The Emperor Trajan’s Dream – A Conquest of India? Then, after a winter ( / ) in Antioch marked by a great earthquake, in Trajan marched down the Euphrates to Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital, and then to the head of the Persian Gulf. There [the historian] Cassius Dio describes him looking longingly at a merchant-ship setting off for India, and wishing that he were as young as Alexander. – Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East .
Shops in Forum Julium, Rome. This piazza with columns was built after BCE, to enlarge the older Roman Forum. A N E MPIRE A CROSS T HREE C ONTINENTS T HEMES IN W ORLD H ISTORY Much more characteristic was the gradual extension of Roman direct rule. This was accomplished by absorbing a whole series of ‘dependent’ kingdoms into Roman provincial territory.
The Near East was full of such kingdoms*, but by the early second century those which lay west of the Euphrates (towards Roman territory) had disappeared, swallowed up by Rome. (Incidentally, some of these kingdoms were exceedingly wealthy, for example Herod’s kingdom yielded the equivalent of . million denarii per year, equal to over , kg of gold! The denarius was a Roman silver coin containing about 4½ gm of pure silver.) In fact, except for Italy, which was not considered a province in these centuries, all the territories of the empire were organised into provinces and subject to taxation.
At its peak in the second century, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to the borders of Armenia, and from the Sahara to the Euphrates and sometimes beyond. Given that there was no government in the modern sense to help them to run things, you may well ask, how was it possible for the emperor to cope with the control and administration of such a vast and diverse set of territories, with a population of some million in the mid-second century? The answer lies in the urbanisation of the empire. The great urban centres that lined the shores of the Mediterranean (Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch were the biggest among them) were