Gaius Messius Quintus Traianus Decius was the first Roman emperor to die in battle against a foreign enemy. Having seized the throne from his predecessor in AD 249, his most famous act of policy had been an edict commanding all his subjects to sacrifice for the empire's prosperity. That didn't do him much good. He fell victim to his own poor planning in an extended campaign against Gothic invaders that began in the summer of 250 and terminated in May of 251.

The events surrounding Decius’ fatal encounter with Gothic invaders were once shrouded in mystery. The nearest contemporary account, that of Publius Herennius Dexippus, was known only through four fragments: one describing a failed ‘Scythian’ attack on Marcianopolis, another a letter of Decius to the people of Philippopolis (Plovdiv), the third recording the repulse of an attack by ‘Skythai’ on the same city, the fourth simply saying that Decius was killed near Abritus at a place called Forum Thembronios. A series of spectacular discoveries in the past decade have changed this picture. We now have extensive new passages of Dexippus’ Scythian Affairs (Skythika), discovered in a palimpsest at Vienna, and we now know exactly where the battle was fought and by what units. The combination of Dexippus’ expanded narrative with the archaeological evidence from the battle site makes it possible to reconstruct the events surrounding Decius’ catastrophe with far greater probability than has hitherto been the case.

What emerges from the new material is striking evidence for Decius’ strategy at the beginning of the campaign, and his response to the failure of his initial plan. There was no anticipation on Decius’ part that Gothic raiders might resort to misdi-rection, with the result that Roman armies were in the wrong place to meet the main thrust of an invasion. A consequence of this failure was inadequate preparation to resist the raiders once they had breached the frontier. The best Decius could manage was a hasty pursuit of the raiders. The Gothic plan appears to have been to attack deeply into Roman territory, evading Roman forces where possible, and plunder as widely as possible before returning home.