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 were used for branches of one people speaking closely related tongues; Greek writers tended to say Getae, Latin ones Dacians. They were a settled, metal-working society of fortified hill citadels, governed at its height by a warrior nobility and a priesthood that the sources treat as a single learned order.

The political kingdom had a short and intense life. Burebista welded the tribes into a power strong enough to alarm Rome in the first century BCE; after a period of fragmentation it was rebuilt by Decebalus, whose wars against the emperors Domitian and then Trajan ended in the fall of the mountain capital, Sarmizegetusa, and the king’s suicide. Trajan’s two campaigns, of 101–102 and 105–106, are carved in spiral relief up the column that still stands in Rome. What followed was a Roman province, and the question of how far the conquered population was replaced or absorbed — the origin dispute behind modern Romanian identity — remains argued by historians rather than settled.

For the history of religion the Getae matter chiefly for one belief, reported by outsiders. Herodotus writes that they held themselves to be immortal: that the dead did not perish but went to a divine being he calls Zalmoxis, and that every few years they dispatched a chosen messenger to him by throwing the man onto upturned spears, to carry their needs to the god. Herodotus passes on, but does not vouch for, a Greek rumour that Zalmoxis had been a mortal — a former slave of Pythagoras — who staged his own death and return to convince his people of survival beyond it. Whether Zalmoxis was god, deified man, or priest-king, the Greek sources could not agree, and modern scholarship cannot recover the cult from behind them.

The figure drew the Greeks because it touched their own preoccupations. Plato, in the Charmides, has Socrates report a Thracian physician of Zalmoxis who taught that body and soul must be treated together, and that the cure begins with the soul through certain “charms” — a passage later readers have used to align the Getic teaching with the Pythagorean and Orphic currents that promised the soul a destiny after death. Some later writers credited the Dacian priests with astronomy and a withdrawn, ascetic life. How much of this is observation and how much is the familiar Greek habit of finding its own mysteries among distant peoples is impossible to weigh; the Dacians left no scripture of their own, and burned their citadels rather than surrender them. What survives is a report, from the people who conquered or who wrote them down, of a nation that was said not to fear death.

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

→ Related: Neoplatonism