The Getae

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North of the Haemus, where the Balkan range falls away into the plain and the land runs flat to the great river, the ground was held by a people the Greeks called the Getae. They lived on both banks of the lower Danube — the Ister, in the older name — between the mountains and the water, out toward the Black Sea and the open edge of the Scythian steppe. They were farmers of the river plain and horsemen and archers of the kind the settled south found hard to read: not a city people, not a kingdom in the Greek sense for most of their history, but a nation all the same, and one with a conviction about death that set them apart from every neighbor. They did not, they held, die at all.

That conviction is why the Getae are remembered, and remembered with a respect the Greeks rarely extended across the line they drew between themselves and the peoples they called barbarian. The fullest portrait of them stands in a few chapters of Herodotus, set down in the fifth century BCE, and it is the portrait of a people he plainly found admirable. Almost everything that can be said of their inner world descends from that handful of pages, and so the Getae come to us doubly framed: as a living sacred world with a god and a rite of its own, and as a thing seen at a distance, through the interest of a foreign historian who never crossed the river to them.

The people of the lower Danube

The Getae enter the written record in 513 BCE, in Herodotus’ account of the Persian campaign against the Scythians. When Darius marched north through Thrace and came to the Danube, the Thracian peoples along his road submitted as he passed — all but one. The Getae, alone, stood and fought, and were beaten, and it is at this moment that Herodotus pauses to name them: the bravest and the most just of the Thracians. He stops to explain the bravery by the belief, and the two are joined in his telling from the start — a people unafraid of the Persian because, in their own reckoning, there was nothing in the field that could finally kill them.

Their land was Thracian land, and the Getae were a Thracian people, kin in speech and custom to the tribes of the Rhodope and the Hebrus to the south and to the Odrysians whose kingdom rose in the classical age. But they faced north and east as much as south, onto the steppe, and the Scythian frontier ran through their world. The Greeks knew them by the Black Sea, where the colonies of Istros and Tomis and Odessos sat on the coast of their country; the Romans, coming later and from another direction, more often called the same stock by another name. Strabo, writing under Augustus, set the matter down as plainly as it can be put: the Getae were Thracians, settled on both banks of the Ister like the Mysians; the western part of the nation, toward the sources of the Danube, the Romans called Daci, and the eastern part, toward the sea, the Greeks called Getae — and both, he adds, spoke one tongue. Pliny compressed it to a half-line: the Getae, by the Romans called Daci. The Dacians of the Carpathian mountains and the Getae of the river plain were, in the ancient view, two faces of a single people, and the line between them is as much a line between the writers — Greek and Roman — who described them as a line on the ground.

Their history is a history of meeting larger powers and outlasting more of them than might be expected. After Darius came the Macedonians: in 335 BCE, before he turned east, Alexander forced the Danube, scattered a Getic force on the far bank, and burned a settlement there, securing the river as the northern bound of his realm. A generation later the Getae did better. Around the turn of the fourth century into the third, their king Dromichaetes met the army of Lysimachus — one of Alexander’s successors, lord of Thrace — and not only defeated it but took Lysimachus himself prisoner. The story the Greeks told of the aftermath is a story against themselves: Dromichaetes treated his royal captive with courtesy, set a plain Getic table beside a Macedonian one laden with gold and silver plate, and let the contrast make the argument that a neighbor was worth more as a friend than as a corpse, then released him. In the first century BCE the Getae and Dacians were briefly welded into a single great power under Burebista, whose kingdom reached from the Danube deep into the surrounding lands before it broke apart at his death. And in the early empire Rome closed over the lower river: the province of Moesia organized the south bank in the first years CE, and in the early second century the wars of Trajan carried the eagles across the Danube and made a province of Dacia itself. The Getae did not vanish at any single stroke; they were absorbed, renamed, and folded into the long Roman frontier on the river that had always defined them.

Those who make themselves immortal

What the Getae held about death is given in four sentences of Herodotus, and those four sentences carry the weight of the whole tradition. They do not think they die, he writes; the one who passes from this life goes to a divine being they call Zalmoxis — whom some among them name Gebeleizis instead. The verb he reaches for is a coinage: athanatizontes, those who make themselves immortal, the ones who deathless themselves. It is not quite the immortality of the Greek philosophers, a property the soul has by nature. It is something the Getae do — a thing achieved, secured, made, in the act of passing to the god.

The passage to Zalmoxis had a rite, and it is the rite that has fixed the Getae in memory. Every few years — the count Herodotus gives runs to several seasons between one and the next — they chose by lot a man to go to the god as their messenger, and charged him aloud, in the hearing of all, with whatever the people needed at that time. Then others took up three spears and held the points upward, and the man was swung and thrown onto them. If he was pierced and died, the god was held to be favorable, to have heard and to be ready to help. If he lived, the fault was laid not on the rite but on the man: he was reckoned a bad messenger, unworthy of the carrying, and another was sent in his place. The thing should be set down with the gravity that belongs to a sacred act at the edge of life, which is how Herodotus, for all his foreignness, set it down — not as the cruelty of savages but as the most serious traffic a people could have with their god, the dispatch of one of their own across the boundary the rest of them believed they would all in time cross.

The same chapters give a second rite, stranger and more defiant. When it thundered and lightened, the Getae shot their arrows up into the sky toward the storm — loosing them at the heavens, threatening the divinity, holding, in Herodotus’ phrase, that there is no god but their own. Whether the arrows were aimed at Zalmoxis or at some other power of the storm, and whether Gebeleizis was simply another name for the same god or a distinct power of the bright sky and the thunder, the single ancient sentence does not say, and the question has been argued ever since without settling. What survives is the gesture: a people who answered the storm not with sacrifice or appeasement but with drawn bows, men of the river plain standing under the thunder and shooting back.

The nature of the god is harder still, and the difficulty begins with Herodotus himself. After the rite he turns to a wholly different account, one he says he had from the Greeks who lived by the Black Sea and the Hellespont, and which he relays at length while making clear he does not credit it. By that story Zalmoxis had been a man — and not merely a man but, of all things, a slave of Pythagoras on Samos, who learned from his master and from the soft living of the Ionians the doctrine that the soul does not perish. Freed and grown rich, he went home to the rude north and built himself a hall, where he feasted the leading Getae and taught them that neither he nor they nor their descendants would die but would pass to a place where they should live on and possess all good things. And to prove it he had a chamber dug underground, vanished into it for three years while the Getae mourned him as dead, and came up again in the fourth, so that what he taught was believed. Herodotus relays the whole of it and then sets it aside with a historian’s care: he neither disbelieves nor wholly believes the tale of the underground chamber, he says, but he thinks this Zalmoxis, if he was a man at all, lived many years before Pythagoras. Whether the figure of the Getae was a god from the first, a man raised to a god, or both at once is left open in the very source that is nearly our only one — the hedge built into the record at the ground floor, not added by later doubt.

A further complication comes from Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, who set Zalmoxis among the great lawgivers of the nations — Minos, Lycurgus, Moses — each of whom claimed to have his laws from a god, and who reports that Zalmoxis among the Getae credited his to the goddess Hestia. The notice is small but it cuts against the picture, drawn from Herodotus alone, of a people with a single god and no other. If the Getae also honored a goddess of the hearth — or a power the Greek writer named with the Greek Hestia, by the familiar habit of translating a foreign deity into the nearest Greek one — then their world held more than Zalmoxis, and the apparent monotheism of the arrow-rite is at least in part an effect of how little came down and through which narrow channel it came.

The reading of a people without books

The Getae wrote nothing that survives, and so they are known almost entirely through others — which makes the question of distance, of who is speaking and from where, the governing question of everything said about them. Three kinds of witness reach across to them, each at its own remove.

The first is the Greek and Roman authors, and at their head, far above the rest in weight, Herodotus. Nearly the whole of the inner Getic world — the immortality, the messenger, the arrows, the two names of the god, the doubted tale of Pythagoras — rests on a single stretch of his fourth book, written by a man who had it at second or third hand and who was interested in the Getae chiefly as a marvel encountered on the road of Darius’ campaign. Strabo and Diodorus add their notices a few centuries later, copying, glossing, and pursuing their own ends — Strabo the geographer sorting the names of the lower Danube, Diodorus the moralist fitting Zalmoxis into a roster of lawgivers. The picture they hand on is vivid, but it is a picture made by outsiders with their own designs, and it has the shape their interest gave it: a single arresting belief, lit brightly, with most of the ordinary life of a people left dark around it.

The second witness is the ground. The Getae of the lower Danube built in earth and stone, and the richest thing they left is a tomb. Near the modern village of Sveshtari in northeastern Bulgaria, within the great burial landscape of Sboryanovo, a domed chamber tomb of the first quarter of the third century BCE preserves a thing found nowhere else in the Thracian world: a row of ten sculpted female figures, half woman and half plant, their raised arms carrying the roof, their lower bodies opening into acanthus leaves. The Thracian Tomb of Sveshtari was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1985, and it sits beside the remains of a fortified city that excavators have identified, on good grounds though not past dispute, with Helis — the seat of Dromichaetes, the king who captured Lysimachus, where the Greek story has the Getic table set against the Macedonian gold. A tomb of that scale and that date, in that place, gives the literary Getae a body: a society with kings and treasure and a monumental art of the dead, on the very stretch of river where Herodotus set the people who held they did not die. The ground is abundant where the texts are thin, but it is also mute — it shows the wealth and the burial and the carved guardians, and leaves the meaning to be read.

Interior of the Thracian Tomb of Sveshtari, a Getic chamber tomb of the early third century BCE in the Sboryanovo reserve, northeastern Bulgaria; the ten half-human, half-plant caryatids carrying the roof are unique in the Thracian lands. Interact-Bulgaria (ShareBulgaria), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The third witness is the slenderest and the most personal. In 8 CE the Roman poet Ovid was relegated by Augustus to Tomis, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of the Getic country, and there he spent the rest of his life and wrote the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto — the Sorrows and the Letters from the Black Sea. He is the only ancient voice who lived among the Getae and wrote about them at length, and his testimony is shadowed by his purpose: the poems are pleas for recall, and the Getae in them are by turns frightening barbarians at the gate and, when it suits the argument, neighbors he has come to know. He claims — in the letters from Pontus, by the end — to have learned their tongue, even to have composed a poem in Getic, now lost and perhaps never real. The claim is impossible to test and easy to doubt, but it marks the one place where a man of the literate south sat down inside the Getic world and tried, however self-servingly, to speak from within it. After Ovid the Getae pass into the longer Roman frontier story, their name surfacing in the histories of the Danube wars and then settling, in the usage of the conquerors, into the single word Daci.

What endures of the Getae is narrow and bright: a god of the dead with two possible names, a messenger thrown to the spear-points, arrows loosed at the storm, and a historian’s careful refusal to say whether the god had ever been a man. It is the most fully reported of the Thracian faiths, and it is reported almost entirely from outside, by a people who admired it without sharing it. The Getae themselves left a carved tomb and the memory of their certainty — that on the far side of the spear-point and the grave there waited not an ending but Zalmoxis, and a life in which they would lack nothing.

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