The Senate’s formula for praising good emperors — felicior Augusto, melior Traiano, may you be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan — established Trajan as the standard of imperial virtue against which all subsequent emperors were measured. He was the first provincial emperor, born in Spain to a Roman family that had settled there generations earlier, and his elevation by Nerva in 97 AD represented the completion of the process by which the Roman Empire’s leadership became genuinely imperial rather than Italian. He was admired by his contemporaries, praised by the senatorial tradition that wrote most of the surviving ancient history, and still regarded by most historians as among the most capable emperors who ever held the position. His reign was also the high-water mark of Roman territorial expansion, after which the empire never grew larger and began, slowly and then rapidly, to contract.