Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/176

 starting point, viz: shepherds and agriculturists. The inhabitants of Roman Dacia who were city dwellers, accustomed to the advantages offered by great cities, had probably abandoned their threatened homes at the first call of the Emperor when he felt himself for a time unable to maintain his power on the left bank of the Danube. Had they received no such order, they also could have gone on living in their country after the occupation of the barbarians.

It is false to say true that the former alternative has no parallel in Roman history. When the city of Nisibis was ceded by the Romans to the King of Persia in the fourth century A. D., the citizens were not invited to leave: on the contrary they were ordered to accept the sovereignty of their new master, and promptly answered that they were capable of maintaining the liberty of their homes against any enemy.

It must be remembered too that the barbarians were not conquerors in the proper sense of the word, no consistent adversaries of Rome, whom they revered even after they had ceased to have cause to fear her; that in theory their position was that of « foederati» of Caesar, who gave them a province as his vassals, or rather as a territory for the sustenance of the new military auxiliaries of the Roman State. But Dacia was a country of peasants, and no peasant ever leaves his lands because a new prince reigns in the stead of the old. In modern history, in which psychological situations arise quite unparalleled in the darker ages with their simple instincts uninfluenced by more complex desiderata, there are numerous other examples. A village can develop into a city, not merely one of the type of most Roumanian provincial towns, whose churches show them to be mere conglomerations of the old rural organisation, but a veritable fortified, mediaeval stronghold,