Many accounts present the Lacringi (Latin Lacringi, German Lakringen) as a Vandal subgroup alongside the Hasdingi. The sources do not say so. Cassius Dio mentions them exactly once, as a people who, around AD 171/172 on the border of Dacia, surprise another group, the Astingi; the Historia Augusta lists them among a string of names. This article lays out both passages, separates evidence from interpretation, and says plainly where there is nothing to say.
Most peoples that appear on this blog leave at least a handful of lines behind. The Lacringi leave fewer. As far as I could check, the name occurs in the whole ancient record in exactly two places: in Cassius Dio’s Roman History, where they act as a group, and in the Historia Augusta’s life of Marcus Aurelius, where they sit in a list of enemies. There is no ruler’s name, place name, grave or inscription that can be assigned to them. Even the spelling shifts with language and edition: Lakringen or Lakringer in German, Lacringi in the Latin form, Lacringes in the Historia Augusta.
That is exactly what makes the case useful. The Lacringi show how thin the thread can be on which a “tribe” hangs in modern books, and how easily a marginal note turns into an affiliation. Reference works say the Lacringi were a Vandal subgroup, relatives or rivals of the Hasdingi. That is an interpretation. Neither ancient passage calls them Vandals. The following sections show how that impression took hold.
A note on numbering first: Cassius Dio’s book on Marcus Aurelius is counted as Book 71 in the older numbering (Boissevain) and as Book 72 in the Loeb edition by Earnest Cary. The Lacringi passage stands in chapter 12 of it. Below I write 72,12 after Cary and flag where the numbering differs.
Cassius Dio, a Greek-speaking Roman senator from Nicaea in Bithynia, wrote his Roman History in the early third century, roughly half a century after the events. The original of the books on Marcus Aurelius is lost. We know the text through excerpts, above all the abridgement by the Byzantine monk John Xiphilinos in the eleventh century, and through the excerpts compiled under Emperor Constantine VII in the tenth. What we read as “Dio” has therefore already been shortened and reworded once. Names and details may have been lost along the way, and the wider context is sometimes only hinted at.
For the Marcomannic Wars (from 166/167 to 180) Dio is nevertheless a main source, next to the Historia Augusta, inscriptions and coins. The Historia Augusta is a Latin collection of imperial biographies from the late fourth century, regarded as unreliable on many points. Anyone trying to understand the Lacringi has to keep two sources of very different weight apart.
The section belongs to a phase in which Rome tried to set the peoples north of the Danube in motion, partly with money and promises of land. Just before it, Dio reports that various groups were drawn to the Roman side by payments and settlement rights. Then comes the account of the Astingi and, as a side figure within it, the Lacringi. In the Loeb translation (public domain, hosted by Penelope at the University of Chicago) the core runs as follows. The Astingi, led by their chieftains Raüs and Raptus, came into Dacia with their entire households, hoping to gain money and land in return for an alliance. When that failed, they left their wives and children under the protection of a man named Clemens until they had taken the land of the Costoboci by force. After defeating the Costoboci they harmed Dacia no less than before. Then the text says:
“The Lacringi, however, feared that Clemens, in his dread of them, might lead these newcomers into the land they themselves lived in; they fell upon them unprepared and won a clear victory.”Cassius Dio, Roman History 72(71),12 (my own translation, based on the English text of the Loeb edition by E. Cary, public domain; I have not seen the Greek wording myself)
After this, Dio continues, the Astingi stopped their hostilities against Rome, pleaded with Marcus and received money plus the right to ask for land if they harmed Rome’s enemies. They did keep part of those promises. In the same section Dio turns to the Cotini, who made similar offers but treated the Roman secretary Tarrutenius Paternus badly, which later led to their ruin. That is all the text says about the Lacringi.
The sentence betrays two things indirectly. First, the Lacringi lived near Dacia, close enough that a Roman governor could threaten them by leading strangers into their land. Second, they were strong enough to defeat the Astingi, who had just displaced an entire people, the Costoboci, in a surprise attack. Nothing more can be drawn from it. Dio does not say where exactly the Lacringi lived, how large they were, who led them, what language they spoke or what they called themselves.
Nor does Dio say the Lacringi were allies of Rome. One sometimes reads this, for instance in overview articles saying that Astingi and Lacringi fought on the Roman side against the Costoboci in 171. In the text, as far as I could check it, the Astingi fight the Costoboci and the Lacringi attack the Astingi. The Lacringi’s motive is fear for their own land, not a Roman commission. As for Clemens, Dio gives only the name. That he is the governor Sextus Cornelius Clemens, who administered Dacia at that time, is a modern identification resting mainly on inscriptions. It is plausible, but it is not in Dio’s text.
Dio gives no date either. Scholars place the scene, from the narrative context, in the years around 171/172. That is a placement, not evidence in the strict sense.
The second passage stands in the life of Marcus Aurelius, chapter 22. In English rendering it says, in essence, that all the nations from the Illyrian frontier to Gaul had conspired: the Marcomanni, Varistae, Hermunduri and Quadi, the Suebi, Sarmatians, Lacringes and Buri, these and certain others together with the Victuali; a longer run of names follows, which also includes the Costoboci. The ancient historian Peter Kehne lists this enumeration as a “Völkertafel”, a table of peoples, in a study on the Marcomannic Wars, and notes that scholars debate its value. He also mentions that some researchers doubt the idea of a large, fixed league of peoples.
For the Lacringi this means: the Historia Augusta confirms the name as a separate group among the enemies of Marcus, and names them directly next to the Buri, who according to Tacitus lived behind the Marcomanni and Quadi (Germania 43). That is the only neighbour indication we have, and it is literary in nature. A list of peoples in a late antique biography cannot be read like a map. Whether the order is meant geographically is open.
To my knowledge nothing else is added to these two passages. Anyone who finds in books an appearance of the Lacringi in the year 166, said to have invaded Pannonia together with the Langobardi, is looking at secondary literature (so the English Wikipedia, citing Michael Kulikowski). Dio’s report of that raid, as far as I could read it in the English version at Penelope, names “Langobardi and Obii”, not the Lacringi. Whether manuscripts or fragments offer a different reading I could not clarify. I therefore treat the claim as unchecked.
The Astingi in Dio and the Hasdingi (also Asdingi or Hasdingi, German Hasdingen or Asdingen) in later sources are usually equated by scholars. This is an equation through the name. At the Dacia passage Dio says nothing about Vandals. The connecting piece comes from the Gothic historian Jordanes in the sixth century. In his Getica (chapter 22, sections 113 to 115) he says of the Vandal king Visimar that he came from the stock of the Asdingi, which stood out among the Vandals and indicated an especially warlike lineage. The Gothic king Geberich defeats him on the river Marisia, and the survivors obtain land in Pannonia from Emperor Constantine, where they stay for about sixty years. That a similar name, slightly shifted in spelling, appears in Dio some 160 years before Visimar’s time is an argument for continuity. It remains an argument from similarity of name and geographic plausibility.
Jordanes also knows “Astringi” elsewhere (Getica 16, section 91) as auxiliaries of the Gothic king Ostrogotha, alongside Taifali and Carpi. Whether the same group is meant is disputed, as is whether this Ostrogotha was a single king. The encyclopaedic knowledge that treats the Hasdingi as a continuous Vandal tribe since the second century is thus really a chain: Dio (Astingi, second century), Jordanes (Asdingi, fourth century, but written down in the sixth) and later chroniclers. The name itself is regarded as Germanic and is usually linked to a word for “hair”, comparable to Old Norse haddr, the word for a woman’s long hair; the Hasdingi would then be the “long-haired”. That is the common interpretation, not evidence.
The Lacringi play no part in this chain. They do not appear in Jordanes. Whoever turns them into “Vandals” does so from their neighbourhood to the Astingi and from the idea that Dio is reporting on the Vandals as a whole. Dio himself speaks of Vandals only in a different context.
In his report on the peace under Emperor Commodus (180), Dio says Rome required that the Marcomanni not make war on the Iazyges, the Buri or the Vandili (Dio 73,2, older numbering 72,2). That is the place where Vandals occur in Dio, and there they stand as neighbours of the Buri, not as allies of the Astingi. The link to the Dacia episode is therefore indirect. Both the Historia Augusta (Lacringes et Burei) and Dio (Buri and Vandili) name the Buri next to a second group. The two lists are of different kinds and come from different times. That the Buri occur in both does not allow the conclusion that Lacringi and Vandili are the same; neither source equates them.
Eutropius, a historian of the fourth century, names Quadi, Vandals, Sarmatians and Suebi in connection with the Marcomannic War (Breviarium 8,13). There, too, no Lacringi appear. The picture of a large Vandal association under Marcus Aurelius thus arises mainly from Eutropius and Dio 73, not from 72,12.
Anyone looking for the roots of the Lacringi ends up with the Lugii, who have a post of their own (the Lugii). Tacitus writes in the Germania that the name of the Lugii extends over many states; as the most powerful he names the Harii, Helvecones, Manimi, Helisii and Naharvali (Germania 43). Cassius Dio mentions the Lugii (in his text Lygians) in the 90s of the first century, when they asked Domitian for help against the Suebi and received a small cavalry force (Dio 67,5). Neither source calls them Vandals.
The link between Lugii and Vandals is a classic research topic. Pliny the Elder names a group “Vandili” (the manuscripts waver between Vandili and Vindili), to which he reckons Burgundians, Varini, Charini and Gutones. Tacitus mentions the “Vandilii” among the ancient names in Germania 2. Ptolemy lists the Lugii with sub-groups but the Silingi separately (see the Silingi). The historian Reinhard Wenskus proposed that the name Vandili gradually replaced the name Lugii in Roman texts after the Marcomannic Wars; Walter Pohl and Kazimierz Godłowski urge caution because the link rests mainly on shared geography (so the summary of this research in the English Wikipedia; I have not seen the original works).
Where does that leave the Lacringi? I know of no direct equation of the Lacringi with the Lugii in any of the sources I could consult, and a similarity of name (Lug-, Lak-) would not be proof. All the sources show is that around 170 they appear between the Carpathian arc and the Danube, in a region where heirs of the Lugii are also suspected. That is a frame, not a result.
The Silingi, who have a detailed post of their own, appear in Ptolemy around the middle of the second century as “Silingai” south of the Semnones and next in the fifth century in Hydatius, there as Vandals with the byname Silingi. No relationship to the Lacringi is recorded. Both groups were later understood by scholars as parts of the Vandals, the Silingi with better grounds, since Hydatius names them so explicitly. Anyone who says the Lacringi were “like the Silingi” a subgroup transfers one source situation onto another that does not exist.
The comparison is useful all the same. For the Silingi we know a beginning (Ptolemy) and an end (Hydatius, 418). For the Lacringi we know only a moment. The name looks like a fragment of a process that no source narrates.
The Przeworsk culture, named after the find site Przeworsk in south-eastern Poland, existed from the third century BC into the fifth century AD. Its core area lay in the catchment of the upper Oder and Vistula. It is known above all for cremation burials, broken and bent weapon deposits and, in the Roman imperial period, finds of Roman imports. The archaeologist Bartosz Kontny describes for the time of the Marcomannic Wars that Przeworsk warriors probably took part in raids on the Roman frontier and that groups moved towards the upper Tisza; Roman swords and ring-mail remains in graves he reads as booty (so the summary of his chapter; I have not seen the full text).
Whether the Lacringi can be grasped archaeologically is open. Dio names no place, and without a place no group of finds can be assigned. That Przeworsk groups moved into the upper Tisza region fits the date of Dio’s scene but is no proof for the Lacringi. Wojciech Nowakowski, who has studied German archaeology in Poland, points out that the link between Przeworsk and Vandals appears only in late antique written sources (according to the summary in the German Wikipedia article on the Hasdingi). Godłowski likewise warns against treating the entire Przeworsk culture as Vandal. A site, a cemetery or a settlement labelled “Lacringi” would therefore be an assertion that neither the text nor the spade supports.
The area around Dacia in about 170 was densely occupied. The Costoboci, whom Dio’s Astingi displaced, had themselves made headlines only years earlier: around 170 they pushed across the Danube as far as Eleusis in Greece (so the German and English Wikipedia on the Marcomannic Wars). Their origin is disputed; the Cambridge Ancient History speaks of a people “of uncertain origin” north or north-east of the province of Dacia. The Lacringi would then have lived in an area with room for a displacement of the Costoboci that was still within reach of Rome.
The Buri, according to Tacitus, are to be sought behind the Marcomanni and Quadi. When Rome carried the war across the Danube from about 171, the Marcomanni and the Quadi stood at the centre. Marcus Aurelius died on 17 March 180 at Vindobona, today’s Vienna. His son Commodus made peace with Marcomanni and Quadi the same year and returned to Rome, where he celebrated a triumph on 22 October 180 (so the timeline of the English Wikipedia). The Lacringi no longer appear in these closing acts.
The Cotini are also an example of how Rome’s policy worked at the time: money and promises of land to split groups apart, in the same Dio chapter as the Lacringi. Elsewhere Dio reports (72,11) that some barbarians received land in Dacia, Pannonia, Moesia, Germany and even Italy. The Lacringi are not partners of that policy. Their appearance shows rather what they did against it: they defended their territory.
After Dio’s sentence the Lacringi vanish. The English Wikipedia does mention them as “possibly Vandals” in connection with third-century sources. I found no evidence for a mention in the third century, neither in Dio nor in the sources on the Gothic wars; I treat the claim as unverifiable. Nor does the name Lacringi appear in Jordanes or, in the summaries available to me, in the reports on Aurelian’s Danube war against Vandals (around 270/271) and on the settlement of Vandals under Probus (278, after Zosimus); I did not read the originals there myself.
The Hasdingi, by contrast, can be followed. Jordanes places them in the fourth century on the Marisia (today the Mureș), later in Pannonia. They crossed the Rhine in 406, reached Spain in 409 and crossed to North Africa in 429 under Geiseric. After the fall of the Silingi in 418 they seem to have taken in the survivors (see the Silingi and the Vandals). For the Lacringi there is no corresponding trace. It is possible that they merged into other groups, that they lived on under another name, or that their name simply never appears again in any surviving source. Which of these is true cannot be judged.
When Gepids and Goths later shaped the Carpathian region, the old names were obsolete. Jordanes recalls areas the Gepids later settled, and the Gothic king Geberich, with whom the Goths pushed into the region. For the second century these reports help only to a limited degree.
The name Lacringi contains the Germanic suffix -ing, which designates groups after a name-giver or a characteristic, as in Hasdingi, Silingi or Thuringians. I know of no interpretation of the stem “Lakr-”, and I found none in the sources I consulted. Attempts to link it to Slavic or other names turn up in reader comments, not in specialist literature. The suffix suggests the name is Germanic in form; it gives no language or origin. Names that sound Germanic were also applied in Roman writing to groups that spoke something quite different. That holds for the Cotini, of whom Tacitus already remarks that they do not speak Germanic.
Part of the research history is that equations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mostly ran through similarity of names. Today ethnogenesis, the emergence of groups as a process rather than the migration of ready-made peoples, is the standard frame; the German Wikipedia article on the Vandals cites, among others, Helmut Castritius, Volker Bierbrauer, Roland Steinacher and Guido Berndt as references. For the Lacringi these works above all do one thing: they show that a name in Dio does not automatically mean a lasting people, but a group that a Roman author called by that name at a particular moment.
Around 171/172, by the usual dating, a group called the Lacringi lived near the Roman province of Dacia. It was strong enough to beat the Astingi unprepared, and it feared that a Roman governor might lead strangers into its land. The sources carry no more than these sentences. The rest, whether subgroup, league, Vandal, Lugian or Przeworsk, is interpretation.
That is exactly why it is worth not smoothing the case over. The Lacringi are no proof of a Vandal three-way division into Hasdingi, Silingi and Lacringi. They are an example that in late antiquity and the centuries before it there were groups of which we know only that they existed. Readers who want to go further will find the frame of the war with the Marcomanni, the Quadi and the Suebi, the league in the east with the Lugii, and the comparison with the Silingi, a subgroup whose trace can at least be grasped at both ends.
The Silingi · The Vandals · The Lugii · The Marcomanni · The Gepids.
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