Legions of Trajans Dacian wars

[Crispvs]

How much Trajan's Column can be trusted as a source of evidence is anybody's guess, however, for what it is worth, I once went through a book of photographs of the entire sculpture of the column in order to try to make a list of all of the different shield blazons. One thing that struck me was that only nine different blazons were associated with straight sided scuta. Of these, three were consistently associated with praetorian standards, suggesting that they were intended to portray the presence of three praetorian cohorts. That left six blazons. Unfortunately I no longer have the (rather roughly) illustrated list I made then, but I do recall that at least one of the blazons only appeared in the first half of the frieze and at least one only appeared in the second half of the frieze. This suggested to me that whatever the relationship between the blazons on the column and actual blazons, the sculptors may well have been trying to portray the presence of three praetorian cohorts and six different legions, no more than four of which would have been involved in each of the two wars.

Of course this is far from conclusive, and the small number of different blazons might have been simply artistic shorthand for an acknowledgment that more than one legion was involved, but if that was the case, then it is odd that forty or more different blazons can be seen on the shields of Roman auxiliaries shown on the column, suggesting that assigning different blazons to shields on the column may have been intended to indicate the involvement of particular units.

Crispvs