The great national libraries they have such an immensity of funds that from time to time unpublished things are discovered among them. If a few weeks ago we saw an example in Prague, where a collection of occult books put together by Heinrich Himmler was found, now it is the turn of the Austrian National Library , in which an unusual ancient text has appeared that narrates the attempted invasion of what is now Greece by a Gothic wave back in the 3rd century AD
To be exact, the discovery already took place a couple of years ago and it was the German researchers of Gunther Wiener Martin and Jana Grusková , from the universities of Bern and Bratislava, who published several articles on the subject in a German journal. In them they explained that there are several fragments that place the action in the times when Greece was already incorporated into the Roman Empire and the first barbarian invasions began , during the stage of the emperor Decio .
The researchers have had to treat these fragments with a spectrometer to be able to read them. Christopher Mallan , from the University of Oxford, and Caillan Davenport , from the University of Queensland, were in charge of translating one of those pieces, which has been called Thermopylae because he reviews a hitherto unknown battle in the same place where hundreds of years before, in the 5th century BC, an army led by the famous three hundred Spartans tried to stop another invasion, in this case Persian.
This time the danger came from a Gothic military column advancing with the intention of falling first on the city of Thessaloniki . Apparently, the defenders managed to repel the enemy from their walls, so he decided to change direction towards Athens attracted by the potential loot from their shrines and the region in general. The Thermopylae Gorge it was once again the eye of the needle chosen by the Greeks to resist, according to the author of the narration, an Athenian chronicler named Dexippus .
Dexipo says that each one quickly armed himself as he could and placed himself under the orders of the strategist Marianus , who harangued them remembering the deeds of their ancestors and crying out to maintain their freedom. Experts doubt that there was such a rant because it was actually a literary resource of the time, which would have to be attributed to Dexippus' trade. They are also unclear who won the battle because the exact date is not even known, which is calculated between the years 250 andAD 260
It is known that Decius suffered several military setbacks in the area but perhaps by then his successor, Treboniano Gallo, was already on the throne. , of whom it was said that he had allied himself precisely with the Goths to betray Decius and come to power. It does not seem probable because he associated to the throne a son of Decius, Gaius Valens Hostilianus , and also ended up colliding head-on with those dubious allies, defeating them. Of course, chronologically, that new battle of Thermopylae could also have been during Emiliano's mandate. or that of Valeriano .
But Dexippus places the events in that of Decius and even puts in his narration another harangue of the emperor , also probably invented:«Since the vicissitudes of human life bring multiple sufferings -says the Roman- it is the duty of prudent men to accept what happens without losing their spirit or falling into weakness» .
Decius, by the way, died trapped along with another of his sons in a swamp in Lodogorie (present-day Bulgaria)… in an ambush tended by the goths.