to the Roman administration or army, remained behind. However, leaving behind the Romano-Dacian peasantry would have defeated the main purpose of the evacuation, which was to repopulate the Roman provinces south of the Danube, whose inhabitants had been decimated by plague and barbarians invasions, and to bring back into cultivation the extensive abandoned lands (terrae desertae) in those provinces. These were also presumably the aims of Aurelian's contemporaneous resettlement in Roman Pannonia of a substantial section of the Carpi people that he defeated in 273. Ultimate fate The latest secure mention of the Free Dacians in the ancient sources is Constantine I's acclamation as Dacicus Maximus in 336. For the year 381, the Byzantine chronicler Zosimus records an invasion over the Danube by a barbarian coalition of Huns, Sciri and what he terms Karpodakai, or Carpo-Dacians. There is much controversy about the meaning of this term and whether it refers to the Carpi. However, it certainly refers to the Dacians, and most likely means the "Dacians of the Carpathians". However, it is uncertain whether this term constitutes reliable evidence that the Dacians were still a major force at this time. Zosimus is regarded as an unreliable chronicler by a single scholar and has been criticised by one scholar as having "an unsurpassable claim to be regarded as the worst of all the extant Greek historians of the Roman Empire...it would be tedious to catalogue all the instances where this historian has falsely transcribed names, not to mention his confusion of events...". It is accepted that the Zosimus quote proves the continued existence in 381 of the Dacians as a distinct ethnic group. See also Dacians Dacia (Roman province) Costoboci Carpi (people) Hutsuls Origin of the Romanians Eastern Romance substratum References Sources Ancient Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae (ca. 395) Dio Cassius Roman History (ca. AD 230) Eusebius of Caesarea Historia Ecclesiae (ca. 320) Eutropius Historiae Romanae Breviarium (ca. 360) Anonymous Historia Augusta (ca. 400) Jordanes Getica (ca. 550) Pliny the Elder Naturalis Historia (ca. AD 70) Ptolemy Geographia (ca. 140) Sextus Aurelius Victor De Caesaribus (361) Tacitus Germania (ca. 100) Zosimus Historia Nova (ca. 500) Modern AE: Année Epigraphique ("Epigraphic Year" - academic journal) Author? Barrington (2000): Atlas of the Greek & Roman World Batty, Roger (2008): Rome and the Nomads: the Pontic-Danubian region in Antiquity Bichir, Gh. (1976): History and Archaeology of the Carpi from the 2nd to the 4th