Who is BACVRA Mentioned in British Epigraphic Sources?

Abstract

The surviving information about Bacurius the Iberian, an important Georgian figure known to historiography from late antique Greco-Roman sources, is valuable but fragmentary. The main goal of this article is to reconstruct, based on British epigraphic sources, a certain period from Bacurius’ life (368-378 AD) and his connections with the Roman military and political elite of that time.

BACVRA should be a diminutive of Georgian ‘Bacur’. ‘-a’ is one of the most common diminutives suffixes both in old and modern Georgian. The author of this article believes that these inscriptions should belong to Bacurius the Iberian, a contemporary of the emperors Valens and Theodosius the Great, who appears in Greco-Roman sources between 368 and 394 as a high-ranking Roman military officer.