It is exciting, but it is terrible. Dacian women burn Romans alive; Romans impale the severed heads of Dacians before the walls of their camp (Fig. 10.9), or present them, dripping with gore, to the Emperor. A Dacian is assassinated with a sword thrust as he pleads for mercy. Bodies are trampled underfoot in battle, prisoners are dragged along by the hair. The Dacian king commits suicide rather than fall into Roman hands; his subjects burn their capital to the ground to deny it to the Romans. The story of the first campaigns is separated from the second by a Victory writing on a shield; immediately thereafter the deadly, monotonous round begins again. The pathos of some of the scenes heightens the horror, as when two comrades carry tenderly from the field the limp body of a mortally wounded Dacian youth, or a whole tribe, with babies in arms, or children carried on their fathers’ shoulders, comes to make the act of submission. At the end looting, with the Dacian treasure loaded on the backs of mules. These scenes, with their implied criticism of warfare, are the closest the Romans ever came to pacifism. [Illustration: FIG. 10.9 Rome, Trajan’s Column, detail. (P. Romanelli, _La colonna traiana_, Fig. 60)] The province won with so much blood, sweat, and tears by Trajan was consolidated by his successor Hadrian (who had fought in the campaigns) and taught the arts of peace. Hadrian, that restless traveler, spent little of his reign in Rome, but he adorned the city with some of its grandest buildings, for which he himself probably drew the plans, and he built near suburban Tivoli a villa greater than Versailles. 11 An Emperor-Architect: Hadrian About Trajan’s successor Hadrian (A.D. 117–138) archaeology and literature, interlocking, tell us so much that we can write his biography from his buildings, with an occasional assist from written sources. The buildings of his reign are numerous and brilliantly designed. We shall take as examples three from Rome and three from the unique complex of his Villa near Tivoli: the Temple of Venus and Rome, the Pantheon, and his mausoleum; the _Teatro Marittimo_, the _Piazza d’Oro_, and the Canopus. All can be dated with more precision than usual, because in Hadrian’s time the practice became general of stamping bricks with the names of the consuls of the year they were made. Professor Bloch’s accurate study of, and sound inference from, over 4600 stamps, most of them from Hadrian’s reign, have put all students of Roman archaeology deeply in his debt.