Free Dacians - Validity of Paradigm

Validity of Paradigm

There is substantial evidence that large numbers of ethnic Dacians continued to exist on the fringes of the Roman province of Dacia. During Trajan's Dacian Wars in AD 102 and AD 106, enormous numbers of Dacians were killed or taken into slavery. It also appears that many indigenous Dacians were expelled from, or emigrated from, the occupied zone. Two panels of Trajan's Column depict lines of Dacian peasants leaving with their families and animals at the end of each war. It appears that the Romans did not permanently occupy the whole of Decebal's kingdom. The latter's borders, many scholars believe, are described in Ptolemy's Geographia: the rivers Siret in the east, Danube in the south, Thibiscum (Timiş) in the west and the northern Carpathian Mountains in the north. But the eastern border of the Roman province was by AD 120 set at the Limes Transalutanus ("Trans-Olt Frontier"), a line to the east of the river Aluta (Olt), thus excluding the Wallachian plain between the limes and the river Siret. In Transylvania, the line of Roman border-forts seems to indicate that the eastern and northern Carpathians were outside the Roman province, at least partially.

The unoccupied sections of Decebal's kingdom are likely to have been inhabited predominantly by ethnic Dacians, although according to Ptolemy, the northernmost part of the kingdom (northern Carpathians/Bukovina) was shared by non-Dacian tribes: the Anartes and the Taurisci, who were probably Celtic, and the Germanic Bastarnae are also attested in this region. Furthermore, some areas were occupied after 106 by nomadic Sarmatian tribesmen, most likely a minority ruling over the sedentary Geto-Dacian majority e.g. Muntenia (eastern Wallachia), which was ruled by the Roxolani Sarmatians and possibly also northern Moldavia, which was under the Costoboci, identified as a Sarmatian tribe by the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder. But there are no reports of Sarmatians controlling the remaining unoccupied region of Decebal's kingdom between the Transylvanian border of the Roman province and the Siret, i.e. the eastern Carpathians, and it is therefore in these mountain valleys and foothills that the politically independent Free Dacians were most likely concentrated, and presumably where most of the refugees from the Roman conquest escaped to.

Free Dacians are reported to have invaded and ravaged the Roman province in 214 and 218. Several emperors after Trajan, as late as AD 336, assumed the victory title of Dacicus Maximus ("Totally Victorious over the Dacians"): Antoninus Pius (157), Maximinus I (238), Decius (250) Gallienus (257), Aurelian (272) and Constantine I the Great (336). Since such victory-titles always indicated peoples defeated, not geographical regions, the repeated use of Dacicus Maximus implies the existence of ethnic Dacians outside the Roman province in sufficient numbers to warrant major military operations into the early 4th century. The permanent deployment of a massive Roman military garrison, normally of 2 legions and over 40 auxiliary regiments (totaling ca. 35,000 troops, or about 10% of the imperial army's total regular effectives), also implies a grave threat to Roman Dacia throughout its history, between 106 and 275. There is substantial archaeological evidence of major and devastating incursions into Roman Dacia: clusters of coin-hoards and evidence of the destruction and abandonment of Roman forts. Since these episodes coincide with occasions when emperors assumed the title Dacicus Maximus, it is reasonable to suppose that the Free Dacians were primarily responsible for these raids.

In 180, the emperor Commodus, whose reign lasted from 180 to 92, is recorded as having admitted 12,000 "neighbouring Daci", who had been driven out of their own territory by hostile tribes, for settlement in the Roman province. Some scholars believe that the presence of the free Dacians is attested by the Puchov Culture in Slovakia and of the Lipiţa culture to the northeast of the Carpathians. However, the identification of these cultures with ethnic Dacians is controversial, as mainstream scholarship considers Puchov as a Celtic culture. Other scholars have identified Lipiţa as Celtic, Germanic or Slavic. In any case, according to modern archaeological theory, material cultures cannot reliably prove ethnicity.

However, the identification of the Costoboci and Carpi as ethnic Dacian is far from secure. Unlike the Dacians proper, neither group is attested in Moldavia before Ptolemy (i.e. before about. 140). The Costoboci are classified as a Sarmatian tribe by Pliny the Elder, who locates them near the river Tanais (southern river Don) in ca. AD 60, in the Sarmatian heartland of moder-day southern Russia, far to the east of Moldavia. The ethno-linguistic affiliation of the Carpi is uncertain. It has also been variously suggested that they were a Sarmatian, Germanic or Proto-Slavic group. The contemporaneous existence, alongside Dacicus Maximus, of the victory-title Carpicus Maximus - claimed by the emperors Philip the Arab (247), Aurelian (273), Diocletian (297) and Constantine I (317/8) - suggests that the Carpi may have been considered ethnically distinct from the Free Dacians by the Romans.

The traditional paradigm is also open to challenge in other respects. There is no evidence that the peoples outside the province were Romanised to any greater extent than their non-Dacian neighbours, since the archaeological remains of their putative zone of occupation show no greater Roman influence than do other Chernyakhov culture sites elsewhere in the northern Pontic region; nor that the Free Dacians gave up their native tongue and became Latin-speakers. In 271-5, when the Roman emperor Aurelian decided to evacuate Roman Dacia, its Roman residents are reported by ancient sources to have been deported en masse to the province of Moesia Inferior, a Roman territory south of the Danube. These reports have been challenged by some modern scholars who, based primarily on archaeological finds, argue that many rural inhabitants of the Roman province, and even some urban population, with few links to the Roman administration or army, remained behind. However, leaving behind the Romano-Dacian peasantry would have defeated the main purpose of the evacuation, which was to repopulate the Roman provinces south of the Danube, whose inhabitants had been decimated by plague and barbarians invasions, and to bring back into cultivation the abandoned land, or terrae desertae, in those provinces. These were also presumably the aims of Aurelian's contemporaneous resettlement in Roman Pannonia of a substantial section of the Carpi people that he defeated in 273.