Trajan grows ill early in 117 and sets out to sail back to Italy.
His health declines throughout the spring and summer of the year, something publicly acknowledged by the fact that a bronze bust displayed at the time in the public baths of Ancyra show him clearly aged and emaciated.
By the time he reaches Selinus in Cilicia, which is afterwards called Trajanopolis, he suddenly dies from edema on August 9.
Some say that he had adopted Hadrian as his successor, but others that it was his wife Pompeia Plotina who hired someone to impersonate him after he had died.
