Emperor Trajan’s Dream

Shakespeare referred to old age and death as a land “from whose bourn no traveler returns,” or “the undiscovered country.” He might well have been reading tales of the Emperor Trajan. At the end of his final military campaign, the great conqueror Trajan halted on the shores of the Persian Gulf. It was clear he would go no further East; he knew he would not conquer India, and bitterly exclaimed at the sight of a ship setting sail in that direction that had he still his youth, he too would have taken India. He dreamed of joining an elite trio as the only mortal to rival Alexander, who had conquered a part of India. The other two paragons were Dionysus and Heracles. In Benevento, Trajan’s great Arch still bears cryptic traces of a dream that was not to be – an imperialist chimera.