But was he an emperor if he ruled only Dacia Felix, especially if it happened during the crisis of the 3rd century? Zenobia minted gold coins with her son's likeness, but named him Caesar not Augustus, so even though he appeared on many coins in Parthia and Asia minor he was never emperor

Assuming that they're fake because we don't know who Sponsian was is silly. If you're gonna counterfeit a bunch of ancient gold coins, why would you make up an emperor who never existed?

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Why not include this explanation in the post?

I have seen counterfeit Roman coins sell for a huge amount of money because they were counterfeited at the time of the Roman empire. Funny how if it's old enough it's almost certainly valuable applies once you reach a couple thousand years old. Including counterfeit money.

What was a much longer article than I expected for someone who is only known about because of the existence of two coins.

I'm (cautiously) excited by it - it's not every day that a new usurper is discovered

In the third century it's more likely he was a regional commander. Obviously faulty logic, but we have plenty of examples of people who's memory was supposed to be erased but wasn't (Domitian and Marc Antony come to mind)

It is worth pointing out that damnatio memoriae is not actually an ancient phrase, or even really an ancient concept. There are cases of emperors having public monuments defaced but it wasn't really the official, organized, act of rewriting history that it is sometimes portrayed as in popular imagination. Think more pulling down Saddam Hussein's statues in Iraq or changing the street names in Germany after the second world war than something out of 1984.

In this case this is probably less any deliberate act of disrespect and more that our sources for the so-called Third Century Crisis are somewhat poor, and Dacia is a somewhat poorly understood region of the empire.

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Hi!

It seems like you are talking about the popular but ultimately flawed and false "winners write history" trope!

While the expression is sometimes true in one sense (we'll get to that in a bit), it is rarely if ever an absolute truth, and particularly not in the way that the concept has found itself commonly expressed in popular history discourse. When discussing history, and why some events have found their way into the history books when others have not, simply dismissing those events as the imposed narrative of 'victors' actually harms our ability to understand history.

You could say that is in fact a somewhat "lazy" way to introduce the concept of bias which this is ultimately about. Because whoever writes history is the one introducing their biases to history.

A somewhat better, but absolutely not perfect, approach that works better than 'winners writing history' is to say 'writers write history'.

This is more useful than it initially seems. Until fairly recently the literate were a minority, and those with enough literary training to actually write historical narratives formed an even smaller and more distinct class within that.

To give a few examples, Genghis Khan must surely go down as one of the great victors in all history, but he is generally viewed quite unfavorably in practically all sources, because his conquests tended to harm the literary classes.
Similarly the Norsemen historically have been portrayed as uncivilized barbarians as the people that wrote about them were the "losers" whose monasteries got burned down.

Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.
This evaluation is something that is done by historians and part of what makes history and why insights about historical events can shift over time.

This is possibly best exemplified by those examples where victors did unambiguously write the historical sources.

The Spanish absolutely wrote the history of the conquest of Central America from 1532, and the reports and diaries of various conquistadores and priests are still important primary documents for researchers of the period.

But 'victors write the history' presupposes that we still use those histories as they intended, which is simply not the case. It both overlooks the fundamental nature of modern historical methodology, and ignores the fact that, while victors have often proven to be predominant voices, they have rarely proven to be the only voices.

Archaeology, numismatics, works in translation, and other records all allow us at least some insight into the 'losers' viewpoint, as does careful analysis of the 'winner's' records.
We know far more about Rome than we do about Phoenician Carthage. There is still vital research into Carthage, as its being a daily topic of conversation on this subreddit testifies to.

So while it's true that the balance between the voices can be disparate that doesn't mean that the winners are the only voice or even the most interesting.
Which is why stating that history is 'written by the victors' and leaving it at that is harmful to the understanding of history and the process of studying history.

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