Trajan

The first emperor born outside Italy, Trajan came from Italica in the province of Hispania Baetica, where he was born in AD 53 to a family of Italian settler origin. His father, Marcus Ulpius Traianus, was a senator and consul, and Trajan followed him into a military and senatorial career, commanding a legion in Spain and governing Upper Germany. In 97 the elderly emperor Nerva, pressured by the armies after a praetorian mutiny, adopted Trajan as his son and successor — a transfer of power between unrelated houses by adoption that contemporaries contrasted favorably with hereditary succession. Trajan became emperor on Nerva's death in January 98.

His reign was dominated by expansion. Two wars against Decebalus of Dacia, in 101-102 and 105-106, ended with the king's death and the annexation of Dacia as a province, its gold mines enriching the treasury. The campaigns were commemorated by the sculpted Column of Trajan, which still stands in the forum complex he built in Rome. In 113 he launched a war against Parthia, annexing Armenia and Mesopotamia and reaching the Persian Gulf, bringing the empire to its greatest territorial extent, though revolts in the new provinces broke out before his death.

At home Trajan cultivated good relations with the Senate, earning the title optimus, "the best," and later generations of senators prayed that new emperors be "luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan." His government funded the alimenta, a scheme supporting children in the towns of Italy, and undertook roads, bridges, harbors at Ostia and Ancona, and the great forum and markets in Rome designed by Apollodorus of Damascus. His correspondence with Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, preserves his pragmatic instructions on provincial administration, including the handling of accusations against Christians.

Trajan married Pompeia Plotina but had no children. Falling ill on the return from the east, he died at Selinus in Cilicia in August 117. The succession passed to his ward and closest male relative Hadrian, husband of his grandniece Vibia Sabina; the adoption was announced only at the very end of Trajan's life, and Plotina was believed to have supported Hadrian's claim.