Highlights of Romanian History I. [antikvár]

DACIANS AND ROMANS IN TRAJAN'S PROVINCE Hadrian Daicoviciu Ancient sources ^ place the boundaries of the Daco-Getae at the Slovak Mits. and the Northern Carpathians, on the Middle and Lower Danube, on the western coast of Pontus Euxinus and the Dniester. Inside this vast geographical area the Dacians or Getae^ must be looked upon as autochthonous because their formation as a people took place in the respective zone. Dacian ethnogenesis still has some obsctire facets but what is certain is the fact that the tribes of pastoralists who underwent the process of Indo-Europenization in the Aeneolithic on these territories could not be regarded yet as Dacian or Getic. Herodotus ^ will be the first to present the Getae as a distinct branch of the large Thracian people allowing us to consider them as founders and bearers of the cultures belonging to the Early Iron Age and to conclude that the Daco-Getae did not come from elsewhere as a distinct^ already constituted population, but were born here in the Carpatho-Danubian-Pontic area. Naturally, all along their millenary history, the Daco-Getae experienced periods of expansion as well as periods of territorial limitation. About the middle of the 1st century B. 0., under king Burebista, the boun-darie.s of the Dacian kingdorri founded by him reach far beyong the above-mentioned limits, to Olbia and Haemus. On the other hand, however, at various periods, groups of Scythians, Illyrians, Thracians, Celts, Bas-tarna« and Sarmatians come to settle on the territory of Dacia. . At the beginning of the 2nd century A. D., around the date of the Pioman conquest, the borders of Dacia were narrower than at the time of Burebista and even of Augustus' reign. The Tisa plain was occupied by the Sarmatian lazyges. The Sarmatian Eoxolani had infiltrated into the area between the Dniester and the Prut whereas Dobruja was part of the Roman province, Moesia Inferior. In the north-Danubian space it occupied, the Dacian world was ethnically homogeneous as the late-coming alogeneous populations (the Celts in Transylvania, the Bastaruae in Moldavia) had been assimilated by the aboriginals. The late stage of the La Téne period (1st century B. C. — 1st century A. D.) marked the acme of Daco-Getic* civilization along three lines. Along the material, technical and economic one, this was the period of the creation of an oppidan-type civilization characterized by the devel- ' Caesar, Oe bello Gallico, VI, 25; Strabo, VII, 3, 1; Appian, Illyrica, 22. ® Strabo, VII, 3, 13, unequivocally affirms that the Dacians and the Gelae spoke the same language. They formed, therefore, a single people. As regards the use of these two ethnic names in ancient sources see C. Daicoviciu in IstRom, I, pp. 257—259. Since Latin authors use mainly the name of Dacians and the present study deals with the Roman epoch we shall use their ethnicon. = IV, 93. * See H. Daicoviciu in "ActaMN", V, 1968, pp. 51-58.