Tiberius Claudius Maximus

Tiberius Claudius Maximus was a Roman cavalryman whose career is known from the detailed tombstone he commissioned at Philippi. He served under Domitian and Trajan, received military decorations and took part in the Dacian Wars. During the final pursuit of Decebalus, he reached the Dacian king after his suicide, severed his head and presented it to Trajan. He later served in the Parthian campaign.

Maximus’s funerary inscription is unusually valuable because it records a rank-and-file soldier’s progression through the Roman army in detail. His claim to have captured the dying Decebalus and carried the king’s head to Trajan links the monument directly to imagery preserved on Trajan’s Column. The inscription therefore provides rare evidence for individual experience within the emperor’s Dacian and eastern campaigns.

In Simon Turney’s The Iron Gates (Rider of Rome), Tiberius Claudius Maximus, newly assigned to the auxiliary cavalry, returns to terrain associated with an earlier defeat and with memories he has tried to master.