt a bit upset by Julian Bennett's descriptions "ad nauseam" of each little feature on Trajan's column, for instance. Having said that, it is rather unfair to blame a book for being exactly what it is portrayed to be, and an author for having delivered exactly what he was expected to deliver: a top-class piece of scholarship that exhibits all the features - good or bad - that generally go with such books.

Among the "good" are the quality of the author's research, the fact that he leaves no stone unturned, the trouble he takes in explaining in detail the various aspects of Trajan's reign. This was exactly what I was expecting to find, coming from someone like Julian Bennett. On the "bad" side, well, the items to list here are more or less the other side of the coin, when seen from the general reader's point of view. Masses of references and annexes make up one-third of the book as you often find in a thoroughly researched academic study. The book is indeed difficult to read for someone that has no special interest in Trajan or the Roman Empire. Although well written, the small printing does not help ni this respect. As another reviewer mentioned, this is definitely NOT a book for "bed-side reading". It is NOT a bestseller and has never been intended as one. It is a very good piece of scholarship and, as this same reviewer mentioned almost ten years ago, it is very much and still "the" biography of Trajan.

There is, however, much more to it than that. The core theme of the whole book is related to its title. Ever since his reign and even during his reign, Trajan has been portrayed - and was very careful to have himself portrayed - in the best possible light. In a way, he is and "anti-Nero", and quite deliberatly sought to be seen that way or, perhaps even more accuratly, he is the "anti-Domitian", the last of the Flavian emperors who had reigned from AD 81 to AD 96, just before Nerva, who lasted only 18 months, and Trajan, who replaced the old Nerva. Trajan has in fact alwas been seen as the "Optimus Princeps" (the best of emperors) during his reign, during the rest of the Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages, and even afterwards (including by Gibbon, for instance) up to very recently. The main interest of Bennett's book is that it is, to my knowledge at least, the first attempt to assess to what extent this excellent reputation in all respects and all areas was really deserved, and how much it owed to Trajan's political skills and those of his numerous and talented supporters. In other words: how much was real and how much was the result of a carefully constructed public image, or what we would call "positive spin" nowadays?

There is no simple answer to that question, and this is another reason for this book to be complex. The author has to examine all of the materials in detail, whether written or archeological, and compare, contrast and assess for each of the main topics of the reign and each of what the Romans saw as the "traditional Roman virtues" that Trajan was supposed to embodie so perfectly. It seems that, as with all good "spin", elements of truth were mixed up with - say - claims that were much less accurate. Bennett makes a good case when showing, for instance, that Trajan was just as much of an autocrat than Domitian had been, and he could also be just as ruthless. In his recent book on Nerva, Grainger has also shown that Trajan's military deeds were superficially impressive but strategically costly, at best, and that Domitian's plans may have been sounder. In other terms, appearances counted a lot in Imperial politics, possibly as much as they count nowadays, and this, to a large extent, explains the differences in treatment of Domitian and Trajan. However, it was not only spin. The reign did have some solid achievements to show, and it is this mix between reality and propaganda which ensured Trajan's posterity, making him into the "best of emperors" in more senses than one, although, for instance, his Parthian wars were not an overwhelming success and would almost end in disaster just after his death.

It is for this that Bennett's book is worth five stars even if, in some cases, I did feel that he could have gone further and been a bit more critical of his "hero".

14 people found this helpful

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C. E. R. Mendonça

What is all that stuff about?

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2003

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This is the run-of-the-mill booktype on Ancient History that the English speaking academia produces. Mr. Bennett is obvious in love with his hero Trajan, and has painstakingly amassed all relevant materials (textual, archaeological, numismatic, etc.) in order to somehow produce a continuous account of his reign. However, onece we are done with that, what remains for us modern readers who do not love Trajan for his own sake? Nothing much, I fear, as there is not a definite issue (e.g. Trajan's policies of imperial expansion, or his _alimenta_ schemes) to which the author should offer a solution taking Trajan as a model case. As Moses Finley said in his last book, this "say everything you know about" approach only leaves the reader with an idea of wasted intellectual acumen, and begs the issue of the actual relevance of knowledge on the subject. Unfortunately,the book is throughly reasearched, but fails to be actually intersting.

16 people found this helpful

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Mario Naim

A true historian's book.

Reviewed in Canada on June 11, 2021

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Finally an historian of Rome that doesn't feel the need to invent his own revisionist history. A very solid book.

MR. M. ELDER

Trajan - the best prince

Reviewed in France on December 7, 2016

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Livre excellent, très bien écris. une analyse a point de la vie d'un des plus grands empereurs romains et le père adoptif d"Hadrien

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The Keen Reader

Trajan: Optimus Princeps

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2014

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This is one of the great Routledge series of Imperial Biographies, which includes works on Agrippina, Caligula, Claudius, Marcus Aurelius and Nero. The Emperor Trajan, who lived from c. 56 to 117, lacks almost any modern biography, particularly in English, so this work is a welcome addition for anyone wanting to read more on the figures of Imperial Rome. One of the reasons for the difficulty in writing on Trajan is that primary literary sources are fragmentary and any biographer must rely heavily on the works of Pliny the Younger, Dio Chrysostom and Cassius Dio. Structural legacies of Trajan's reign are more plentiful, but again some of the buildings may have been works started by earlier emperors and finished by Trajan, including some commenced by the hated Domitian.

Another reason for difficulty in writing a strictly biographical account of Trajan's life is that he was neither born nor bred for the purple. The son of Marcus Ulpius Traianus, Trajan's early life was that of a man of Roman heritage born and brought up in what is now Spain. It is likely that only by the time of Trajan's father did the family reach the senatorial order; a great achievement in itself, given the property qualifications (one million sesterces at least) and his provincial origins. But the early years of Trajan's life were those of great upheaval in Imperial Rome, with the accession of Nero just two years before his birth, the death of Nero in 68 when Trajan was probably 12, then the `Year of the Four Emperors' in 69, followed by peace and consolidation through the years of Vespasian's rule. On Vespasian's death, Titus' early death and the accession of his brother Domitian, Rome became a place where fear and intrigue again ruled, and Domitian's murder in 96 again raised fears of unrest.

The peaceful accession of Nerva seems to us now to have led almost inevitably to his adoption of Trajan and Trajan's peaceful accession on Nerva's natural death, but at the time this was all new to Rome and the Roman people, and there was never any guarantee that Nerva's rule would be accepted, nor that it would end peaceably, nor that he would be seamlessly followed by another man from outside the old Imperial family. Every step in Trajan's career from the time he started his climb up the cursus honorum was carved out by his own abilities and with some degree of fortuitous luck, but he more than proved his abilities as a soldier and statesman before becoming princeps in 98.

Every credit must be given to Trajan as a man who obviously inspired loyalty and trust, and the fact that he did not even return to Rome until a year after he became princeps shows that his rule was accepted and even welcomed by most. He proved an able ruler, who clearly cared deeply for the Roman Empire and its people, and it is to his credit again that he ruled for nearly twenty years, died of natural causes, and was peaceably succeeded by his chosen successor, his adopted cousin Hadrian in 117.

This is a great book, and a welcome work on Trajan. Given all of the above on Trajan's early life, the book necessarily starts out with discussion of the imperial system and its various orders, the early years of the Ulpii family, the years of Domitian and the rule of Nerva before moving to Trajan's years as princeps. The book then discusses Trajan's ideology as ruler, the wars in Dacia, his methodology as ruler, the cultural aspects of Trajan's reign, his actions as Pater Patriae, including his public works and buildings, the Parthian wars and the legacy he left Hadrian. Trajan was truly a hugely important cog in the Roman Imperial wheel; a man who allowed peace and prosperity to become a feature of the expanding Empire, and left a legacy of good rule to his successors. This is a highly readable yet technical book, which offers great insight to Trajan the man and Trajan, Optimus Princeps - highly recommended as a read for anyone wanting to learn more about Trajan and the growth of Imperial Rome.

10 people found this helpful

Steve

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2016

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An interesting account of Trajan's life. A bit expensive as its a flimsy paperback but its worth a read.

Jason Gacek

A well constructed biography

Reviewed in Canada on December 19, 2008

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Julian Bennett's biography is well written with a good balance of scholarship and courageous educated opinions. Given the remarkable incompleteness of source material, Bennett is able to walk us through the life of Trajan with an admirable mixture of readable storyline and academic accuracy. Unlike other historian's, Bennett is not afraid to put together a "best guess" on the early life of Trajan. I felt that the later years of Trajan and the relationship with Hadrian were not explained clear enough to warrant a 5th star, but overall an excellent book.

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