The Dacians

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High in the Şureanu range of the southern Carpathians, on a ridge above a thousand meters, the ground is still terraced where a people who left almost no writing once leveled it for stone. The walls were laid in a manner the Romans named for the men who built it — the murus dacicus, two faces of dressed blocks with a rubble core, the faces bound back to the fill by squared timber beams set in cut sockets. Below the citadel the terraces carried sanctuaries: rows of stone and timber column-bases set in rectangles and circles, and at the heart of the sacred zone a disc of andesite cut into radiating sectors, a thing the excavators called the andesite sun. This was Sarmizegetusa Regia, the seat of the kings of the Dacians, and the people who raised it are known to history chiefly through the empire that destroyed it.

The Dacians — Daci to the Latin writers — were the northern Thracians of the inner Carpathian lands, of Transylvania and the high country between the mountains and the Danube. They were kin to the Getae of the lower river, so near in speech and custom that the ancients treated them as one stock under two names: Strabo and Pliny held that Getae and Dacians spoke the same tongue, and the modern compound Daco-Getae records the closeness. The distinction the sources draw is one of place and of fortune. The Getae belonged to the open lands of the lower Danube and to the cult of Zalmoxis that Herodotus first described; the Dacians belonged to the mountains, to the dressed-stone fortresses of the Orăştie heights, and to the kingdom that met Rome at the height of its power and lost.

Genealogy: the people of the Carpathian kingdom

The land the Dacians held was rich and defensible. It lay within the arc of the Carpathians, a basin of fertile valleys ringed by mountains carrying iron, and silver, and the gold for which the country would be remembered. By the closing centuries before the Common Era the Dacian tribes had built a network of fortified hill-citadels across this country, strongholds of timber and earth and then of cut stone, and a society the Greco-Roman observers describe as a settled and stratified one rather than a roving confederation. Above the farmers and herders stood a warrior nobility — the tarabostes, the cap-wearers, named for the felt cap that marked their rank — set off from the comati, the long-haired commons. Beside the nobility, and sharing in its authority, stood a priesthood that the sources treat as a single learned order.

For a generation the scattered tribes were welded into one power. The architect of that unification was Burebista, who ruled in the middle of the first century before the Common Era — the conventional dating gives his reign as roughly 82 to 44 BCE — and who, the Britannica account of Burebista records, forged from the Dacian tribes a kingdom that reached at its height from the Black Sea coast westward toward the middle Danube and the river Tisza. He subdued the Celtic Boii and Taurisci to the west; the Greek cities of the western Pontic shore, Olbia and Apollonia among them, came under his hand. Strabo, writing within living memory of these events, says the Getae and Dacians of this age could put two hundred thousand men into the field — a figure to hold at arm’s length, but a measure of how the kingdom loomed to those who watched it from the south. Burebista pressed hard enough on Rome’s Danube frontier to draw the notice of Roman politics; he was said to have offered his help to Pompey in the civil war, and Caesar is reported to have been planning a campaign against him when both men were killed in the same year. Burebista’s death, around 44 BCE, broke the unity he had made. The kingdom fragmented into rival successor states, and a century and a half would pass before another king gathered the Dacian power into a single hand strong enough to face the empire.

Teaching and significance: the kingdom, the sanctuaries, and the god

What sets the Dacians apart among the peoples north of the Danube is the material grandeur of what they built, and the particular cast of the religion the sources tie to it. They were metalworkers of the first rank. Dacian smiths worked iron into the curved falx, the two-handed sickle-sword that the legions learned to fear, and into the squared beams and clamps that held their walls; their goldsmiths and silversmiths produced the spiral armlets and the hoards that have come from the Orăştie ground. The wealth of the Carpathian mines — gold above all — was real, and it would in the end be among the reasons the country could not be left alone.

The center of the kingdom was Sarmizegetusa Regia, set high in the mountains and not to be confused with the later Roman colony of Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa raised on the plain some forty kilometers off. The mountain capital was a citadel and a sanctuary together. Its walls were built in the murus dacicus, the technique the Wikipedia account of Sarmizegetusa Regia describes as massive dressed blocks laid in two faces over a core; below the fortress, on leveled terraces, lay the sacred zone, with rectangular settings of stone column-bases, two circular sanctuaries, and the carved andesite disc. The great circular sanctuary — a ring of stone enclosing a setting of timber posts laid out in a disciplined pattern — and the andesite sun beside it have been read, by some, as instruments of a calendar, an order of the year kept in stone. That reading is contested, and the Dacians left no text to confirm it; what is certain is that this was a place where the political and the sacred were not separated, the seat of the kings and the high place of the cult in one.

The great circular sanctuary in the sacred zone of Sarmizegetusa Regia, in the Şureanu mountains of Romania. Eliza Palos, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The religion kept in such places reaches us only through Greek and Roman eyes, and at their distance. Its god was the figure the Getae and Dacians shared, Zalmoxis, of whom Herodotus had written long before that the Getae held themselves immortal and sent a messenger to him; the Dacian side of the cult the sources tie above all to the priesthood. Strabo, in the seventh book of his Geography, gives the fullest account: a high priest who was honored almost as a god, who counseled the king and withdrew to a holy mountain, set apart in a manner the Greek geographer compares to the prophets of other nations. Strabo names the priest of Burebista’s reign — Deceneus, in the common Latin form — and reports that this priest brought the people to such obedience that they uprooted their vines and gave up wine at his word, a reform in which the priestly and the royal authority are already fused. The holy mountain Strabo calls Kogaionon; which peak of the Orăştie range it was, or whether it was Sarmizegetusa itself, the sources do not settle, and the identification remains contested. The late notices add the names of the priestly grades — the ktistai, the founders, and an order of god-fearing, withdrawn men, abstinent and unmarried, whom the tradition remembers as ascetics of a sort. How much of this picture is the observation of a real Dacian priesthood and how much the Greek habit of finding one’s own kind of holiness among distant peoples cannot now be weighed; the Dacians wrote no scripture against which to check it. The dignified report is the only report there is.

The Dacian Wars: Decebalus and Trajan

The kingdom that Burebista made and that fell apart at his death was gathered again, late in the first century of the Common Era, under the king the Roman record knows as Decebalus, who reigned from about 87 to 106 CE. He was, the Britannica account of Decebalus records, a soldier and an organizer who restored the mountain kingdom, drew the neighboring tribes into his orbit, and made of the Orăştie fortresses a system strong enough to bargain with Rome. Under the emperor Domitian the Dacians had already humbled a Roman army and won, in 89 CE, a settlement under which Rome paid subsidies and sent craftsmen and engineers across the Danube — among them, the sources suggest, the very men whose skill helped raise the dressed-stone walls the legions would later have to break.

That settlement was intolerable to Trajan, and the war he made to end it is the event through which the Dacians are best remembered. The survey of Trajan’s Dacian Wars sets the two campaigns firmly: the first in 101 and 102 CE, the second in 105 and 106. In the first, Trajan crossed the Danube, fought his way through the mountain passes — the hard fighting at Tapae among them — and pressed toward the capital until Decebalus, seeing the advance could not be stopped, came to terms in 102, surrendering territory and weapons and engineers and accepting the status of a client king. The peace did not hold. Decebalus rearmed, drew the tribes to him again, and raided across the frontier, and in 105 Trajan returned. This time the legions crossed on the great stone bridge thrown over the Danube at Drobeta by the architect Apollodorus of Damascus, drove north through the fortresses, and laid siege to Sarmizegetusa Regia. They cut the water carried to the citadel, and in 106 the capital fell and was burned. Decebalus fled into the mountains with the Romans at his heels and, rather than be taken to be led in a triumph through Rome, cut his own throat. The scene is carved on Trajan’s Column in Rome — the cornered king beneath an oak, the Roman cavalryman reaching toward him — and survives also in the careful nineteenth-century engravings of the column’s reliefs.

The death of Decebalus (scene CXLV of Trajan’s Column): the cornered Dacian king takes his own life beneath an oak as a Roman horseman reaches him. Engraving by Conrad Cichorius, Die Reliefs der Traianssäule (1896–1900), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

With the king dead and the capital razed, Dacia was made a Roman province. The mountain fortresses were dismantled, their walls thrown down, the murus dacicus broken open; the gold and silver of the Carpathians, and the treasure Decebalus had hidden — diverted, the tradition says, by turning a river from its bed — were carried to Rome to pay for the games and the buildings of Trajan’s reign. The land was opened to colonists and to the working of its mines. This is the hinge of the Dacians’ history, and it asks to be told plainly. They were the subjects of a conquest: a kingdom defeated, its sanctuary-capital burned, its wealth taken, its people drawn under the rule of the power that had beaten them. The Roman record that celebrates the victory — the column, the coins reading Dacia capta — is the record of the conquerors, and the temptation to read the conquest as the bringing of order to a wild frontier is the conquerors’ own. The Dacians were neither wild nor without order. They had a kingdom, a capital, a priesthood, and a god, and they fought two empires to keep them.

Reception and afterlife

Almost nothing of the Dacians comes down in a Dacian voice. The reception is the record, and it has three strands. The first is the Greek and Roman writers, each at his own distance and interest: Herodotus on the Getic cult that the Dacians shared; Strabo on the priesthood, Burebista, and the holy mountain; and, for the wars, Cassius Dio, whose account of Trajan’s campaigns survives mostly in later summary but remains the narrative spine of the conquest. To these the Dacians owe the shape of their story — and its slant, for these were external witnesses, interested and sometimes hostile, and the kingdom keeps its own counsel behind their reports.

The second strand is carved and dug. Trajan’s Column stands in Rome, its spiral of reliefs the most detailed visual record any ancient people left of a war they lost — the river crossing, the sieges of the mountain forts, the burning of the citadels, the death of the king — though it is the victors’ telling, made to be read as the empire’s triumph. Against it stands the archaeology of the kingdom itself: the dressed-stone fortresses and the terraced sanctuaries of the Orăştie mountains, inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 as the Dacian Fortresses of the Orăştie Mountains; the andesite sun; the gold and silver hoards and the spiral armlets; the iron of the falx. The mute material corrects the literary record where it can, and confirms its outline: here was a wealthy, fortified, metalworking power, exactly where the writers placed it.

A surviving stretch of the murus dacicus*, the Dacian dressed-stone wall, at Sarmizegetusa Regia. Oroles, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.*

The third strand is the long and charged afterlife of the Dacians as ancestors. The Romanized population of the province, and the question of its descent, lie at the root of a centuries-old dispute over the origins of the modern Romanians — whether they descend in continuity from the Romanized Dacians north of the Danube, or migrated to that ground later. The dispute has a scholarly form and a political one, and in its political form it has at times swelled into a cult of Dacian ancestry — a modern movement, sometimes called Dacianism or, in its more ambitious reaches, protochronism, that has claimed for the ancient kingdom a grandeur and a continuity the evidence does not bear. The careful thing is to keep the registers apart. The Dacians were a real and considerable people of the ancient Carpathians, well attested in stone and in the foreign record. The use later made of them — the projection backward of a national continuity, the inflation of the kingdom into a golden age — is a reception, and a recent one, and it should not be read back into the kingdom that Trajan burned.

What endures, when the projections are set down, is the harder and stranger thing the sources and the stones agree on: a mountain people who built in cut stone and worked in gold, who kept a god and a priesthood on a holy peak, who were gathered into one kingdom by Burebista and defended by Decebalus, and who met the full weight of Rome and, beaten, burned their own citadels rather than yield them whole. The capital is a field of foundations now, its sanctuaries open to the weather of the Carpathians, and the gold is in other hands. The people behind it are read, still, mostly through the column that records their defeat — which is reason enough to read them with care.

→ Related: Dacia · The Getae · Sarmizegetusa Regia · Zalmoxis · Thrace · Gebeleizis · Bendis · The Thracian Horseman · Kotys Goddess · Derzelas · The Odrysians · Perperikon · Starosel · Tatul · Dionysus · Orpheus · Apollo · Asclepius