On January 28, 98 CE, Trajan peacefully took the purple, the army’s general now the Senate’s princeps. The city heard relief instead of whispers: legality had returned after Domitian. The Rhine and Danube awaited his steel; Rome awaited his word [3][15].
What Happened
News moved fast along the Via Flaminia that winter. On January 28, 98, Nerva was dead and Trajan—already adopted—became emperor. There were no barricades on the Capitoline, no auction of the throne in the Praetorian camp. Shields knocked in measured salute, not in panic. The transfer was the point [3][15].
Trajan’s accession came with a promise. Cassius Dio preserves it: the new emperor declared he would not put “any good man” to death or reduce him in status [3]. That sentence, simple and bronze-colored in its clarity, rang through the Curia as loudly as a trumpet through the Rhine fog. Law, not terror, would govern. It was also a rebuke to the prior reign.
The new princeps did not sprint to Rome. He remained with the troops in Germania, letting the symbolism work for him. On the Rhine’s cold banks, at posts near what is now Mainz, he appeared where soldiers actually lived, a choice that set the tempo for years of Danubian and eastern logistics. The Senate, watching from Rome, could wait one season; barbarians could not [3].
The sound of accession was different this time: not the crunch of hobnailed boots storming a palace, but the scratch of styluses drafting rescripts and the clink of coin dies being prepared for new legends. When he finally entered Rome in 99, he would align word and deed: reassure the Senate, then build and march [3][15].
The stakes were already visible. Dacia under Decebalus had survived Domitian’s war; the Danube line needed more than garrisons. The Iron Gates, Drobeta, and beyond—these would feel the hammer. In Rome the Forum of Trajan was not yet a drawing, but the space for it—a saddle of earth between the Capitol and Quirinal—waited to be cut down to a clean plane [4][13].
Trajan’s accession also meant that administrative Rome—the letters that later crossed between Emperor and Pliny in Bithynia, the alimenta tables of Veleia—would gain a clerk’s precision. The optimus princeps would earn that title by yoking frontier iron to bureaucratic ink [1][6][12].
Why This Matters
The peaceful accession gave Trajan uncontested legitimacy, freeing him to act decisively on the Danube without watching his back. It signaled to the Senate a restoration of due process and to the legions continuity of command. Those assurances shaped the next decade’s decisions in Dacia and the Forum [3][15].
The event embodies law as a governing instrument: a constitutional succession reinforced by explicit guarantees. It also previews the regime’s propaganda—coinage soon proclaimed SPQR OPTIMO PRINCIPI, aligning public works and victories under a consensual banner [14].
In the broader arc, this moment is the runway for everything: Tabula Traiana’s cliff-road, the Drobeta bridge, and the Column’s 155 scenes all presuppose a princeps whose authority flows from consent as well as from cohorts [4][5][14].
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