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Emperor Trajan's brilliant campaigns against King Decebalus were among the final bloody scenes in the drama of Roman conquest.
For all the great military reputation of the Roman Empire, the Caesars themselves were not very warlike. Edward Gibbon observed in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that the emperors were "engaged in the pursuit of pleasure, or in the exercise of tyranny" and "seldom showed themselves to the armies." The Roman conquest of Britannia was a notable exception. Gnaeus Julius Agricola's adventures and excursions into the stem and wild mountains of Caledonia must have fired the imaginations of an entire generation of young Romans. But even in Britannia, Emperor T Flavius Domitian was a reluctant militarist, either because he was jealous of Agricola or out of despair over the ruinous expense involved, for comparatively little gain. Nonetheless, there was one who dreamed of military fame in the service of Rome. This young provincial, Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, probably hoped to command a legion as his father had in the Jewish War of 66-73. He could scarcely have dreamed of sitting upon the throne of Caesar himself. Yet the man now known as Trajan would lead the empire's last great achievement in conquest and Romanization: the Dacian Wars.
Caesar Augustus based the limits of the Roman Empire on the natural frontiers of the Rhine and Danube rivers. This 1,500-mile frontier was fortified and defended in depth by the Roman legions and naval forces. Beyond the Danubian frontier lay the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Iazges and the Dacians. These barbarian peoples posed no threat to Rome as long as they were kept divided through diplomacy and overawed by military strength. In the last quarter of the 1st century, however, the Dacian tribes were united by an ambitious, aggressive ruler known to Roman chroniclers as King Decebalus.
In AD 98, Trajan ascended to the imperial purple. In terms of tradition, he seemed an unlikely choice, since he was not a Roman aristocrat but a Spaniard from faroff Italica (now Seville). For the first time, a Roman emperor came from beyond the Italian border. It was, nevertheless, a prescient decision on the part of Trajan's adoptive father, Emperor Nerva. In choosing Trajan, who was immensely popular with the...