To what that great scroll has to tell us about the Roman attitude--and the sculptor’s--to the art of war we shall return. For the moment another matter is of interest: the inscription on the column-base. It states that the column marks the height of earth that was removed to make room for it. For centuries it was inferred that Trajan’s engineers had cut away a whole saddle connecting the Esquiline with the Capitoline Hill. But in 1907 Boni published the results of excavations around the base of the column, which revealed a street, a wall, and houses, dated by their pottery--Arretine and earlier--to the late Republic. Hence there probably never was a saddle of hill here. What then does the inscription mean? Boni fixed his eye on the terraced slope of the Quirinal to the north of the Forum, and concluded--rightly, as later excavation proved--that what Trajan was referring to was the cutting down and terracing of this slope for some purpose to be connected with the Forum. What that purpose was did not transpire until 1928, when Corrado Ricci cleared the area of medieval and later accretions and discovered the six levels of Trajan’s Market (Fig. 10.8). The terrace treatment clearly goes back for inspiration to the Sanctuary of Fortune at Praeneste. Brick stamps show that the Market was built before the Forum: the shape in which the hill was dug out left space for the Forum apse when it came to be built. Form follows function: the hemicycle shows the classical virtues of symmetry, regularity, and creative exploitation of tradition, but the shape is practical, too: it allows space for nearly twice as many rooms as would have been possible with a rectilinear front. The shop fronts are good-looking as well as utilitarian. The ground floor rooms are handsomely framed in travertine; the second level windows are arched, and framed with pilasters, much as at Praeneste, with pediments alternately curved and triangular, the triangular pediments are sometimes deliberately broken, never coming to an apex, a trick of style imitated with success by eighteenth century English furniture designers like Chippendale. But this is an old thing in a new way, for here the material is not stone but brick, the beautifully-proportioned rose-red Roman kind, used unashamedly without veneer of stucco or marble, like the rose-red arcades of Renaissance Bologna. [Illustration: FIG. 10.8 Rome, Trajan’s Market. (Fototeca)] Some of the rooms have drains in the floor for carrying of spilled liquid; the inference is that these were wine or oil shops; those without such provision would be for dry commodities like grain. There are 150 of these shops altogether, all more or less identical. The whole complex has the air not of private enterprise but of a government project, and it seems a reasonable guess that here we have the headquarters of the _annona_, the government dole of wine, oil, and grain, the cargoes of the ships that docked in Trajan’s port of Ostia.