Provincia Dacia Romana

Please |help| us convert the |Dictionary of Roman Coins| from scans to text by typing the original text here. Please add updates or make corrections to the NumisWiki text version as appropriate.

Provincia Dacia Romana. - This vast and very noted province, as has already been observed (see Dacia), comprehended within its limits the modern Romania, Moldova (Moldavia) and parts of Hungary, Bulgary, Ukraine, Serbia and Montenegro. How much too, after its dearly purchased aquisition by the victorious arms of Trajan, it was the care of Imperial Rome to civilize and adorn it, is shewn by various remains of its acknowledged importance, in sculptured marbles and inscribed stones, in public roads and edifices, in the ruins of Trajan's bridge and other monuments. But although the name of Dacia and the memory of its conquest, are recorded on many coins of Roman die, struck in all the three metals, yet it does not appear that any of its cities or districts were admitted to partake of colonial or municipal privileges, nor that any pieces of money were struck within the provinces itself, until the reign of Philip senior, who was the first emperror that changed its political condition from subjugation to free-citizenship and gave it immunities which placed its inhabitants on an equality, as to rights, with the Romans themselves. - The imperial Greek pieces which bear the name of this country in Greek, were fabricated elsewhere, in memory of the advantages which the Romans had gained over the Dacians. "It has not been possible" says M. Hennin (Manuel vol. ii. p. 107) "to ascertain positively the places where those pieces were coined. M. Sestini ascribes them to the Isle of Crete and belives them to have been struck in the city of Thalassa." Be this, however, as it may, it was under Philip senior that it began to use Latin legends. And from notations of years which appear on the exergue of these coins, such as AN. I., AN. II., AN. II., &c, the inference seems warranted that having been rendered free under Philip and admitted by him to share in the immunities of the Jus Italicum and this to be placed on the footing of the Roman citizens, the entire province, out of grateful remembrance of benefits thereby conferred upon it, adopted the plan of computing dates from that period as being the aera of its liberation.

View whole page from the |Dictionary Of Roman Coins|

Also see Dacia.