Sauromates II defeats the Siraces and the Scythians

In the Roman period the Bosporan Kingdom guarded the northeastern shore of the Black Sea as a client of Rome. Its kings, who bore the names Tiberius Julius, received yearly Roman subsidies and put the emperor’s head on their gold staters, but defended their frontiers with their own army. Their usual enemies were the Scythians and Tauri of Crimea and the Sarmatians of the steppes east of the Sea of Azov, among whom the Siraces were one of the strongest tribes. Tanais in the Don delta, a trading town where Bosporan merchants dealt with the nomads, was also the kingdom’s fortress against them; its walls were restored in 163 and repeatedly in the following decades.

The surviving part of a dedication to Zeus, Ares and Aphrodite found at Tanais and dated to the year 490 of the Bosporan era (193/194) reads: “…having waged war on the Siraces and the Scythians and taken Taurica under treaty, made the sea free for sailors in Pontus and Bithynia”. The top of the stele with the victor’s name is lost, but the dedication dates from the reign of Sauromates II (174/175–210/211), and Vasily Latyshev, who published it in 1890, as well as later scholars attribute the victories to him. It was dedicated by Zeno son of Zeno, whom the king had sent to Tanais; in Latyshev’s reading, the dedicant’s father, also named Zeno, commanded in the war. The words about the sea are understood as referring to a campaign of the Bosporan fleet against the pirates of the southern Black Sea, where the Bosporus’ main trading partners lay. According to V. F. Gaidukevich, the Tauro-Scythians then had to accept a Bosporan protectorate, and Sauromates’ son Rhescuporis styled himself “king of the whole Bosporus and of the Tauro-Scythians”; triumphal images on Sauromates’ bronze coins have also been linked to these victories.

The war is known only from this inscription and from coins, so its course is unknown; the defeat of the Siraces is sometimes dated to 192–193. Gaidukevich noted that Sauromates used the turmoil in Rome after the murder of Commodus to raise the face value of his copper coins against Roman rules, and only later countermarked them with the head of Septimius Severus. He regarded the 2nd and the first decades of the 3rd century as the height of the kingdom’s second flowering.