Dacia

“ The history of the Roman occupation of Dacia, which lasted from the time of Trajan until it was evacuated by Aurelian, [102] affords little to interest the reader. Dacia was, so to speak, the outwork of the Empire which served to hold the barbarians at bay during its 'decline and fall;' and the country was more prosperous than during the period of its independence, when the tribes were constantly at war with one another and there was no settled government. ”

“ In one way the land is to this day more Roman than Spain or Gaul, as its people still call themselves by the Roman name. Dacia, in fact, though geographically belonging to the Eastern half of the Empire, stood in the same position as the Western provinces. Greek influences had not reached so far north, nor was there in Dacia any old-standing native civilization, such as there was in Syria and Egypt. ”

“ The villages of ancient Dacia were romanized by the natural advance of the Romans, as in the Balkans they assumed the same Roman elements: in their private lives, however, very little can have been changed. We know nothing of the organisation of the Dacian rural community, but it is probable that the «davas» in Dacia and the « paras» in the Balkans were ruled by local chiefs who were in their turn the vassals of valley-princes, the supreme leader being a king of the type of Decebalus:. ”

“ Towards the end of the first century Trajan conquered Dacia, the modern Wallachia, and, in pursuance of the old Roman policy, the conquerors endeavoured to confirm their hold upon the country by the settlement of Latin colonists and by the introduction of the Latin language. ♦250 A.D.♦ The Latinisation of Dacia was, however, interrupted by the invasion of the Goths, a warlike horde lured by the prospect of reaping where the peaceful peasantry of Dacia had sown under the protection of the Roman eagles. They met with no opposition in the newly and imperfectly settled province ”

“ The new and unsettled province of Dacia was neither strong enough to resist, nor rich enough to satiate, the rapaciousness of the barbarians. As long as the remote banks of the Niester were considered as the boundary of the Roman power, the fortifications of the Lower Danube were more carelessly guarded, and the inhabitants of Mæsia lived in supine security, fondly conceiving themselves at an inaccessible distance from any barbarian invaders. The irruptions of the Goths, under the reign of Philip, fatally convinced them of their mistake. ”

“ Dacia. From the 6th to the 12th century, wave after wave of barbarian conquerors, Goths, Tatars, Slavs and others, passed over the country, and, according to one school of historians, almost obliterated its original Daco-Roman population; the modern Vlachs, on this theory, representing a later body of immigrants from Transdanubian territory. According to others, the ancient inhabitants were, at worst, only submerged for a time, and their direct descendants are the Rumans of to-day. Each of these conflicting views is supported by strong evidence ”

“ Balbinus protested. "Come down to facts. How do you hold Dacia now? If what you say is true it is already nearly as well worth looting as Gaul and will soon be richer. How do you hold off all those desperate nomads of the north? You can't set up a cordon of legionaries shoulder to shoulder, over a thousand miles of frontier. You can't ditch, stockade and tower any such endless line of defense. You can't even have posts close together. How do you hold off the raiders?"
"The legions do it handily," said Proculus. "Hold them off and push them back too." ”

“ He next advanced into the midst of the hostile country, took the capital of the Dacians, and reduced them to subjection. Decebalus, in despair, fell by his own hand. All Dacia, comprising the modern countries of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania, was made a Roman province; and several Roman colonies were planted among the barbarians, thus for the first time preparing for the spread of civilization in that savage country. Trajan now returned to Rome, to triumph a second time for his Dacian successes. ”

“ In this view, the modern Roumans would be the descendants of Trajan's colonists and of Dacians who had learned of them to adopt the speech and manners of Rome. But when we remember that Dacia was the first Roman province to be given up—that the modern Roumania was for ages the highway of every barbarian tribe on its way from the East to the West—that the land has been conquered and settled and forsaken over and over again—it would be passing strange if this should be the one land, and its people the one race, to keep the Latin tongue when it has been forgotten in all the neighboring countries. ”

“ In 129, under Hadrian, Dacia was divided into Dacia Superior and Inferior, the former comprising Transylvania, the latter Little Walachia, with procurators, probably both under the same praetorian legate (according to Brandis, the procurator of Dacia inferior was independent, but see A. Domaszewski in Rheinisches Museum, xlviii., 1893) . Marcus Aurelius redivided it into three (tres Daciae) : Porolissensis, from the chief town Porolissum (near Mojrad) , Apulensis from Apulum and Maluensis (site unknown) . ”

“ The seriousness of this position was that technically the Dacia was now an American ship, for an American citizen owned her, she carried an American crew, she bore on her flagstaff the American flag, and she had been admitted to American registry under a law recently passed by Congress. How could the United States sit by quietly and permit this seizure to take place? When the Dacia sailed on January 23rd the excitement was keen; the voyage had obtained a vast amount of newspaper advertising, and the eyes of the world were fixed upon her. ”

“ Rewards and thanks followed his successes; the king regarded him as the preserver of his throne, and considered no rewards too great or too good for the Christian warrior. The rewards of the good are ever sources of envy to the wicked. So was it at the court of the Dacian king. The prosperity of Sir Tyrius was gall and wormwood to a knight of Dacia, Sir Plebeus, who, until the coming of this stranger, had been looked upon as the greatest warrior of the Dacian people. To envy succeeded hatred, to hatred falsehood. ”

“ Several other petty independent states arose at the same time in various parts of Dacia; but they were frequently annexed to the same sceptre, at other periods dismembered, according to the warlike ardour or indolence and incapacity of their various chiefs. Their general system, however, consisted in making war against the Romans of the lower empire, in which they were seconded by the Slaves and Bulgarians of Mæsia, whom they looked upon as their natural allies. ”

“ Emigrants from crowded Italy would demand leave to form a colony, traders would hasten in their footsteps, and soon another responsibility of land and lives, perhaps with no natural protection of river, sea, or mountains, would be added to Rome’s burden of government. Such was the fertile province of Dacia, north of the Danube, a notable gain in territory, but yet a future source of weakness. ”

“ A few years later, when Alexander Severus was on the throne, they began to make incursions into Dacia. During the reign of Philip the Arabian (A. D. 244-249) they passed through Dacia, crossed the Danube, and invaded Mœsia (modern Bulgaria) . In their next invasion (A. D. 251) they passed the Balkans, defeated the Romans in two terrible battles, the last of which cost the reigning Emperor, Decius, his life, and destroyed the city of Philippopolis, with 100,000 of its people. ”

“ They belonged to the Thracian group of nations, and were identical with the Getæ. They inhabited the country which was bordered on the south by the Danube and Mœsia. They were engaged in frequent wars with the Romans, and obtained a decided advantage, in the reign of Domitian, under their king Decebalus. The honor of the empire was so far tarnished as to pay a tribute to Dacia, but Trajan resolved to wipe away the disgrace, and headed himself an expedition into this distant country, A.D. 101, with eighty thousand veterans, subdued Decebalus, and added Dacia to the provinces of the empire. ”

“ And the true state of things was confessed in his abandonment of Trajan’s great Province of Dacia. Aurelian withdrew [1369] the army and the provincials, whom he settled south of the Danube in Moesia; putting the best face he could on this retirement by giving Moesia the name of Dacia.
These phenomena attest an obvious truth, sometimes ignored, that territorial expansion needs something more than military conquest to give it lasting effect. In order to hold conquered lands the conquerors must either occupy them or thoroughly assimilate the native population. ”

“ This Roman element south of the Danube had further received a great increase at the expense of Trajan's colonial foundation to the north when Aurelian established his New Dacia on the Moesian side of the river. On the other hand, the analogy supplied by the withdrawal of the Roman provincials from Riparian Noricum tells against the assumption that the official withdrawal of the Roman colonists of Trajan's Dacia by Aurelian entailed the entire evacuation of the Carpathian regions by their Latin-speaking inhabitants. ”

“ From its geographical position, Dacia formed an effective counterpoise to the growing influence upon Roman policy of the Eastern provinces, and it might have proved a valuable outpost for a religion which was always looked upon with hostility by the Greek-speaking subjects of Rome. Unfortunately, however, a religion which allies itself with the State must suffer from its ally’s reverses as well as profit by its good fortunes, and so the Mithraists found. ”

“ A Roman emperor meets a shameful death in captivity among the Parthians; Dacia, Trajan’s hard-won conquest, has to be abandoned and its inhabitants, who were spared by the enemy, transplanted to the southern bank of the Danube. ”

“ But neither the one nor the other took place; moreover, at that very time the Dacian state, created by the vigorous hand of Burebista, again went to pieces; internal troubles, perhaps also the attacks from the north by the Germanic Bastarnae and by the Sarmatian tribes that subsequently environed Dacia on all sides, prevented the Dacians from interfering in the Roman civil war, in the decision of which their future also was at stake. ”

“ Some former inhabitants of Dacia, joined by a number of Slaves and Bulgarians, separated from the new settlers, and went to the lower part of Dacia lying between 11the rivers Olt and Danube, where they fixed their habitations. They formed themselves into a nation, and chose for their chief one Bessarabba, to whom they gave the Slavonic title of Bann or regent. The country within his jurisdiction was called Bannat; and it retains to this day the name of Bannat of Crayova, the latter being that of its present capital. ”

“ Modern geographers draw exactly the same line (about 19° E. of Greenwich) as the boundary of Barca and Tripoli. On the Northern shore of the Mediterranean the matter is a little more complicated. Noricum, Pannonia, Savia, and Dalmatia belonged to the West, and Dacia—not the original but the later province of Dacia—to the East. This gives us for the frontier of the Western Empire the Danube as far as Belgrade, and on the Adriatic the modern town of Lissa. ”

“ It will, I fear, be a long time before one can again apply to Roumania the epithet—Dacia Feli—Happy Dacia—which it bore in the days of long ago, when it was one of the most flourishing colonies of the Roman Empire. [22] But the self-reliant people of Roumania are not depressed or discouraged by the present condition of their war-tried country. These descendants of the Dacians, whom the Romans called “the most warlike of men,” have abiding confidence in their recuperative power and their ability to make good their claim to an honorable position among the nations of the civilized world. ”

“ The Dacians, especially of Dacia Trajana, Hungary, and Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia, are known to us chiefly by the bas-reliefs on the Trajan Column. It was built by that emperor, who, like Hadrian, followed in the footsteps of Divus Cæsar, to commemorate the conquests of a.d. 103–104; and it dates three years before his death in a.d. 114. The Dacian Sword was somewhat sickle-shaped, with an inner edge, like the oldest Greek and its model, the Egyptian Khopsh. A Dacian Sword on the trophy belonging to Dr. Gregorutti, of Papiriano, is a curved sabre without a cross-bar. ”

“ They embraced the Christian religion, and established it in Dacia; since when, to the present moment, it has never ceased to be predominant amongst its inhabitants.
In 376, the Hunns, having over-run the countries possessed by the Goths, forced Athanaric, King of the Vizigoths, to retire with all his forces to that part of Dacia, situated between the rivers Dniester and Danube, now called Moldavia. He raised a wall between the latter river and the Pruth, by which he thought himself sufficiently protected against the attacks of his enemies. The Hunns, however, were not stopped by it ”

“ All the other races, old and new, from the Albanian to the Ottoman, are still there, each keeping its national being and its national speech. And in one part of the ancient Dacia we must add quite a distinct element, the element of Teutonic occupation in a form unlike any in which we see it in the West, in the shape of the Saxons of Transsilvania. ”