Halfway down Curetes Street, a rectangular pool and a re-erected frame of columns mark the Fountain of Trajan — a nymphaeum, which is Rome’s word for turning municipal plumbing into imperial theatre.
Water arrived by aqueduct from the hills, poured through the fountain’s façade into a broad pool, and was ladled into the jugs of anyone who came — free, public, and reliable, which in the ancient world was civilisation itself. Above the water, in a two-storey architectural frame filled with statues, stood a colossal figure of Trajan, the emperor of the empire’s greatest extent.
The globe at his foot
Of the colossus, excavation recovered enough to matter: a foot, resting on a sphere. The globe under the imperial foot was Rome’s tidiest sentence — the world, held down — and inscriptions here spelled it out for anyone the sculpture left in doubt. Fragments of the statuary are in the Ephesus Museum; on site, the re-erected frame and pool let you reconstruct the stage.
It is worth pausing to admire the honesty of the arrangement: propaganda above, genuine public service below. The emperor got his colossus; the Ephesians got clean water every day of the year. Both sides considered it a fair trade, and the fountain worked for centuries.
