Dacia

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Dacia was the kingdom of the Dacians and the Getae, the Thraco-Getic peoples who held the lands north of the lower Danube — most of modern Romania and the Carpathian basin — from roughly the second century before the Common Era until the Roman conquest of 106. The two names belonged to branches of one people speaking closely related tongues: Greek writers, looking up the river from the Black Sea coast, said Getae; Latin writers, looking across it from the provinces of Moesia, said Daci. The doubling is the first thing to notice about this kingdom, because it is a doubling of witnesses, not of nations. Almost nothing of Dacia comes down in a Dacian voice. It comes down in two foreign ones, Greek and Roman, that did not always describe the same thing and never described it from inside.

What the witnesses agree on is the shape of the society. This was no roving confederation of herders but a settled, metal-working power of fortified hill citadels, its strongholds ringed in the Orăștie Mountains around the mountain capital of Sarmizegetusa Regia, built on a ridge above twelve hundred meters and laid out with terraced sanctuaries, paved roads, and a water system carried in ceramic pipe. Dacian smiths worked iron and gold; the kingdom sat on the silver and gold of the Carpathians, and its coinage and its hoards both bear witness to the wealth that drew Rome’s eye. Above the craftsmen and farmers stood a warrior nobility — the tarabostes, the cap-wearers, set apart from the comati, the long-haired commons — and beside the nobility, sharing in its authority, a priesthood that the Greek and Roman sources treat as a single learned order, custodians of the calendar, of the high sanctuaries, and of the teaching about the soul for which the Getae became known.

The kingdom’s short and violent arc

The political kingdom had a brief, concentrated life, bracketed by two strong kings and broken in the middle. The first was Burebista, who in the first century BCE — he ruled from about 82 to 44 — welded the scattered tribes into a single power that reached, at its height, from the Adriatic toward the Black Sea and pressed hard enough on the Greek cities of the western Pontus and on Rome’s Danube frontier to make him a name in Roman politics. He is remembered as acting in concert with a chief priest, Deceneus, credited by later writers with reforming the Getae, curbing their drinking by ordering the vines uprooted, and schooling the nobility in astronomy and a withdrawn, disciplined life — a report in which the political and the priestly are already fused. Burebista was murdered in 44 BCE, the same year as Caesar, and his kingdom split into pieces.

It was rebuilt, a century and a half later, by Decebalus, who gathered the fragments again and made Dacia once more a threat that an emperor could not ignore. Coming to power in the 80s CE, he turned back the armies of Domitian — his forces killed Oppius Sabinus, the governor of Moesia, and bloodied a punitive Roman expedition — and extracted from Rome a peace so favorable, with subsidies and engineers sent north, that it read in the capital as a humiliation. Trajan came to undo it. His two campaigns, the Dacian Wars of 101–102 and 105–106, are the best-documented episodes in the kingdom’s history precisely because Rome made monuments of them. The first war ground Decebalus down to a harsh treaty; the second answered his rearming with a war of annihilation. Roman columns pushed up into the mountains across a great stone bridge thrown over the Danube at Drobeta by Apollodorus of Damascus, reduced the citadels one by one, and besieged Sarmizegetusa Regia, cutting its water before the walls fell in 106. Decebalus fled into the hills and, run down by Roman cavalry, cut his own throat rather than be taken — a scene carved on the column, the cornered king with the sword at his neck. His treasure was dragged from the bed of a diverted river; his kingdom became the Roman province of Dacia.

The whole arc is wound, scene by scene, up the spiral of Trajan’s Column, the marble shaft dedicated in Rome in 113, whose continuous relief band climbs from the crossing of the Danube to the final pacification in more than a hundred and fifty episodes. It is the fullest visual record of the war and, like the rest of the evidence, a record made by the conqueror: the Dacians appear in it as the defeated, brave and doomed, their dragon-headed draco standards streaming above the press, their king dying nobly so that Rome’s victory should look the weightier. What became of the conquered population — how far it was killed, enslaved, driven off, or absorbed into the Latin-speaking province settled with colonists from across the empire — is the historical question behind the modern dispute over Romanian origins, argued between an autochthonist school that sees the Romanians as Daco-Romans formed in place from natives and colonists and an immigrationist school that places their formation south of the Danube and a later migration north. The dispute is old, much freighted with national feeling, and unsettled on the evidence; it bears on the afterlife of the province, not on the kingdom that fell.

The Getae who held themselves immortal

For the history of religion the Getae matter chiefly for one thing, reported by outsiders and impossible to recover from anywhere else. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, calls them the bravest and most upright of the Thracians and says of them that they make themselves immortal — meaning not that they cannot die but that they hold death to be a passage rather than an ending. The dead do not perish; they go to a divine being he names Zalmoxis, whom some of the Getae, he adds, call Gebeleizis. And once in every five years, by his account, they send this being a messenger. They choose a man by lot, charge him aloud with what the people need, and then, while three of them hold spears upright, the rest fling him into the air to fall upon the points. If he is killed by the fall, the god is held to be favorable; if he lives, they blame the messenger himself as a bad man and choose another. The detail is the kind Herodotus does not invent and does not soften — a rite that treats a violent death as a delivery, an envoy dispatched to a god who receives the dead.

Herodotus then passes on, without vouching for it, a second story he had from the Greeks who lived along the Black Sea and the Hellespont. By their telling Zalmoxis had been no god at all but a man, once a slave of Pythagoras on Samos, who won his freedom, grew rich, and went home to a Thrace he found coarse, bringing with him the Ionian arts and the doctrine that neither he nor his guests nor their descendants would truly die. To fix the teaching, the story goes, he built himself an underground chamber, withdrew into it, and vanished for three years while the Getae mourned him for dead; in the fourth year he reappeared, and what he had taught was believed thereafter. Herodotus reports the tale and declines it in the same breath: he neither disbelieves nor wholly believes the business of the underground chamber, and for his own part he thinks that Zalmoxis, if he ever lived, lived long before Pythagoras. The refusal is as important as the report. It is the earliest and clearest case of the source-critical problem that hangs over the whole cult: every word of it is Greek, and the Greeks could not agree whether Zalmoxis was a god the Getae had always had, a man they raised to godhead, or a priest-king who had ruled and taught them. The cult cannot be reached from behind the reports, because the reports are all there is.

That uncertainty is itself a clue to what was happening in the telling. The slave-of-Pythagoras story is a familiar Hellenic move — explaining a foreign god as a borrowed and deified human, and pinning a distant people’s wisdom onto a Greek master so that the wisdom can be claimed as Greek. The same move attached two other northern figures to Pythagoras’s school: Abaris the Hyperborean, who rode the arrow given him by Apollo, and Aristeas of Proconnesus, whose soul was said to leave and re-enter his body. The Getic god, the Hyperborean priest, and the wandering soul of Aristeas were drawn into one constellation around the man of Samos, and the drawing tells more about Greek ideas of the soul than about anything on the Danube. The historian Leonid Zhmud has argued that Pythagoras never went north at all, and that it was the north that was brought to him — the figures imported into his legend rather than the reverse.

The whole that must be healed: Zalmoxis in the philosophers

The figure drew the philosophers because it touched their own deepest preoccupation, the standing of the soul over the body. Plato, in the Charmides, has Socrates say that he learned a charm for the headache, while on campaign, from one of the physicians of the Thracian king Zalmoxis — physicians, in Jowett’s rendering of the hosted text, so skilled that they can even confer immortality. The Thracian’s teaching, as Socrates relays it, is that the Greek doctors fail because they treat the part and ignore the whole: “as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul; and this,” he said, “is the reason why the cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they are ignorant of the whole.” Health begins, on this account, from the soul, and the soul is treated with charms, and the charms are fair words. The same dialogue sets Zalmoxis beside Abaris the Hyperborean as a source of such charms, keeping the northern constellation intact.

Whatever the Charmides preserves of any actual Getic medicine — and it may preserve nothing but the name — it gave the later tradition a fixed point. Here the wild messenger flung on the spears is gone, and in its place stands a doctor of the whole person who heals the body by way of the soul, a figure readers could line up with the Pythagorean and Orphic currents that promised the soul a destiny beyond the body. Those currents ran close. The Pythagorean school taught the transmigration of the soul through successive lives — the best-attested of all its early doctrines, already known to Herodotus — and the Orphic poems, treated more fully under Thrace, taught the soul’s divine origin, its imprisonment in the body, and its long round of rebirths toward release. The ancient sources rarely held Orphic and Pythagorean transmigration apart, and the Zalmoxis legend, which makes a Getic god the pupil of Pythagoras, is one of the knots in which they are tied. Later writers, reaching back through Neoplatonism for the roots of the mysteries, kept the dignified Zalmoxis of the Charmides alive as a teacher of the soul’s survival, and the disappearance-and-return of the underground chamber was read, in time, less as a conjuror’s trick than as the trace of an initiation — a staged death and rebirth of the kind the mystery cults enacted, the descent and the reappearance founding a teaching about immortality.

To this the sources add a thinner report of the priests themselves: that they practiced astronomy, lived apart, abstained — a withdrawn, ascetic order — among the names the late notices preserve for its grades are ktistai, the founders, and kapnobatai, the smoke-walkers, men set aside from marriage and meat. How much of this is observation of a real Getic priesthood and how much the familiar habit of finding one’s own mysteries among distant peoples cannot be weighed, because the Dacians left no scripture against which to check it. They wrote almost nothing; what they built they burned rather than yield, firing their own citadels ahead of the legions.

Sources and the source-critical problem

Everything known of Dacian religion stands on a narrow and one-sided base, and the first duty of any account is to say so. The foundational text is Herodotus, whose Histories (4.93–96) supply the immortality, the messenger on the spears, the name Gebeleizis, and the rationalizing slave-of-Pythagoras story together with the historian’s own refusal of it; the passage can be read in the public-domain Godley translation of Book IV. The second is Plato’s Charmides, where the Thracian physician of Zalmoxis teaches the healing of the whole, available in the Jowett translation. Around these cluster the later notices — Strabo on Burebista and the priest Deceneus, the Gothic history of Jordanes, which folds the Getae into the Goths and inflates the priesthood into a college of philosophers, and the Neoplatonists who kept Zalmoxis among the wise — each further from the kingdom in time and each shaped by its own ends.

The decisive feature of this record is that it is wholly external. The Getae produced no literature and the Dacian language survives only in names, glosses, and a scatter of plant-words; the immortality-cult is known only as Greeks and Romans chose to render it, and the renderings disagree at the root, unable to settle whether Zalmoxis was god, deified man, or priest-king. The standard comparative study, Mircea Eliade’s Zalmoxis, the Vanishing God (University of Chicago Press, 1972; first published in French as De Zalmoxis à Genghis-Khan, 1970), sets the underground disappearance among the wider patterns of disappearance and return while warning how little can be reconstructed beneath the Greek overlay. Leonid Zhmud’s “Pythagoras’ Northern Connections: Zalmoxis, Abaris, Aristeas” (Classical Quarterly 66.2, 2016) traces how the Greek tradition bound these three northern figures to Pythagoras and argues that the binding was the Greeks’ work, not a memory of contact. For the material kingdom rather than the legend, Ioana A. Oltean’s Dacia: Landscape, Colonisation and Romanisation (Routledge, 2007) reads the citadels, settlements, and field systems through landscape archaeology, and the survey article Origin of the Romanians lays out, with its bibliography, the long and politically charged debate over continuity that the conquest left behind — a dispute to be reported in both its cases and arbitrated in neither.

The Getae thus reach the historical imagination doubly mediated: through Greek writers who needed a frontier people to carry the doctrine that the soul outlasts the body, and through Roman ones who needed a brave enemy to make a conquest worth a column. Between the two the kingdom keeps its own counsel. What can be said with confidence is small and strange and constant across the witnesses, hostile and admiring alike: that here was a nation on the Danube, walled into its mountains, ruled by warriors and a priesthood of the soul, which sent its dead to a god by name and met death itself — the messenger’s, the king’s at the cliff’s edge, the citadel’s in flame — as a thing it had decided not to fear.

→ In the library: Plato — Charmides (Jowett, 1892)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Zalmoxis · Thrace · Herodotus · Plato · Socrates · Pythagoras · Pythagoreanism · Soul · Reincarnation · Immortality · Mystery Religions · Roman Empire · Asceticism · Eschatology