Trajan's Column has already accumulated a mountain of print — 1,530 items at the last count — and this book adds another thirty to the pile, publishing a selection from some fifty papers that were delivered at a four-day conference held in Vienna to celebrate the 1900th anniversary of the dedication of the Column on 12 May a.d. 113. As the title proclaims, the focus is on the Column as a ‘victory monument and war chronicle in pictures’. Accordingly, most of the contributions concern the reliefs on the shaft, revisiting the perennial problem of how they were intended to be ‘read’, as narrative or as metaphor, factual or ideological, as pictures or words. The fact that the 200 m-long frieze could never have been read by anyone (except the sculptors who carved it) in the sense that we are accustomed to do from casts and photographs, let alone interpreted, occasionally comes to the fore to be pushed aside, as is the issue of when it was carved and for whom. Here the Column and its reliefs are accepted without question as a single Trajanic monument, with all the contradictions that entails.

The papers are divided into seven sections, starting with two keynote lectures, one by Werner Eck discussing Trajan's imperial image as represented in Pliny the Younger's panegyric, and the other by Tonio Hölscher on the art-historical side, whose contorted title (‘The ideology of reality – The reality of ideology: narrative structure, material culture and (in)visibility of a war environment in pictures’) pretty well says it all. His solution to the problem of how its content reached a wider audience (32–5) is that it did not have to (which is obvious enough), but the further implications of its invisibility to ordinary mortals are left obscure.

Section Two, under the rubric ‘The Monument: Documentation, Conservation and Building Context’, takes the form of four brief papers, mainly summary versions of work published long since: Giangiacomo Martines, architect-in-charge, on the structure of the Column (Prospettiva 31 (1983), 60–71) and on the 1:1 outline drawings (made by tracing on transparent film) commissioned when the scaffolding was up in the 1980–1990s (Colonna Traiana: Corpus dei disegni 1981–2001 (2001)); Matthias Bruno and Fulvia Bianchi on their re-examination in 1998 of Boni's old trench beside the foundations, which disproved Boni's claim that the Column was an afterthought (PBSR 74 (2006), 293–322); Cinzia Conti, conservator-in-charge, repeating her identification of six individual hands at work on the reliefs (in F. Festa Farina et al. (eds), Tra Damasco e Roma (2001), 199–215); and the ancient historian Karl Strobel on the wider architectural setting (Kaiser Traian (2010), 338–41), reiterating Zanker's theory of a master plan for Trajan's Forum while also happily endorsing Meneghini's highly questionable substitution of the Temple of Divus Traianus with a propylon.

The third section covers ‘The Reliefs: Pictorial Language and Programme’, where twelve papers (bizarrely arranged in alphabetical order by author) take particular themes and look at where and/or how they are illustrated on the Column, several reproducing the same diagram with the relevant areas of the reliefs coloured in, with the same random result. We jump from medical orderlies (Dan Aparaschivei), to how the battle scene CXII, right at the top of the Column, was planned and executed (Martin Beckmann); from the representation of a wooden amphitheatre (Ivan Bogdanović), to Jon Coulston on the arms and armour depicted in the pedestal reliefs (the most detailed study on the subject to date, furnished with twenty-one colour plates, which would surely have been better placed in Section 2); from a simplistic analysis of how urban architecture is represented (Marcel Danner), to a curious attempt to identify two master-designers each responsible for different battle scenes, depending on whether the Romans are on the offensive or defensive, and their orderly disposition at fixed intervals up the shaft (Stephan Faust); from a woolly exposition of how the reliefs represent the process of empire-building in microcosm (Christian Heitz), to an inconclusive investigation of the extent to which the representations of battle scenes can be seen to draw on prior tradition or are new departures specifically for the Column (Alice Landskron); from a comparison between sacrifice scenes as narrative devices on Trajan's Column and on Marcus’ Column, finding few differences (John Scheid), to an attempt to define the new image of Trajan as both war-leader and bringer of ‘culture’ (Gunnar Seelentag), and to the frieze as evidence of Dacian architecture and urbanism (Elizabeth Wolfram Thill, re-running her articles in AJA 114 (2010), 27–43 and JRA 24 (2011), 283–312, with further contrived argument concerning the metaphorical contrast between Roman forts and Dacian strongholds). The section ends with a rather inconsequential account of historical narrative in Roman funerary(!) art before and after Trajan's Column (Norbert Zimmermann and Monica Salvadori).

In Section Four, Ekkehard Weber, apparently under duress (193 n. 2), provides a short and open-ended enquiry into the ‘enigma’ of the Column's dedicatory inscription, which does indeed raise many major questions concerning the original purpose of the Column, generally ignored by all parties. He also casts doubt on 12 May as the exact date of its dedication in a.d. 113, which is derived from the restoration of a lacuna in the fasti Ostienses as [columna]m, on the grounds that the word is too short, though I find the much longer alternative [bibliotheca]m that he proposes no less problematic. This is followed by a much longer essay from Bernhard Woytek supplying a much-needed overview (and review) of the numismatic evidence for Trajan's Column, first in the context of other column-coins, then on its own terms. He confirms that all known coins showing Trajan's Column that were minted in Rome (currently a total of 422, outnumbering all those depicting the equus Traiani, the Basilica Ulpia and the Forum Traiani put together) date only from Trajan's sixth consulship, between spring 113 and spring 115; any ‘Cos V’ coins are fakes. Less than half the coins show a spiral on the shaft, but where they do, most have it correctly ascending to the right; those where it turns to the left are mainly fake sestertii, though some genuine examples made the same error. He is convinced (too easily in my view) that the spiral must represent the helical band of the frieze, not the spiral staircase inside the shaft (which turns in the same direction); as a result, when the spiral is marked with dots, he sees them as referring not to steps or the windows which light the staircase, but to the reliefs. One denarius actually shows little people walking up in each of the three bands (pl. 67, fig. 19a), but to his eye this coin, like another with a blotch at the bottom of the shaft which might be read as an equestrian figure riding to the right (pl. 67 fig. 21a), is conclusive proof that the ‘relief band was either completely finished or at least in progress in 113/114’ and that any possibility that the frieze was added under Hadrian must be laid to rest (211–12). An analysis of the coins as evidence for the statue of Trajan on top indicates a cuirassed type, standing on his right leg, with a military cloak round his shoulders descending to his ankle, his left arm raised holding a spear or sceptre, and his right hand extended, holding an object which the aurei (the most valuable, made by the best die-cutters and therefore the most accurate) suggest was spherical, i.e. a globe, otherwise not attested on coins until the third century.

Section Five, loosely identified as ‘Reception and Influence’, contains a survey by Martin Galinier of imitations of Trajan's Column erected by later European rulers; Joanna Olchawa on Trajan's Column as the model for the eleventh-century Bernward's Column in Hildesheim (though as far as I can see the two monuments have nothing in common beyond both being columns); Volker Heenes, publishing for a second time, in German instead of English, his discovery of two more sixteenth-century copies to add to the larger corpus derived from the initial survey of the frieze by Jacopo Ripanda in 1504 (RIHA Journal 0094 (9 July 2014)); and Stefan Seitschek pursuing the reception of Trajan and his Dacian conquest at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI (reg. 1711–40) in its wider cultural context.

In Section Six we first return to the relief frieze, where the representation of the second Dacian War in the upper half of the shaft is ‘read’ and commentated upon by Karl Strobel, prefacing his case with the unlikely expectation that the staircases to the upper floor of the Basilica Ulpia and those to the roofs of the ‘Libraries’, together with the use of paint and metal accessories, were expressly designed to render the uppermost sections of the frieze legible. Next, Ioan Piso asks ‘Was the conquest of Dacia a necessity?’, and Dan Dana looks at how the Dacian victory was celebrated elsewhere in the Empire. The final section reports on excavations at Sarmizegetusa Regia, past (Răzvan Mateescu) and present (Gelu Florea), and the epigraphic evidence in favour of a monument or shrine there commemorating the Roman victory (Coriolan Horaţio Opreanu).

All told, as so often with such conference proceedings, the compendium offers few original or significant additions to the field; rather it is a reflection of an existing scholarly status quo, as constituted by the invitees. It is good to have two of the Italian contributions (Martines and Conti) in English, though the translations are poor. In terms of editing and production, the decision to unite each paper with its own bibliography is to be commended, and the printing of the 350-odd illustrations, the majority in colour, is of exceptionally high quality.