The
assumption has commonly been that this outlying Romance people owe their
Romance character to the Roman colonization of Dacia under Trajan. In
this view, the modern Roumans would be the descendants of Trajan's
colonists and of Dacians who had learned of them to adopt the speech and
manners of Rome. But when we remember that Dacia was the first Roman
province to be given up--that the modern Roumania was for ages the
highway of every barbarian tribe on its way from the East to the
West--that the land has been conquered and settled and forsaken over and
over again,--it would be passing strange if this should be the one land,
and its people the one race, to keep the Latin tongue when it has been
forgotten in all the neighboring countries. In fact, this idea has been
completely dispersed by modern research. The establishment of the
Roumans in Dacia is of comparatively recent date, beginning only in the
thirteenth century. The Roumans of Wallachia, Moldavia, and
Transsilvania, are isolated from the scattered Rouman remnant on Pindos
and elsewhere. They represent that part of the inhabitants of the
peninsula which became Latin, while the Greeks remained Greek, and the
Illyrians remained barbarian.
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