IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 219

Trajan's Column stands at the northern end of the forum that the emperor Trajan built in Rome, and it survives almost intact. Its purpose was commemorative. Between AD 101 and 106 Trajan fought two hard campaigns against the Dacians, a people whose kingdom lay north of the Danube in what is now Romania, and the column was intended to fix the memory of those victories in stone. It was dedicated in AD 113. The architect of the whole complex, Apollodorus of Damascus, is named by ancient writers as its designer.

Constructing the forum demanded engineering on a scale that the Romans found remarkable. The site lay in the hollow between the Capitoline and the Quirinal hills, and the ground was occupied by a broad spur of high land. To obtain a level piazza, Apollodorus had that spur cut back, an operation that meant removing an immense volume of earth and rock. The forum that resulted contained a great basilica used for law courts and business, and two libraries, one Greek and one Latin, all laid out on a strict axis. The column stood between the two libraries.

The column is not large, but its interest lies in its proportions and in what it carries. The shaft is about thirty metres tall and is built not of a single block but of some twenty drums of white marble, each weighing many tonnes and lifted into position by cranes and hauling gear. A spiral staircase runs up the inside, lit by narrow slits cut through the stone. The pedestal carries reliefs of captured Dacian weapons and armour. According to the ancient historian Cassius Dio, Trajan's ashes were eventually placed inside this pedestal, so the monument served also as the emperor's tomb.

The shaft is wrapped by a band of relief carving that spirals from the base to the top. The band makes twenty-three turns; unrolled, it would measure about two hundred metres, and it contains some 2,500 figures arranged in roughly 150 separate scenes. The carving is only about 1.25 metres high, so the figures are small and fine detail is hard to make out from the ground. The lower turns, at eye level, can be followed comfortably by a visitor standing beside the pedestal. The upper ones cannot.

The narrative begins with the army crossing the Danube on a bridge of boats and continues through both campaigns. It shows the emperor addressing his troops, sacrifices offered before battle, roads and forts under construction, and the assault on Dacian strongholds. One scene shows a group of Dacian nobles taking poison rather than be captured. Trajan himself appears more than fifty times, always in the same profile, and the sculptors used a convention in which the same figures recur within a scene to suggest the passage of time.

For historians of the Roman army the band is a document of great value, because it records equipment and practice at a period for which other evidence is thin. It shows helmets, body armour and shields of kinds that rarely survive in the ground; it shows artillery, boat-building and forts of a design that excavation has since confirmed. The Dacian side is treated with unexpected care: their costume and their curved swords are represented, and civilians appear alongside the soldiers.

Yet the frieze must be read as what it is: a monument of state propaganda, not a report. There are no captions, and the order of the scenes has to be reconstructed by scholars, who disagree about several of them. The carving has no true perspective, and the size of a figure indicates his importance rather than his distance from the viewer. Above all, the sculptors were not reporters: they worked from official accounts and from memory, and the column tells us how Trajan wished the war to be remembered as well as how it was fought.

The column was topped from the start by a statue of the emperor, cast in bronze and probably gilded. That figure disappeared in the Middle Ages, and for centuries the top of the monument was empty. In 1587 Pope Sixtus V had it replaced with a bronze figure of Saint Peter, which still stands there. The substitution changed the monument's meaning: a victory column of a pagan emperor became, on its summit at least, a Christian image.

Because the upper turns of the frieze could never be studied properly from the ground, nineteenth-century scholars had copies made. Full-size plaster casts were produced, section by section, and installed in museums in London and in Rome, mounted at eye level. The copies made it possible to study the upper part of the band closely for the first time, and they have proved valuable for a second reason: they record the condition of the marble before a century of weathering by polluted air. Comparison of cast and stone shows how much detail has been lost.

The column survived when almost everything around it was lost. The forum's basilica and libraries collapsed or were quarried for building stone; the column itself remained upright, and its use as a pedestal for a Christian saint may have helped to save it. It has been cleaned and studied many times, but its fabric is essentially unchanged. Standing beside it, a visitor sees much what a Roman of the second century would have seen: a monument designed to make a distant war permanent in the memory of the capital.

Bathing was one of the defining habits of Roman urban life. From a small town on a frontier to the capital itself, a settlement of any size expected to have a public bath, and the largest imperial complexes, the thermae built by successive emperors in Rome, were enormous: the whole complex of the Baths of Caracalla covered some ten hectares. Entrance cost very little, and in some places it was free, so that the baths were open to the poor as well as the rich. They served as gymnasium, club and wash-house at once, and a visitor who wanted to understand a Roman town would learn more from an afternoon in its baths than from an hour in its temple.

Baths varied greatly in size and luxury, but their sequence of rooms was broadly similar. Bathers changed in the apodyterium, where slaves guarded their clothes, and often exercised first in an open courtyard, the palaestra, or played ball. They then moved through rooms of increasing heat: the tepidarium, a warm room that allowed the body to adjust, and the caldarium, where a hot plunge pool and a heated floor produced the sweating that Romans regarded as the point of the exercise. The visit usually ended in the frigidarium, a cold room with a pool, before the bather was oiled, scraped and dressed. Smaller establishments often lacked some of these rooms.

The heat came from a system the Romans called the hypocaust, and it is the part of the bath that archaeologists understand best, because its remains are so distinctive. A furnace, or praefurnium, was built against an outer wall and fed with wood. Its hot gases passed into a shallow space beneath the floor of the heated rooms. That floor, the suspensura, was a thick slab of concrete and tile. It rested on dozens of short brick columns known as pilae, which raised it above the ground. From the space underneath, the hot air rose inside the walls through hollow rectangular tiles, the tubuli, set into the masonry. It escaped through vents near the roof. In this way the surfaces of a room were heated rather than its air, which is why a bather's feet were the first part of the body to feel the heat.

Keeping such a building hot consumed a great deal of fuel. Supplying the wood, and carting away the ash, was a major expense, and the largest baths needed gangs of slaves to stoke the furnaces through the day. Large establishments were also heavy consumers of water, which arrived through lead pipes from the aqueducts and was stored in cisterns. Heating and water supply together explain why baths were found mostly in towns that could afford them, and why smaller settlements managed with a single modest establishment rather than a full range of hot and cold rooms.

Romans did not use soap. Instead they rubbed the body with oil and then removed it, together with the sweat and dirt, using a curved metal scraper called a strigil. Bathing was therefore as much a social ritual as a way of getting clean. People talked, argued, read aloud, bought snacks and met friends; some baths had libraries and gardens attached. Whether men and women bathed together has been much discussed. Some ancient authors suggest that mixed bathing occurred, at least at certain periods, while others condemn it; the evidence is too uneven to allow a general conclusion, and practice probably varied from place to place.

Historians have two kinds of evidence to work with. The first is physical: bath buildings survive across the empire, from the Stabian Baths at Pompeii to military bath-houses on the northern frontiers, and excavation of their furnaces has produced ash, fuel remains and the broken tiles of collapsed floors. The second is written. The architect Vitruvius set out in the first century BC how a bath should be sited and heated; the poet Martial and the philosopher Seneca, who lodged above a public bath, described the noise and behaviour of bathers; and inscriptions record who paid for a building and why. Each kind of source answers questions that the other cannot.

The limits of that evidence are considerable. Walls and piers survive, but roofs, windows and doors mostly do not, so the height of a room and the way light entered it must be inferred. Nobody can now measure the temperature of a caldarium, although the design of the hypocaust allows estimates. The sequence of rooms described above is a general pattern reconstructed from many buildings, not a rule that every bath followed; a visitor to a small provincial town might have found a quite different arrangement. Above all, the sensory experience that made bathing important to Romans is precisely what the ruins cannot supply.

By the fourth century, large public baths were becoming harder to maintain. The reasons are debated: the cost of fuel and labour rose, the aqueducts that fed the great complexes needed constant repair, and the taste for very hot rooms may have declined. What is clear is that the end came with the political collapse of the western empire. When the aqueducts of Rome were cut in the sixth century, the thermae that depended on them ceased to function, and many were quarried for stone. Bathing survived in the east, and the Turkish bath of later centuries descends from the same tradition of heated rooms.

On a weekend in October, on the field beside Battle Abbey in East Sussex, several hundred people dress as eleventh-century soldiers and fight the Battle of Hastings again. Elsewhere, in reconstructed cottages and workshops, visitors watch bread being baked over a fire, wool being spun and iron being hammered. Such performances attract millions of people every year, and their defenders claim that they bring the past to life in a way that books cannot. I think the claim is partly true, but that the value of re-enactment lies somewhere other than where its supporters usually place it.

The strongest argument for re-enactment is not that it makes history vivid but that it makes it physical. Reading that a mail shirt was heavy tells us little; wearing one for an hour, and discovering how quickly it exhausts the shoulders, tells us something about why soldiers fought on foot in short bursts and why armour was expensive to own. Crafts are the same. A historian who spends a day making a nail with a hammer and an anvil acquires a sense of the time and skill involved that no table of wages quite supplies. This is knowledge that is difficult to put into words and easy to underestimate.

Nor should the audience be dismissed. A living museum can reach people who would never open a learned journal, and it can make them curious. Curators report that a visitor who has watched a sheep being sheared, or a pot being thrown, is far more likely to ask a question about land use or trade than one who has walked past a glass case. If the purpose of public history is to start an argument rather than to conclude one, then a demonstration that produces questions has done its job.

Yet re-enactment is selective in an obvious way. It favours what can be seen: battles, costumes, cookery and craft. It is much less comfortable with the material that most professional historians consider central, such as taxation, land tenure, demography and the slow machinery of administration. A visitor may leave a Roman fort knowing how a soldier fastened his sandals and with no sense that the army was also an instrument of census-taking and road-building. The past that re-enactment shows most readily is the past that photographs well.

A second problem is the false certainty of the reconstruction. A room has to be built in one particular way, with one colour on the walls and one kind of furniture, and once it is built it looks like evidence. Where scholars disagree, and on the decoration of a Roman interior they often do, the visitor is usually told nothing. The building has become an argument in three dimensions that has forgotten it is an argument. Reconstructions that display their own workings, with drawings, alternatives and labels admitting what is guessed, are more honest and, in my experience, more interesting.

The third risk is that sensation takes the place of understanding. Critics writing in the 1980s, when the phrase 'heritage industry' was coined, warned that the feeling of authenticity produced by a well-made reconstruction is easily mistaken for historical understanding. The critic Robert Hewison argued that museums were replacing history with nostalgia, and although the charge was exaggerated, it contained a warning worth keeping. Visitors remember the smell of the tannery long after they have forgotten why the cloth trade moved elsewhere. Feeling moved is not the same as knowing.

What would make these displays more useful? First, show the process of reconstruction rather than only its product: the experiments, the wrong turnings, the parts that nobody can settle. Second, abandon first-person role-play, in which a costumed interpreter answers every question in character, since it forces the staff member to invent where the sources are silent. Interpretation in the third person, in which the interpreter steps out of role to explain what is known, what is guessed and what is disputed, is more demanding and more honest.

None of this means that reconstruction has no place in research. Experimental archaeology — rebuilding a kiln to see whether it reaches the necessary temperature, thatching a roof to learn how long it lasts — is a recognised method, and it has settled questions that documents could not. But its power is limited to questions of the practical and the possible. It can show that something could have been done in a particular way; it cannot show that it was, still less why. The grander claims made for reconstruction do not survive that distinction.

My conclusion, then, is neither celebration nor dismissal. Re-enactment and living museums are the best available corrective to the illusion, common among people who read a great deal, that the past was made of paper. They teach the weight of things and the cost of time. But they earn their place in education only when they are honest about their own construction, and when they lead visitors back to the sources rather than leaving them with a memory of a pleasant day out. The past is an argument, not a place you can visit.