The end of Roman Dacia: from “Dacia lost” to Aurelian’s withdrawal

Around 360, Sextus Aurelius Victor was writing a book about the Roman emperors, the Liber de Caesaribus. When he reaches the reign of Gallienus, he lists the disasters of the age, and among them he places a clause of a few words: et amissa trans Istrum, quae Traianus quaesiuerat, “and [the territories] beyond the Ister that Trajan had acquired were lost”^[1]. The Ister is the Danube. The text does not name Dacia, but Trajan’s conquests beyond the river point to it clearly. The name of Aurelian, the emperor whom textbooks associate with “the withdrawal of 271”, does not appear in the passage at all. How did the province of Dacia actually come to an end: in a single year, through an evacuation, or in several stages? And what dates the loss of control, what dates Aurelian’s withdrawal?

Four late texts

We have no contemporary account. The reconstruction rests above all on four Latin accounts, written late, nearly a century or more after the events (they are not the only ones: Orosius, for instance, also records the loss of Dacia under Gallienus):

• Aurelius Victor (around 360/361) speaks only of the loss under Gallienus^[1];
• Eutropius (around 369/370) says that Aurelian gave up the province of Dacia and moved Romanos ex urbibus et agris Daciae, “the Romans from the towns and fields of Dacia”, to media Moesia, central Moesia^[2];
• Festus (around 370) puts both in a single sentence: Dacia sub Gallieno imperatore amissa est, “was lost under the emperor Gallienus”, and through Aurelian, translatis exinde Romanis, “after the Romans had been moved from there”, two Dacias were created in the regions of Moesia and Dardania^[3];
• the Historia Augusta, a collection of imperial biographies probably written at the end of the 4th century or the beginning of the next, gives the fullest formula: Aurelian abandoned the province sublato exercitu et provincialibus, “having withdrawn the army and the provincials”, and abductosque ex ea populos in Moesia conlocavit, “settled in Moesia the peoples taken out of it”^[4].

The similarities between them are not accidental. Dan Ruscu, who analysed the whole tradition, considers that all the surviving accounts derive from a single literary tradition^{[8, p. 184]}: a lost history of the emperors that modern scholars have reconstructed and named the Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte. Florian Matei-Popescu and Ioan Carol Opriș treat it in the same way, as a common source, at least in part^[5]. We have no manuscript of it, however: it is a reconstruction, not a surviving witness.

Read in this way, the tradition speaks, according to Ruscu, “beyond doubt of two events: one in the time of Gallienus, the other in the time of Aurelian”^{[8, p. 185]}. (Ruscu writes in Romanian; the quotations from his book are our translation.)

The first phase: “Dacia lost” under Gallienus

What was lost under Gallienus, who reigned between 260 and 268? According to Ruscu, the inscriptions from Sarmizegetusa, Potaissa and Mehadia show that the province had not yet been abandoned around 256–260. After the capture of the emperor Valerian, however, “an important part of the troops of Dacia is either withdrawn to a southern line – in the immediate vicinity of the Danube – or transferred to Poetovio”^{[8, p. 212]}. Hence his definition: “Dacia amissa means a loss of military control over this province”^{[8, p. 213]}. It therefore means neither the departure of everyone nor the instant disappearance of the administration.

Ruscu rejects two older explanations. The first is a usurpation: the usurpers Ingenuus or Regalianus would have detached Dacia from the Empire. But the events took place mainly in Pannonia and Moesia, and a temporary usurpation does not explain why Dacia in particular remained in the tradition as the lost province^{[8, p. 201]}. The second is a massive barbarian attack that would have conquered the province: the sources attest serious attacks in the Danubian and Balkan regions, but they do not describe such an attack on Dacia. Here the argument also relies on the silence of the sources, so it does not rule out local raids.

The coins are compatible with this chronology, without proving it on their own. Cristian Găzdac compared the circulation of coinage in Dacia with that of the neighbouring provinces. After the reign of Philip, it deteriorates sharply, against the background of the general debasement of 253–260. Under Claudius II, Dacia declines, while in Pannonia the years 268–284 are a phase of consolidation. His conclusion: probably by the end of Gallienus’ reign, Dacia had slipped out of the Empire’s financial control^[6]. Coinage is not a census, though: how many coins are found also depends on excavation, on their publication and on the type of site.

The second phase: Aurelian’s decision

Ruscu rejects the idea that Dacia was reconquered under Claudius II or under Aurelian. The passage of Orosius sometimes invoked in this sense combines, in his view, the victory over the Goths with the general restoration of the frontiers through the defeat of Tetricus and Zenobia^{[8, pp. 216–223]}. What Aurelian does is officially complete what had begun under Gallienus.

And the year of the withdrawal? The literary sources give no explicit year, nor the exact sequence of operations^[8]. Part of the scholarship therefore keeps a broader dating, between 271 and 275. Matei-Popescu and Opriș have recently argued for 271: for them, the coins with the legend DACIA FELIX, from December 270–January 271, are a marker before which the withdrawal could not have taken place, and the authors correlate the withdrawal with the reopening of the mint at Serdica in the summer of 271^[5].

The withdrawal did not erase every Roman presence north of the river. The legions of Dacia were moved to Oescus and Ratiaria, south of the Danube, while Drobeta and Sucidava remained strategic points on the left bank, a kind of bridgeheads of the new frontier^[5]. The situation on the Danube should not, however, be projected onto Transylvania, where the loss of control and the end of the institutions followed other rhythms.

The new Dacia south of the Danube is not located identically in all the texts: Eutropius says central Moesia^[2], Festus “the regions of Moesia and Dardania”^[3], the Historia Augusta the region “which now divides the two Moesias”^[4]. The two late provinces, Dacia Ripensis and Dacia Mediterranea, would have been formed only between 321 and 343/344, according to Matei-Popescu and Opriș, probably within the reorganizations of Constantine’s time. This is a reconstruction, not the date of a surviving act^[5].

Who left?

This is where the stakes are highest. The sentences in Festus and the Historia Augusta have been cited as proof that Aurelian emptied the province of people. Yet the texts speak of the army and of Romani, provinciales, populi, not of “everyone”. Ruscu notes that no source says omnes provinciales or omnes Romani and concludes: “the idea of a total evacuation of the provincial population cannot be accepted”^{[8, p. 230]}. Matei-Popescu and Opriș, for their part, argue for an organized withdrawal that involved soldiers, administrative personnel and an important part of the population, without assuming the evacuation of all inhabitants^[5].

The opposite mistake is just as serious. To reduce the withdrawal to the departure of a few officials is to ignore the words of the texts: “the Romans from the towns and fields”, “the provincials”, “the peoples”. The departure was real and probably substantial. How substantial, we do not know: “The scale of this withdrawal is hard to determine”, Ruscu admits. Rather than a systematic colonization, he sees in the settlement south of the Danube “a sheltering of refugees”^{[8, p. 230]}.

Towns that fade slowly

What happened to those who stayed? The literary sources are silent. Archaeology speaks, but in its own way. Robert Wanner and Eric C. De Sena compared three former towns in Transylvania: Napoca, Potaissa and Porolissum. Their conclusion: “There is clear evidence of post-Roman activity near and probably in Napoca, Potaissa and Porolissum”, and “their decline was an extremely slow process that lasted over a century after the Romans left”^{[7, pp. 21, 25]}.

The evidence differs from place to place. At Napoca, secure contexts inside the walls after the 280s are few, but at least 52 late or post-Roman graves appear to the south and south-east of the town^{[7, pp. 12–14]}. At Potaissa, beneath present-day Turda, the cemeteries around the fortress and a brooch dated to around 290–310 indicate activity in the late 3rd and the 4th centuries^{[7, pp. 15–17]}. At Porolissum, the forum is reconfigured with masonry made of reused materials^{[7, pp. 18–20]}.

Archaeology shows that people went on living around the ruins. It does not show that the Roman town as an institution survived. Nor does it show who these people were: the graves, the pottery and the brooches document practices and contacts, not the language or the identity of those buried.

What remains open

We do not know the exact year of Aurelian’s decision, nor how the withdrawal unfolded from one region to another. We do not know how many people left and how many stayed. We do not know how much control the Empire still had in each corner of the province between Gallienus and Aurelian. And about the language and identity of those who stayed, the texts and coins of this dossier say nothing.

Conclusion

How did the province of Dacia come to an end? Not in a single year and not through a complete evacuation. Aurelius Victor and Festus preserve the memory of a Dacia lost under Gallienus; the troops, military control and, judging by the coins, financial control weaken from that time on. Under Aurelian, in 271 or in the years immediately after, the process is officially completed: the army is withdrawn, and part of the administrative apparatus and a significant part of the population move south of the Danube, into a new Dacia. How many left, the sources do not allow us to establish. The formula closest to the sources is this: disintegration under Gallienus, organized withdrawal under Aurelian, regional transformation after Aurelian. Even if the withdrawal itself took place in 271, the end of the province took more than a decade.