Dacia and Rome

Romania's history doesn't begin with Romania. It begins with a Thracian kingdom north of the Danube that had to be conquered twice by Rome — and with a language that decided not to die when Rome left.

Before Rome: the Dacian kingdom

The territory that is now Romania was inhabited during the first millennium BC by Thracian peoples — culturally related to those south of the Danube, but split into countless tribes. Those who remained north of the river became known as Getae (in Greek sources) or Dacians (in Roman ones). In the 1st century BC, under King Burebista (82-44 BC), those tribes are unified for the first time: a kingdom emerges that stretches from Bohemia to the Black Sea, large enough to alarm Rome. Caesar was seriously considering a campaign against Burebista when he was assassinated on the Ides of March.

The kingdom fragmented after Burebista’s death, but it reconstituted itself a hundred and fifty years later under another king: Decebalus (87-106 AD). His capital, Sarmizegetusa Regia, high in the Orăștie mountains, was a citadel of stone and timber with circular sanctuaries of astronomical orientation — remains visible today and listed as World Heritage. The Dacians had writing, minted their own coinage, exported gold and worked iron. Their religion, dominated by the semi-legendary figure of Zalmoxis, mixed soul immortality with sky cult. They were not a barbarian people on the margins of classical civilization: they were an alternative to it.

Trajan’s two wars

Domitian had signed a humiliating peace with the Dacians in 89 AD, paying them tribute in exchange for not crossing the Danube. When Trajan came to the throne, he decided to cancel it. The first Dacian war (101-102) ended in a new peace which Decebalus violated as soon as Rome turned its attention elsewhere. The second (105-106) was total: two years of campaign, a colossal bridge over the Danube designed by Apollodorus of Damascus, and the final fall of Sarmizegetusa. Decebalus committed suicide by cutting his throat rather than be captured alive. The whole war is narrated, scene by scene, in the 155 panels of the helical relief on Trajan’s Column in Rome — the most detailed graphic record of any Roman military campaign.

The booty was immense. The historian Joannes Lydus, citing Crito (Trajan’s personal physician), speaks of 165 tonnes of gold and 331 of silver — figures probably exaggerated but indicative: Trajan financed with Dacian wealth the Forums and markets that bear his name in Rome, and celebrated 123 consecutive days of public games. Dacia became a Roman province — the Empire’s last great acquisition — and filled with colonists from everywhere: from the Mediterranean, from North Africa, from Asia Minor. The name given to them in inscriptions is telling: ex toto orbe Romano, “from the whole Roman world”.

Latinization and abandonment

The province lasted 165 years. As short as a blink in imperial terms — and yet enough to change the language of the country definitively. The explanation is density: colonization was intense (though Roman sources exaggerate when speaking of Dacian “extermination”), the gold mines of western Transylvania employed thousands of imported miners, and the network of paved roads integrated the territory into the imperial system.

In 271 AD, with the Empire harried by the Goths, Aurelian abandoned Dacia. He ordered the legions and administrative apparatus to withdraw south of the Danube. But the rural population — peasants, shepherds, miners — did not move. The dominant hypothesis in Romanian historiography, known as “Daco-Roman continuity”, holds that this population kept the Latin language alive over the following centuries, isolated in valleys and mountains. The alternative hypothesis, defended mainly by Hungarian historiography, proposes that Romanian was actually born south of the Danube and only returned north in the Middle Ages. The argument is old, ideological and, given the nature of the archaeological record, unsolvable.

What is verifiable is the following: when Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars and Slavs passed over the territory for a thousand years, the Latin language survived — rural, spoken by shepherds, without prestige, without a state, without a Latin Church. All neighboring peoples ended up speaking Slavic, Greek or Magyar. The Romanians did not. When in the 19th century nationalist intellectuals begin to build the narrative of Romania, it rests on that double heritage — Dacian and Roman. Hence the very name: român, Roman. And hence why Trajan’s Column remains, eighteen centuries later, the founding monument of a country that did not exist when it was raised.