On the Romanian territory there were discovered impressively beautiful vestiges of Neolithic cultures: it is here that the highly typical civilization of the Geto-Dacians flourished, a kin belonging to the great family of the Thracians. The Geto-Dacians arrested the attention of foreign contemporaries under major historical circumstances (in 335 B.C. they fought against the famous Alexander the Great, and about 290 B.C. they were taking as prisoner the latter's succesor in Thracia, King Lysimachus). The Helenistic monarchies had positively influenced the Geto-Dacians' culture and civilization, which proved responsive to the Greek touch.

The expansion of the Roman Empire in the Balkan peninsula, alarming the Geto-Dacians, determined the strengthening of their unity. About the middle of the first century B.C., the Getic king Burebista succeeded in building an impressingly powerful state, by unifying the Geto-Dacian tribes on the wide space stretching from present-day Slovakia to the Balkans; he forced all the Pontic cities, from Olbia to Apollonia of Thracia, to submit to his rule. The clash between Burebista's and Caesar's forces was going to take place in 44 B.C.; but just then the Roman Emperor was murdered; after a little while Burebista shared the same fate.

At the beginning of our era the Roman Empire was getting closer in its expansion to the Danube, and the Geto-Dacians could do nothing but have relations with it, now cordial, now hostile, to assimilate the elements of the Roman civilization and military technics. They will resist the Romans both politically and military, for about century until the reign of the Roman emperor Trajan, who, after long and dreadfull years of wars, succeeded in 106 A.D. to break the heroic resistance of the Dacians, whose king, Decebal - entered in legend for his bravery - commited suicide to avoid being captured. The resistance and destruction of Decebal' Dacia lingered in the conscience of the raising generations as a glorious epic. The memorial monuments - Trajan's Column (Rome) and Tropaeum Trajani (Adamclisi, Dobrogea (Dobrudja)) - attest through their celebrated scenes to the Dacians' bravery in defending their plains, fields, rich and well-sheltering mountains.

Besides all sufferings, Dacia's integration into the Roman Empire had some positive aspects: by the endeavour of Dacia's natives and Roman colonists, by their practical-mindedness Dacia reached a high level of material and spiritual culture, and underwent the important process of Romanization, which left lasting marks, traceable to the day, in the Romanian people's Latin language, in its name, conscience and culture. As the Geto-Dacians were the basic ethnic element in the making of the Romanian people, the Romans were the second element of the Romanians' ethnogenesis.

The crisis occuring in the Roman Empire as well as the pressure of the Barbarians forced Emperor Aurelian to decide in 271 A.D. the withdrawal of the Roman troops, administration and a part of the urban population from Dacia moving them south of the Danube. Yet, most of the population, consisting of Roman peasants and Romanized Dacians, did not leave their land, being in a close touch with the South-Danubian Roman world. Coming into contact with the Barbarians, the Daco-Romans adopted forms of organization imposed by the newly born historical conditions. They constituted themselves into what the great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga named "popular Romanies" or "rural Romanies", that is those territories in which imperial authority was not effective any more and whose people lived in popular bodies politic. They were considered as Romanies by their inhabitants, who knew that they were belonging or had belonged to the Roman Empire.

Last update: 1999, August 18
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