High and mighty ... Trajan's column. Photograph: © geocities.com/gorlik
Trajan's column, the white stone cylinder that looms to this day above the imperial Forum in the heart of Rome and that to anyone visiting the city in the second century AD when it was built would have been a stunning assertion of the military might of the Roman empire, is an unlikely thing for a famous novelist to pick an argument about.
Zadie Smith has however got into a dispute with Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard about whether ancient Roman viewers could get a decent look at the spiralling frieze that covers the monument.
In a book review Beard asserted that large parts of the column's visual narrative of the Dacian wars would have been beyond decipherment in ancient times as they are today. Smith objected on the TLS letters page that a raised gallery gave ancient viewers an elevated view.
Beard's deconstructive scepticism sounds clever yet is one of the most boring things you can say about a work of art. Recently I strained to look up at the facade of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Obviously, some parts are beyond full comprehension from the ground. Obviously, that has very little to do with Gaudi's intention or my response - great art has an organic power that transcends minutiae. Beard's scalpel makes no dent on Trajan's column, a profoundly spectacular and moving sight for ancient Romans that stood at the heart of a sublime monumental complex and - crucially - repeated itself so you didn't need to see every detail of the frieze to assimilate its meaning.
There is, as Beard says, no proof that viewing galleries would have made it any easier than it is today to make out the higher parts of the frieze. On the other hand, people actually went up inside to get a view of the city - it was a belvedere, as Penelope Davies points out in her recent book Death and the Emperor. On the way towards it, you would see constantly changing, fragmentary views framed by the Forum and Basilica of Trajan. Up close, you soon got its message.
"The artist", argues John R Clarke in his 2006 book Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans, "planned for vertical reading patterns so that the viewer did not have to circle the column." In fact, the frieze, although it seems from the ground so long and rich, consists of variations on just six motifs, a German scholar showed in 1927. This means that - just as today - what mattered for a contemporary viewer was the overall effect of military might, imperial grandeur and the tragedy of defeat for Rome's enemies.
Most of all, what would impress them as it impresses us is the sheer mad fact of this colossal tube with a story wrapped around it. Trajan's column is one of the most compelling urban objects ever created and one of the most emulated, not least by the Monument erected in London after the Great Fire. Good for Zadie Smith for objecting to a bit of pointless pedantry that even if technically true, has nothing to do with the Column's testimony to the grandeur that was Rome.
