Trajan's Legacy

The problem with trajan is that we run into a pausity of primary source accountings of his reign. Plutarch, tacitus and suetanius all lived in and around his reign but prudently avoided commenting on the sitting emperor. But despite the lack of detail, the broad sweeps of trajan's legacy are well understood. He was the first emperor to be drawn from the provinces, rather than the italian peninsula,. A major landmark that allowed men of merit from across the empire to believe that every door in the empire was open to them. In time, other spaniards and syrians and thracians would come to don the purple and rule the empire.