Free Dacians

Despite this acculturation, the paradigm holds that the Free Dacians were irredentists, repeatedly invading the Roman province in attempts to recover the refugees' ancestral land.

After this, the Free Dacians supposedly liberated the Roman province and joined the remaining Romano-Dacians to form a Latin-speaking Daco-Roman ethnic group that were the forebears of the modern Romanian people.

[3] There is substantial evidence that large numbers of ethnic Dacians continued to exist on the fringes of the Roman province of Dacia.

Two panels of Trajan's Column depict lines of Dacian peasants leaving with their families and animals at the end of each war.

[10][11] Several emperors after Trajan, as late as AD 336, assumed the victory title of Dacicus Maximus (" Grand Dacian "): Antoninus Pius (157),[12] Maximinus I (238),[13] Decius (250)[14] Gallienus (257),[15] Aurelian (272)[16] and Constantine I the Great (336).

[17] 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.

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.

[20][full citation needed] 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.

[citation needed] In 180, the emperor Commodus, whose reign lasted from 180 to 192, 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.

For the year 381, the Byzantine chronicler Zosimus records an invasion over the Danube by a barbarian coalition of Huns, Sciri and what he terms Karpodakai, or Carpo-Dacians.

Zosimus is regarded as an unreliable chronicler by a single scholar[citation needed] and has been criticised by one scholar as having "an unsurpassable claim to be regarded as the worst of all the extant Greek historians of the Roman Empire...it would be tedious to catalogue all the instances where this historian has falsely transcribed names, not to mention his confusion of events...".