Note 91 — Chapter IV

Traian was sent by Nerva in the year 96 or 97 as legate to Germany, probably to the upper, as at that time Vestricius Spurinna seems to have presided over the lower. Nominated here as co–regent in October of the year 97, he received the accounts of Nerva’s death and of his nomination as the Augustus in February 98 at Cologne. He may have remained there during the winter and the following summer; in the winter 98–99 he was on the Danube. The words of Eutropius, viii. 2: urbes trans Rhenum in Germania reparavit (whence the often misused notice in Orosius, vii. 12, 2, has been copied), which can only be referred to the upper province, but naturally apply not to the legate, but to the Caesar or the Augustus, obtain a confirmation through the civitas Ulpia s(altus?) N(icerini?) Lopodunum of the inscriptions. The “restoration” may stand in contrast not to the institutions of Domitian, but to the irregular germs of urban arrangements in the Decumates–land before the shifting of the military frontier. There is no indication pointing to warlike events under Trajan; that he planned and gave his name (Ammianus, xvii. 1, 11) to a castellum in Alamannorum solo—according to the connection, on the Main not far from Mentz—is as little proof of such events as the circumstance that a later poet (Sidonius, Carm. vii. 115), mixing up old and new, makes Agrippina under him the terror of the Sugambri—that is, in his sense, of the Franks.