The King Who Buried a River
When Rome finally cornered the Dacian king, it wasn't a sword that gave up his secret — it was a traitor's whisper about a riverbed.
In the winter years of 105 and 106, the Second Dacian War ground toward its brutal end. Rome's legions pressed into the mountain kingdom of Dacia, and one by one its nobles surrendered or were captured, their loyalty to King Decebalus dissolving under the weight of Roman siegecraft. Among them was a man named Bicilis, a companion of the king who knew something no soldier could have guessed by looking at the landscape: that beneath the waters of a river near the royal palace lay one of the greatest hoards of precious metal in the ancient world.
The river was known to the Romans as the Sargetia — the watercourse ran past Decebalus's palace in the Dacian capital, and today it is identified with the modern Strei. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, the king had used captive laborers to temporarily divert its course, exposing the riverbed. There, his men dug a great hollow and filled it with silver, gold, and other valuables sturdy enough to withstand dampness. Stones were piled over the treasure, then earth, and finally the river was allowed to return to its natural channel, erasing every trace of the work beneath the flowing water.
Decebalus did not stop there. He ordered the same captives to hide his robes and other precious articles in nearby caves — a second, scattered layer of concealment to accompany the sunken hoard. Then, in a chilling act of self-protection, he had the laborers who had done the digging killed, ensuring that no one alive could reveal where the treasure lay.
No one, that is, except Bicilis. As a companion of the king, he had learned the secret without having to dig a single shovelful of earth himself. When Roman forces captured him during the war's final campaigns, he gave up the location, and the Sargetia's hidden fortune passed from Dacian hands into Roman ones.
The scale of what was found — or claimed to have been found — is almost impossible to grasp. T. Statilius Crito, a physician and procurator under the emperor Trajan who compiled a history called the Getica, recorded the treasure at five million pounds of gold and ten million pounds of silver, figures modern historians like Julian Bennett suspect are the result of a scribal error somewhere down the centuries of copying. Even scaled-down estimates remain staggering: the historian Jérôme Carcopino calculated the hoard at roughly 165,500 kilograms of gold and 331,000 kilograms of silver.
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