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History has not been kind to Roman Emperor Sponsian and it isn’t fair. He did the nearly impossible by declaring himself the big cheese on his own authority and got away with it. For a long time, scholars thought he was a hoax. Though they admitted it would have to be an elaborate one. New evidence surfaced which proves he really did exist. That led to the public discovering his story. If coins with his image were forgeries, they wouldn’t show wear marks from being in circulation.
Emperor Sponsian gains rightful place in history
A single gold coin proved that Sponsian, “a third century Roman emperor written out of history as a fictional character really did exist.” It was discovered in Transylvania and bears his name and portrait.
Long before Vlad the Impaler came along, the community was “a far-flung outpost of the Roman empire.” So far out in the sticks, it was virtually cut off from the rest of Rome’s holdings. That’s a crucial clue to the story.
Everyone in academia believed the Emperor Sponsian coin to be “a fake.” Still, it is made of gold, which makes it interesting simply because it isn’t typical to make a fake coin with real gold. But, not interesting enough to display to local burglars.
For years, “it had been locked away in a museum cupboard.” After everyone forgot all about it, Professor Paul Pearson, with University College in London, got a chance to put it under a high power microscope and show the images to some expert friends of his.
“What we have found is an emperor. He was a figure thought to have been a fake and written off by the experts but we think he was real and that he had a role in history.” The coin examined was “among a small hoard discovered in 1713.” Originally declared authentic, in the mid-19th century, experts “suspected that they might have been produced by forgers of the time.” That conclusion was based simply on their “crude” design.
The debate raged until 1863. That’s when Henry Cohen, the leading coin expert of the time, declared once and for all that “they were not only ‘modern‘ fakes, but poorly made.” Besides that, they were “ridiculously imagined.” His colleagues bowed to his authority and “to this day Sponsian has been dismissed in scholarly catalogs.”
They were in circulation
Pearson first got a squint at photos of the Emperor Sponsian coin while “researching for a book about the history of the Roman empire.” The scratches visible on that image suggested to his trained eye that they “might have been produced by the coin being in circulation.” Wanting to be absolutely certain, he reached out to the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University.
They had it “locked away in a cupboard along with three others from the original hoard.” With their blessing, he “examined all four coins under a powerful microscope and confirmed in the journal, PLOS 1, that there really were scratches, and the patterns were consistent with them being jingled around in purses.”
Pearson and Jesper Ericsson, the museum’s curator of coins, also did a chemical analysis which proved “the coins had been buried in soil for hundreds of years.” Their next question was who the heck was Sponsian and how did he end up on a gold coin wearing the crown? When they got done digging, they were certain they had most of the answers.
Sponsian was a military commander, most likely a general, in charge of the “most distant and difficult to defend” outpost. In order to defend the province of “Dacia” for the Roman empire, he was “forced to crown himself as emperor.”
Archaeologists previously “established that Dacia was cut off from the rest of the Roman empire in around 260 CE. There was a pandemic, civil war and the empire was fragmenting.” Desperate times call for desperate measures. “Surrounded by enemies and cut off from Rome, Sponsian likely assumed supreme command during a period of chaos and civil war, protecting the military and civilian population of Dacia until order was restored, and the province evacuated between 271 and 275 CE.”
He had to make himself the Emporer “to maintain control of the military and of the civilian population because they were surrounded and completely cut off.” Tying up all the loose ends, “In order to create a functioning economy in the province they decided to mint their own coins.” The DIY ones were obviously not up to treasury mint standards. “They may not have known who the actual emperor was because there was civil war but what they needed was a supreme military commander in the absence of real power from Rome. He took command at a period when command was needed.“
