Costoboci Erotic

The Costoboci were a people of the northern Carpathians who turn up in Roman writing between roughly the first and fourth centuries AD, and then stop turning up. Their country lay along the upper Dniester and Prut, in what is now western Ukraine, northern Moldova and Romanian Bukovina: wooded hill country above the Dacian plain, close enough to Rome's frontier to matter and far enough past it to stay outside the province. Most historians count them among the free Dacians, the tribes left unconquered when Trajan took Dacia in 106. Ptolemy lists them twice, once in Sarmatia and once as the Transmontani Costoboci, those across the mountains, which may record two branches or may be a mapmaker duplicating himself. Archaeologists usually attach them to the Lipita culture of the upper Dniester, whose pottery and house plans look Dacian, though that match is argued rather than settled. Nothing of their language survives except personal names, and those names read Thraco-Dacian, which is the strongest single piece of evidence against the older theories making them Sarmatian, Celtic or Slavic.

They are remembered for one campaign. Around 170, with Rome tied up in the Marcomannic Wars, the Costoboci crossed the Danube and drove south through Moesia and Thrace into Macedonia, then kept going into Greece itself. At Eleusis they burned the sanctuary of Demeter, whose mysteries had been running for centuries without a break; Pausanias, writing soon after, calls them bandits and remembers a runner from Elateia who died fighting them. Marcus Aurelius paid for the rebuilding. Roman troops broke the raid, and then, within a year or two, the Hasdingi Vandals moved into the Costoboci homeland and took it. After that they are never again a power. One marble monument in Rome holds the whole aftermath: Zia, daughter of Tiatus, a Dacian woman, wife of Pieporus king of the Costoboci, buried in the imperial capital by two grandsons with Dacian names, Natoporus and Drilgisa. A royal house living out its last years inside the empire it had raided. The name itself lasts into the fourth century in Ammianus, by then attached to a stretch of country rather than to anyone doing anything. No living people traces itself to them. What remains is the excavated ground along the Dniester and a permanent open question about who the free Dacians actually were.