01-15-2006, 01:54 AM
Quote:Isn't the Column generally felt to be MORE stylized and less realistic than artwork from the frontier area? I'm curious as to why you think Dacians carved the Adamklissi reliefs, rather than the army's own stone workers
Me too! Are the carvings of the reliefs similar to Dacian vernacular work, or something? Even so, as Matthew says, they would surely have had a very real example to work from...
Trajan's Column, all questions of workmanship aside, is surely intended as a 'readable' narrative, and as such takes narrative shortcuts - segmentata is an identifiably 'Roman' type of armour (nobody else used it, as far as I'm aware), and so it would make sense to represent all Roman troops as wearing it, to differentiate them from the auxiliaries (for example) - this seems the best explanation for the uniform appearance of the Roman soldiers on the column.
Nathan Ross
