Trajan’s Colossal Temple on top of Pergamon

As history tells us, the reign of Trajan was involved the apex of the expansion of the Roman Empire.  The emperor himself was flush with resources and all about honoring himself, by numerous building projects, in this case the giant temple built on top of the acropolis at Pergamon. To give you an idea of how egocentric this project was, there were already historically famous temples to no less than Zeus down below the acropolis top, and the temple of Dionysius/Bacchus right next to the stage area of the theater, and the huge temple complex at the Asclepian just outside the town, not to mention a world class library, so world-class, it was raided by Marc Anthony in the process of wooing Cleopatra. And lastly, here is where a new form of writing surface was invented— parchment, which in Greek is a riff off of the name Pergamon—περγαμηνή — pergamene.  But it was no easy engineering task to build a new giant temple on top of the acropolis at Pergamon.  For a start one had to create a whole artificially leveling of the hill top which then could support the temple.  So a platform had to built to make this possible.

Here is the bird’s eye view of what we are talking about.  Think about the weight of hauling all sorts of marble to the top of that hill.

And of course there was the obligatory statue of the emperor in a godlike pose…..here posing as Trajan is our doctoral student Cody, who actually looks more like Commodus if you ask me, but definitely imperial in his pose.