It is the dream of every ancient historian that some new discovery will solve a mystery of the past – some newly discovered fragment of a lost historian which will make everything clear. Such circumstances are very rare, but the Gothic War of Decius is one recent occasion where exactly the new discovery historians dream of took place. Between 2007 and 2009, a research project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) on Greek palimpsests of the Austrian National Library in Vienna, discovered fragments of an unknown ancient text on eight pages of a medieval (Byzantine) manuscript from the 11th century.

The original text had been washed off in the 13th century and the parchment was reused for a new text (a palimpsest). Being able to identify about 15 per cent of the text, the lead researcher Jana Grusková  identified these pages as probably coming from Dexippus’ history known as the Scythica. Pairing with the Dexippus specialist Gunther Martin, in 2012-2015, the two deciphered 60 per cent of the fragments which they then published and called Scythica Vindobonensia or Dexippus Vindobonensis. And the fragments give us details which we otherwise would not have.