the 100-foot-high column commemorating trajan's victory over the dacians shows the force required to keep the peace. its unique spiral frieze tells of the discipline and resourcefulness of the roman lions. moving by sea, assembling to hear their orders, building fortifications, raiding an enemy town, and crossing the danube in small boats, the army is shown to be an awesome fighting machine. but there is no glorification of war itself, which is necessarily brutal and remorseless. the victory column and the triumphal arch through which the retuturning army marched, dragging slaves and spoils of war, were forceful forms of propaganda for the righteousness of imperial power, guided by the emperor, the senate, and the people of rome. it was the arch that was the basis of a revolutionary new architecture. the post and lintel system of the ancient world was limited in the space it could span and the weight it could bear. the romans soon recognized the arch's strength and versatility and elaborated it into an art form of grandeur and utility. roman stone arches, like the one supporting this

, he was presented with a legal and ethical problem which he described in a letter to the emperor trajan dramatized ): having never been present at any trials of the christians, i am unacquainted with the methods or limits to be observed either in examining or punishing them. >> so we have to imagine pliny seated in the form of a roman administrator, a roman magistrate, all decked out in his finery, enthroned in the tribunal with his guards and his bailiffs and his courtiers around him. and before him stand these christians, and pliny can't figure out who they are or why they're there. apparently, they've done something that get their neighbors mad at them. the neighbors have complained that the temples are empty, and no one is buying certain things for the gods, and they're christians. and so, somehow or another, pliny is forced to deal with this as a criminal matter. >> pliny genuinely was perplexed because he sees what appear to be good, law-abiding citizens being hauled up on trumped-up charges of being a christian, and simply on that basis, by convention, being subject to capital pu