Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/175



The aboriginal population, the Dacians of the highlands, who replaced their more ancient brethren on the banks of the Danube, had a king, Decebalus, who died unconquered in defence of his homeland against the legions of the Emperor Trajan. Under him, however, ruled not only other Dacian chiefs, but also the petty chieftains of other local federations. There were no cities before the Romans founded them: these intelligent barbarians, half won over to Roman civilisation, ordinarily lived in villages or «davas» north of the Danube and «paras» in the Balkans. They were unlike the Gauls in their «cities» dominated by the aristocracy of warriors. The country was the village and the village was wholly free, certainly autonomous.

The legend of a new society built from the ruins of the old by Trajan’s colonists must, in my opinion, be abandoned. It is not possible to admit that the fusion of two such different elements; of the patriarchal, pastoral Dacians and the army veterans, the retired officials and the prospectors after gold and other metals could have been accomplished between Trajan’s final and completely victorious campaign in 106 A. D. and the evacuation of the Roman province of Dacia by Aurelian in about 270 A. D. I am inclined to think, therefore, that it was more likely that the denationalisation of the inhabitants was brought about by the imperceptible, gradual infiltration of the surplus rural population of Italy, as Rome began to import her food from overseas and slave labour and the growth of large estates ousted the free peasantry from the peninsula. The first condition for a process of denationalisation is a majority of the invading population of the same occupation as those whose country it invades. The national character of the ancient Thracians could be altered only if newcomers of the same mode of life formed the