The forum Traiani was completed by Hadrian, who erected the temple of Trajan (templum divi Traiani) and his wife, Plotina, northwest of the column.⁷ This temple was octostyle peripteral, and stood on a raised platform, round which was a porticus. Fragments of its granite columns 2 metres in diameter, of smaller marble columns 1.80 metres in diameter, and some corresponding capitals of the Corinthian order have been found at various times, as well as remains of the concrete substructures.¹ The reliefs,² found within the area of the forum, may have belonged to this temple, but more probably to the encircling colonnade.

The portion of this form which is now exposed to view consists of the column, the central part of the basilica, and a small part of the northwest end of the forum proper. The broken columns of granite now standing do not belong to the basilica, but to some other part of the forum. The remaining fragments, comparatively numerous as they are, give little idea of the wealth of precious marbles and decorative work of every conceivable kind with which this most magnificent group of buildings was adorned. Ammianus Marcellinus³ gives a most vivid picture of the astonishment of the emperor Constantius on the occasion of his first visit to this forum. It soon outstripped all the others in importance, as is shown by the numerous statues of famous men setu p here between the second and fifth centuries.⁴ The history of its destruction begins with the sixth century, and throughout the middle ages it furnished an almost inexhaustible supply of decorative material for the churchs and palaces of Rome.

7. Spart. Vit. Hadr. 19; CIL. vi. 966, 31215.

1. Bull. d. Ist. 1869, 237; NS. 1886, 158 ff.

2. PBS. iv. 229-257.

3. xvi. 10.15.

4. CIL. vi. passim; Jordan, I. 2. 465.

5. Cf. Cerasoli, La Colonna Traiana e le sue Adiacenze nei secoli xvi e xvii, BC.. 1901, 300-308.

Samuel Ball Platner, The Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome (Allyn and Bacon: Boston, 1911), 289-290.