[The following is in regards to the death of King Decebalus and the end of the Second Dacian War.]
A little later, in the Carpathian Mountains, snow was thick on the ground as Roman cavalry of the 2nd Pannonian Ala closed in on a party of riders that had paused in a forest clearing. As revealed by his later gravestone, decurion Tiberius Claudius Maximus from Philippi in Macedonia, formerly with the 7th Claudia Legion, led a Pannonian Horse detachment that caught up with King Decebalus. Outside Porolissum, not far from where the borders of Romania, Moldova and the Ukraine meet today, the elated troopers encircled the exhausted king and his party.
Decebalus had dismounted. Decurion Maximus urged his horse forward, aiming to make the king a prisoner. Decebalus reached to the sheath at his waist and drew a curved dagger. In one quick movement, the king drew the blade across his neck, and slit his own throat. Maximus quickly dismounted, but the king, lying in the snow, drowning in his own blood, could not be kept alive. Trajan’s Column shows one of the troopers on horseback surrounding the Dacian party making an obscene two-fingered gesture towards the dying monarch. With Decebalus dead, Maximus drew his long cavalry sword, and with carefully aimed blows, severed the king’s head and right arm.
The decurion and his men took Decebalus’ remains south to Trajan, who rewarded the cavalry officer with a golden torque, the second such decoration that Maximus received during his career, which would also include service for the emperor in Parthia. The head of King Decebalus was subsequently taken to Rome and displayed on the Gemonian Stairs – proof positive to the Roman people that their great enemy of the past twenty-one years had finally been eliminated, that the Dacian wars were at last at an end, and that the legionaries who had perished at the hands of Decebalus and the Sarmatians had been avenged.
Source:
Dando-Collins, Stephen. “Part III: The Battles – Second Dacian War.” Legions of Rome: The Definitive History of Every Imperial Roman Legion. Thomas Dunne Books, 2012. 405. Print.
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