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1 Gheorghe Alexandru Niculescu ([email protected]) Budapest, the 7th of July, 2005 Authenticity and More: The Pre-Roman Origins of the Romanians What we know Before discussing some accounts of the pre-Roman origins of the Romanians, a few data on the period when most historians and archaeologists place the origins of the Romanian people. At the beginning of the II-nd century AD, following two wars which were a serious task for the Roman Empire, the emperor Traianus won a complete victory over the Dacian king Decebalus. Following this victory a new province of the Empire was build, named Dacia, which will be abandoned some 170 years later, when the emperor Aurelianus withdrew the army and the administration. The Dacians are mentioned in the ancient written sources beginning with the 1st century BC and in many of them we find that they were related to another population, the Getae, if not identical with it. E.g. Strabo writes that the two populations were speaking the same language. The Getae were mentioned for the first time by Herodotus în the 5th century BC, as belonging to the Thracian ethne, from the northern area of their spread. For the purposes of this presentation I will consider them to be one and the same people. The dominant interpretation in the Romanian academic environment and the history textbooks is that at the origins of the Romanian people, Romanian being a Romance language with several tens of Dacian words, is the population of the province abandoned by Aurelian, a population made mostly from Romanized Dacians. This interpretation has to solve a series of problems, among which that of the Free Dacians. The Roman province has included only a part of the area occupied, following the current interpretations of the historians and archaeologists, by the Dacians, an area which covered the territory of the current Romanian national state. Therefore historians and archaeologists have to explain how extended territories which have never been a part of the Roman Empire were Romanized. The accounts of Romanian national genealogy There are many presentations of how the narratives about the origins of the Romanians changed, beginning with the first historiographical writings in Romanian. Most of them aim to proclaim the truth about Romanian origins, which appears from their perspective as beyond any doubt, and therefore examine in the history of the thinking about Romanian origins how close or how far previous accounts have come to this truth usually articulating a linear evolution, with forerunners who have were able to prophetically aproximate the truth of the present. In the last two decades an increasing number of authors have used other approaches to the study of the accounts of the Romanian national origins. Many of them isolate the main variants of these accounts, a purely Roman account, a purely Dacian account, 2 and the mixed account, dominant politically and academically since the last quarter of the 19th century. The Roman account is associated with a pro-Western orientation, the Dacian one with an indigenism which rejects the civilized West, the variants of the mixed version being interpreted according to the weight and the significance of the two components. This typological vision is questionable. Romania, its political and academic institutitions, the disciplines, the international configuration, as well as the dominant views on national origins have changed substantially during the period of more than 200 years to which belong the accounts usually analyzed. An example: the Dacian version of the Romanian origins seems naturally associated with religious orthodoxy and the 1930s, when intellectuals with views close to those of the Church have supported more or less extreme views of this version suggest a stable association between the two visions: that of the Church and that of the nationalist intellectuals. Nevertheless, C. Bolliac, one of those who have brought the Dacian origins to the forefront of the debate, has led in the 1860s an obstinate campaign for the secularization of the wealth of the Orthodox monasteries. Much later, in the 1980s, we can see a significat part of the ideological activists of the communist party, together with a group of writers, historians and sociologists, supporting a Dacian origin, even in extreme versions and, at the same time, an intensification of the actions of the communist party against the Orthodox church, culminating in the distruction of several old Bucharest churches. However, immediately after 1989, we can notice an increased interest of the Romanian Orthodox Church for the Dacian origins, associated with a kind of Romanian Christian protochronism. Lucian Boia Among the historiographical works on the accounts of the origins of the Romanians one deserves a special mention: History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness by Lucian Boia, published in 1997 and translated in English and published by the CEU Press in 2001. The Bucharest historian shows in this book that the knowledge about the origins of the Romanians is a construction to which not only historians and archaeologists have contributed, but also people situated outside the human sciences. Thus what he names “the historical background imprinted in the collective conscience” was continuously elaborated and adapted. Taking into account the reduced circulation of the history works and the much larger public of the works of literature and cinema, he suggests that knowledge outside the academic disciplines had a dominant role and the historians could not make their works impermeable to such ideas. This historical background is, following Boia’s views, made of myths, with stable structures, and it does not matter if the materials they articulate are true or not. He sees no contradiction between the real and the fictive, and defines myth as an imaginary construction about the essence of natural and social phenomena, a system of interpretation and an ethical code, which organizes the perception of the past in close 3 connection with the values fundamental for a society and meant to insure its cohesion.1 In his description of the myths of national origins, Lucian Boia achieves a good chronology of the changes, trying put the ideas in the original contexts, for instance when explaining the option of the Transylvanian school for the Roman origins by the necessity of noble, pure origins, a country in which Latin was the official language and the Romanians were in state of serious social and political inferiority.2 Although he declares that his investigation about the elaboration of the discourse about the past in Romania will include all levels, histriography as well as literature, textbooks as well as political propaganda, Lucian Boia gives much more space to simplistic views held outside the mainstream of scientific ideas than to important works, such as those of Vasile Pârvan or the big synthesis on Romanian history published by the Romanian academy starting with 1960. From this observation we can begin to see the limits of his perspective. Archaeological constructions, for instance, have an increased autonomy and cannot be interpreted as mere products of a collective conscience; they can be written for a very small number of people able understand them and at every time during the last 200 years most of those people belonged to Western academic environments. This can produce a tension between the role of the intellectuals who write about national genealogy, who have to discover what was already known (Zygmunt Bauman), and what is scientifically valuable in a field of academic knolwedge. The little attention given to the best scientific knowledge in his analysis of the accounts about Romanian national ideology might suggest that for Lucian Boia nationalism is linked with bad science but one has also to take into account the circumstances in which he works. Although his works are in great public demand, Lucian Boia receives little support from his academic colleagues and is frequently attacked both by authorized professionals and by angry laymen. The concern of the Romanian academic historiographical environment with the danger represented by Lucian Boia’s work is so serious that a professor from Cluj has written not a review but a 400 pages long book on Boia’s book from 1997. This might explain Professor Boia’s reluctance to attack directly the sacred truths of Romanian historiography and the emphasis on marginal works. However the absence of a critique of the scientific disciplines makes him unaware to what extent and in what ways national ideology has permeated the humanities. Common knowledge and even his own paradigm, that of the imaginary, contain notions beloning to the nationalist representation of society, like that of the collective conscience. There is also an obvious absence of reflexivity in Boia’s approach which is also a characteristic of national historiography: while explaining the main myths developed by historians who were believing to make good science he fails to explain the possibility of his own work. If in his perspective there is no important difference between the fiction and the real his own work becomes fictional as much as real. 1 Boia 1997: 7-8. 2 Boia 1997: 86. 4 The imaginary, artificially limited at the national borders in Boia’s work, should be replaced in my view with representation and reality, because representations can be sometimes confronted to reality and science works by opposing truth to fiction. An alternative to Boia’s view could be to situate the accounts about the national origins in their immediate context, which is never, it cannot be, the national one. I will present my views in a simplified manner, not only because time is short, but also because I want to make them as clear as possible and thus vulnerable to critiques supporting other views. I will start by evoking Pierre Bourdieu who believed that the significance of any assertion depends on the position in a field of knowledge of the person making it. If we think this is true, in order to understand assertions we have to abandon the national framework and its derivates (collective conscience, national ideology, national culture and so on) and investigate the tradition of knowledge in which they are produced. Of course here we can encounter difficulties, disciplines can be poorly individualized and structured to a great extent by national ideology which can take the role of social theory, but the attempt deserves to be made. Especially if we look closer at the claims made inside most disciplines about society to study national realities. If we want to understand society outside the framework proposed by nationalism we have to accept Fredrik Barth’s observation: nobody has ever seen a society, to which I would add that our efforts to understand such entities can be an important part of the efforts to articulate one. Accordingly we have to abandon any explicative function assigned to entities like national culture and avoid reducing the action of persons to modal behaviors characteristic for a group. We should be as cautious as possible with the totalizing knowledge claims we can frequently encounter in the world we are living. They are appealing because they can replace time consuming and difficult documentation work with the illusion of resuming in a few phrases all that is important. Totalizing perspectives are not justified by some essential characteristic of human knowledge, but by the political need for knowledge that can be resumed in a discourse which cannot be too long; hence an important incentive for what Marshall Sahlins has named Leviathanology, in which intellectual creativity is reduced to trends and the content of the ideas to their names. This economy of thought, when applied to society, might be sometimes useful, or even unavoidable, but we should be aware of the consequences, for instance that such different thinkers like Hobbes and Foucault can be brought inside the same way of thinking by a simple logical operation. In such cases we are blurring the distinction made by Pierre Bourdieu between logical things and the logic of things. The confidence shown by macro sociologits should be compared with the decades spent by archaeologists in attempts to reduce simple, common objects to a list, however big, of traits, attempts to which D. Clarke’s assertion that any object has an infinity of traits, made in his book from 1968, has not put an end. Despite limits of knowlege which can be easily exemplified, much of the current research has the tendency to close knowlege by formulating explanatory principles with universal validity in which then one can recognize tendencies to various paradigms. The overuse of such principles may lead to the degradation of the paradigms and even to their disappearance. To quote again Marhsall Sahlins, 5 paradigms do not disappear because they are not capable to explain but because they explain to much, and so everything becomes boring. I think this happens in the area of our research on the 19th century with the scientific discourse on identity. I want to defend, and even exemplify the virtues of a perspective which is critical and contextual. Instead of following the developing of ideas that resume that action of people I suggest it is more productive to follow people who use ideas in ways and with purposes we should not rush to generalize, with consequences we are not allowed to assume. That is we have to break the grand naratives, like that on the accounts of national genealogy, into meaningful sequences, being aware that the same idea, expressed in the same way, with the same words, can mean very different things depending on the context of its use. All these theoretical statements make my task very difficult, especially because the only context I know very well is that of contemporary Romanian archaeology. Anyway I will try to keep my presentation inside the project for which I was invited and hope for critical reactions from the historians. Before discussing some sequences of the discourses on national origins in Romania I have make clear my position about these origins. As Lucian Boia, I think that origins do not have the importance assigned to them by national historiographies. Much more important are the transformations which have changed the peoples bearing the same name for more than 1000 years to such an extent that they resemble more each other than to their respective ancestors. Romanticism The first sequence I am going to speak about is placed in around the 1860s, when the public image about the origins of the Romanians is marked by a tension between the syntheses of the Transylvanian School which promoted the purity of the Roman origins and the historians from Romania, who, although recognizing to the Transylvanians the merit of being the only to produce such syntheses in the national language, opposed the idea of the purity of the origins and even were embarassed by it. This attitude can be explained by their concern about the state of national culture, with had to use a language without a stable ortography and literary forms, but also by fears about the reactions of the Western scholars toward the claims of Roman purity. The historians from Romania were more interested in recuperating traditions closer in time, like the historiographical writings from the 16th-17th centuries, than by the Roman heritage, much more difficult to mobilize. They accepted the Roman origins but warned against understanding these origins as a certificate of civilization; this was not done by opposing Dacian origins, which by that time had nothing unheard of about them, but by accepting a mixed origin without normative consequences. One of these historians is Mihail Kogălniceanu. He wrote: “we might as well be the descendants of Hercules, if we will be villains, the world will consider us villains, on the contrary, if we cast away the demoralization and the public strife which bring us toward extinction and strive to go on the path of brotherhood, on that of the patriotism 6 of a healthy civilisation, not a superficial one, we will be respected in Europe, even if we would be the descendants of Gengis-Khan.” 3 At the same time there was a growing concern for the loss of specificity and authenticity accompanying the process of modernization and the writer Alecu Russo was in tone with many of his contemporaries when we wrote in the 1850s that “the appreciation for foreign things has awakened us, but now begins a time when it suffocates us in every way”4 and, opposing progress to the quality of interpersonal relations, described Moldavian educated society as resembling a British colony in a country whose language and customs it ignores.5 Hasdeu (1838-1907) In this circumstances, a young high scool professor, Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu, the son of Moldavian father from the lesser nobility and of a Lithuanian mother, publishes in his own journal, an article with the title “Did the Dacians perish?”, often interpreted as the beginning of an assertion of the Dacian origins of the Romanians. The article is written in a very polemical key. Hasdeu contests the quality of the science authorized by doctorates of the Transylvanian historians. His main target is one of them, August Treboniu Laurian, a distinguished historian and epigraphist, who held high official positions in the principalities, in the authorities regulating the public education, later to become president of the Romanian Academy. Hasdeu mocks his latin name, translating it in Romanian, so he calls him “Laurel-Leaf”, and writes that during the periods in which August Treboniu Laurian held those high positions even the Romanian chicken learned to count not only the years, but also the hours ab Urbe condita6. Hasdeu insistently mentions the doctoral titles of the Transylvanians, to show their emptiness, and claims that they either ignore the Greek sources or use them second hand, and also that they have a poor knowledge of the Latin ones.7 He makes an extensive discussion of a passage from Eutropius, particularly important for the understanding of the population of Roman Dacia because the Late Roman historian writes about the reduced Dacian population and about the colonization ex toto orbe Romano, reproaching to the Transylanians to have interpreted it using a generic knowledge of Latin, without investigating the uses of the relevant words one can find in other parts of the work of Eutropius. His purpose is not to show the true origins of the Romanians, to oppose the Dacian one to the Roman one. Hasdeu wants only to fight, with arguments built on interpretations of ancient written sources, the idea that the Dacians were extermined by the Romans, idea supported by the doctorates he did not have, and to show that the Dacians survived in the Roman province, that Free Dacians lived outside the Roman province, and that the population brought by the Romans was not Italic or of pure 3 V. M. Kogălniceanu, “Cuvînt introductiv la Cursul de istorie naţională”, in Cronicile României sau Letopiseţele Moldaviei şi Valahiei, 2nd ed., 1, Bucharest, 1872, p. xxxix. Apud Babu-Buznea 1979: 20. 4 Alecu Russo, “Cugetări”, in Scrieri alese, Bucharest: Ed. Albatros, 1970: 111, apud Babu-Buznea 1979: 55. 5 Alecu Russo, “Cugetări”, in Scrieri alese, Bucharest: Ed. Albatros, 1970: 46, apud Babu-Buznea 1979: 57. 6 Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu, Scrieri istorice, ed. Sacerdoţeanu, Bucharest, 1973: 85. 7 Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu, Scrieri istorice, ed. Sacerdoţeanu, Bucharest, 1973: 83. 7 Roman origin, because “Rome was… made of the most heterogeneous elements…from the shores of Persia and Arabia to…the British Wall.” His argument is not for another pure origin but against the purity of national origins, and this is usually ignored by those who reconstitute the genealogy of the Dacian version of Romanian national origins. Hasdeu mentions that he was accused for having “diabolical plans” and for making “anti-national” interpretations and assures his readers that he would rather cut his tongue and hands8 than to do any harm to his nation. Nevertheless he feels compelled to tell what he thinks about the national origins, namely that “our nation was formed from several elements, out of which not a single one was dominant”, its specificity being a result of the nature of the elements but also of the ways in which they combined, similarly to a chemical substance – the comparison is his -- which has properties different from those of its constituents.9 Hasdeu will continue his research on the Dacians, especially by trying to find Dacian origins for Romanian words, his final count being 84 such words.10 His vision on the formation of the nations will become a stratified one, as it is presented in an article published in 189411 According to this view the Balkan peoples formed by a superposition of succesive strata: first the Pelasgi, then the Thracians, the Romans and the Slavs. 12 He sees the formation of the Romanian people as analogous to that of the French or of the Spanish peoples, where the local population was defeated and then romanized, not destroyed. 13 Hasdeu’s position on the origins of the Romanians was not excentric because he asserted a Dacian origin, but because he attacked the authority of the Transylvanian scholars. At the beginning of the 1860s an origin from both Romans and Dacians was not a problem, as, among others, proved by the fact that a man who will become the chief of the liberal party and the most important Romanian politician of the 19th century, I.C. Brătianu, has written in 1857 a series of articles titled “Historical studies on the origins of our nationality” in which he argued that the ancestors of the Romanians were the Thracians, the Romans and the Celts.14 The presence of the Celts is not due to some special research or to romantic fantasy. It just shows how important France was at that time for the future union of the Romanian principalities. Also it is worth mentioning that at the same time the interest for Celtic antiquities was on the rise in France and Vercingetorix, the Celtic leader defeated by Caesar, becomes ““an increasingly popular embodiment of French patriotism and national character”15 The emperor Napoleon the IIIrd founds the Museum of National Antiquities in 1862 and finances from his own funds archaeological excavations at three Celtic sites. The choice is significant: Alesia (the place of the final defeat), Gergovia (the site of a Celtic victory) and Bibracte (where Vercingetorix has tried to united the Celtic forces 8 Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu, Scrieri istorice, ed. Sacerdoţeanu, Bucharest, 1973: 106. 9 Bogdan Petriceicu-Hasdeu, Scrieri istorice, ed. Sacerdoţeanu, Bucharest, 1973: 106. 10 Boia 1997: 92. 11 “Die Genealogie der Balkanvölker”, Romanische Jahrbücher 10(Jan), 1894. 12 See Boia 1997: 93. 13 Zub 1981: 232. 14 apud Boia 1997: 92. 15 Dietler 1994. 8 against the Romans). He also commissioned, again from his own pocket, a monumental statue of Vercingetorix, with a face modelled after his own, to be raised at Alesia.16 The article from 1860 did not have negative consequences on Hasdeu career. Although he loses his position as a high school professor in 1863, he is appointed the same year by Alexandru Odobescu in the comission charged with the study of monastery archives. In 1867 he is elected in the parliament and in 1874 he is decorated by the reigning prince for the first volume of his “Critical History of the Romanians”. The same year the inaugurates the course of compared filology in which the presents the relations of Romanian with Sanscrite, Latin, Greek, Albanian, Celtic, Germanic and Romance languages. In 1876 he is appointed director of the State Archives and in 1877 member of the Romanian academy. 17 Like other Romanian intellectuals of his time, in the context of a rapid occidentalization of the elites, Hasdeu wanted to find the authentic spiritual character of the Romanians. He looked for it not in the Dacian culture, so distant and so little known, but in the middle ages. It is difficult to say how much influence the archaeological excavations initiated by the French emperor had on the interest for pre-Roman antiquities in Romania, but in 1869 we have the first excavations meant to discover Dacian antiquities, performed by Cesar Bolliac Bolliac The son the an Italian absentee father and of an Greek mother, Bolliac was a romantic poet and an active radical politician, who suffered in jail for his political convictions in 1840. He expressed similar positions to those of Alecu Russo: “Already the language of the cities, the language of the government are not understood by the people; we have now two languages. The people is left behind. Nobody is reading anything, not even sacred books…”18, but in his poetry he evokes the solidarity of the civilized peoples with the Romanians.19 His romantic literary creations, started in the late 1830s, cannot explain why he started excavating in search for the Dacians thirty years later. In 1874 he wrote: “I have started only 4, 5 years ago to study the Dacian pottery: until then my researach was limited to the Romans and so was that of all who had a taste for antiquities. Everything found was Roman, and what could not be Roman was barbarian, therefore good to be…thrown away. Proof for this is that in the collections donated to the Museum by the …general N. Mavros, nothing Dacian can be found…”.20 An article from 1870 shows that Bolliac was not interested only in finding local roots for the Romanians: “The Dacian civilization…might be of interest for the scientific 16 Dietler 1994: 588-589. 17 See A. Sacerdoţeanu, in B. Petriceicu-Hasdeu, Scrieri istorice, Bucharest 1973: xxxvi-xxxviii. 18 Opere, ESPLA II, 1956, p. 197, apud Babu-Buznea 1979: 67. 19 Opere, ESPLA II, 1956, p. 317, apud Babu-Buznea 1979: 72. 20 Anghelinu 2003: 83. Cf. C. Bolliac, Trompeta Carpaţilor, anul XII, nr. 1137, 1874, 29 iunie, apud Tocilescu 1880, p. 415, n. 3 9 world today and might make us intersting to this world. …our mission is to give to history the Dacian times…”21 We know how Bolliac’s archaeological research from 1869 looked like from a report addressed to the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education in the same year. Bolliac has followed what he believed to be ancient Roman roads and in his report descriptions of visibile fixed monuments alternate with descriptions of antiquities he buys from different people. The exacavation of a site took usually one single day, generally with the help of local people (30 to 80) mobilized by the local authorities for that purpose. How he assigned monuments to the Dacians can be seen from the following: “From Alexandria I have bought…a statue without a head, on a marble throne, belonging to the Mithraic cult and other two figurines, representing unknown deities also belonging to the Mithraic cult; therefore these last two can be attributed more to the time of the Dacians that to that of the Romans.” 22 He simply considered Dacian whatever was not for him Roman. This sequence, which is usually named by Romanian historians romantic Dacianism, can be easily interpreted in a different way, by making all the activities of the two persons I have discussed here stem from their quest for identity, in the context of Romanian national ideology of that time. One could seriously question the validity of my interpretations with texts from the same authors which show that they were intimately and persistently convinced of the Dacian origins of the Romanains. Hasdeu has written an unpublished poem when he was 20 years old in which he simply stated “I am a Dacian, I hate Romans”. One can also accuse me of ignorance because I have started the presentation of Bolliac’s views on the Dacians with 1869, although he has written a poem in 1843 in which the Dacians are glorified, and in 1856 a tract in French defending the claims for unity of the Romanians with arguments stemming from the idea of an ancient pre-roman Dacia, but this still does not explain why he has started looking for them archaeologically so late. Why did he not start serious research of the Dacians in his youth when he was looking for Roman ruins? My simple answer is that he had better things to do that to transform fiction into science, but more interesting is what I consider to be his answer. In a paper from 1870 se refers to the interest for prehistory as a fashion. An identity search account of the writings of these people conflates, as it happens in the history of imaginary paradigm practiced by Lucian Boia, the scientifically real with the fiction and reduces the complexities of individual lifes to the pursuit of an idea. Perhaps the best illustration of this way of thinking is a TV show from Communist times, which presented documentary films in individual scholars, under the generic title “A Life for an Idea”, which sounds for me depressing: so much for so little. If the interest for Dacians is transformed into a Dacianist ideology we have great difficulty to understand why Bolliac was able to appeal in the writings to the sister Romanace nations and why Hasdeu used for two of his most important periodicals the titles Trajan and The Column of Trajan. 21 Apud Andrei Rusu, C. Bolliac, Scrieri literare, 2, Bucharest 1983, p. 499-500 22 C. Bolliac, Scrieri literare, 2, Bucharest, 1983, p. 278. 10 Pârvan The following sequence is that of the activity of Vasile Pârvan, unquestionably the first archaeolologist who succeded in separating the antiquities which chronologically can be assigned to the Getae and the Dacians from the rest of the prehistoric antiquities. Părvan’s education is mainly due to the main promotors of what is known as the critical school of Romanian historiography, a school aiming to ground the historical discourse on the study of documents, led by three young historians of the Middle Ages, but with interests extended widely beyond that epoch, specially în the case of the most prolific of them, N. Iorga. At the beginning of the 20th century, Iorga was also very active in a nationalist cultural movement which declared to rely on the values held by the Romanian peasantry and opposed cosmopolitanism, movement in which we can find Pârvan during his student years. N. Iorga has entered an open conflcit with Grigorie Tocilescu, the uncontested leader of Romanian ancient history and archaeology at that time, and seeing the possibility to help Pârvan into becoming a serious competitor for Tocilescu, advised him to change the direction of his studies. With Iorga’s help Pârvan obtained a scholarship from the Romanian state and studied beginning with 1904 in Jena, Berlin (1905-1908) and Breslau (1908-1909), with Heinrich Gelzer, Eduard Meyer, Otto Hirschfeld, Conrad Cichorius and Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorf. He finishes his studies with a doctoral thesis on Die Nationalität der Kaufleute im römischen Reich.23 Then he returns to Romania and takes chair of ancient history and epigraphy at the Bucharest University after the death of Tocilescu in 1909. In 1910 he is appointed director of the National Museum of Antiquities and in 1913 he is already a full member of the Romanian Academy.24 Pârvan’s archaeological resarch begins in Dobrogea in 1911 and it is worth mentioning that he engaged in archaeological exacavations during the second Balkan War, on the Bulgarian territory occupied by the Romanian army, and this was not mere scientific curiosity authorized by the military. During the exacavations he asks from the Romanian government that the peace negotiations should consider his results. Not only was Pârvan part of a universitary group appreciating and supporting him; he created a group of collaborators, with whom he will be able to engage in extensive excavations. Whereas his predecessor, Tocilescu, defined and defended his position by isolation and by monopolizing excavations helped by the state and by his international reputation, Pârvan does that by professionalization, by establishing a clear border between what is inside and what is outside the discipline, on the basis of the technicality of the interpretation. He had excellent administrative qualities and after the union of 1918, was involved in a wide range of academic and administrative activities which made him one of the most important Romanian scholars. Among his enduring creations are the Romanian 23 Anghelinu 2003: 120. 24 Anghelinu 2003: 120. 11 School at Rome, founded in 1921, and two scientific journals, Dacia and Ephemeris Daco-Romana. Then, in 1922-1923, we see a change of focus in his activity. He gives less attention to the Greek and Roman antiquities from Dobrogea, which had earned him international recognition, and engages in the historical and archaeological study of the Dacians, which culminated in the publication of a big book called Getica, in 1926, a year before his death. Such a quick change in the activity of a person who was representing scientific authority in Romania, in a delicate political moment, has been explained as a consequence of the union of 1918, which enabled Romanian archaeologists to research the spectacular Dacian fortresses from Transylvania, and also as linked with a change in his views about the origins of the Romanian people, because as late as 1919, in a speech inaugurating the course on ancient history and art history at the main Transylvanian University, the Cluj University, he declared that “the mother idea of all Romanian culture is the Roman idea”. Unfortunately many authors did not pay attention to the context. For Pârvan the Roman idea is not one of ethnic continuity but one of civilizational superiority and was not transmited inside the Romanian nation but discovered in the 17th century and activated for the Romanians after 1789 by the French. Pârvan never engaged in the research of the Transylvanian sites and their place in Getica is less important than that of the Getic antiquities of Walachia. I believe a search for a better explanation could start with the speech of 1919, titled “The Duty of Our Lives”, in which we can see how he imagined national origins and their importance. For Pârvan societies, and the students in front of him, were made of two kind of people, a majority of passive, simple people, concerned only with basic and base needs, and a small minority of gifted people -- he uses once the term superman -- who shake the traditions and the customs, which otherwise would remain unchanged because such a continuity is the continuity of natural life. All the simple people do is to preserve unchanged their crafts and customs and therefore we can speak about the eternity of “conservative popular primitivism”25 Democracies have, according to Pârvan, vainly attempted to mechanically multiply the superior souls and science proved, according to him, that no doctorate can make a creator out of a monkey, able only to imitate. Therefore Pârvan argues that the educational system should stop trying to impose uniformity and offer to the simple people the possibility to get out of their animal state and to the geniuses the technical tools for their work;26 he adds that liberty cannot florish in a herd.27 The state should help the natural selection of the talents, even with the price of limiting individual liberties.28 The main pedagogical method should be the testing of the individuals, those who have access to the “Cult of the Idea enter the fraternity of the National 25 Pârvan 1919: 53. 26 Pârvan 1919: 54. 27 Pârvan 1919: 55. 28 Pârvan 1919: 56. 12 University, those who are just brute stones are pushed back in the herd, in order to be used as pavement for the construction of the road towards the superior spheres”29 The superior people have the responsibility of the whole nation, because they are above the petty political and social time and space, and their raw material is the soul of the Daco-Roman peasant. He finds all sorts of wonderful potentialities in the world of the peasants, including a natural way of selecting superior people. The national is bio-political, is the conscience of an independent organism fighting for existence with similar organisms, including by the means of war. The national is not the supreme target, is only the raw material which has to be transformed by human thinking in order to produce eternally and universally valid creations. The national is pre-conscious, subcultural, and people are national whether they want it or not. But superior people should raise above this condition. The lower ethnographic base of the nations is the same everywhere, the Romanian ethnographic civilization resembles the Scandinavian one, the Peruvian one and that of the Islamic Black People. Only the superior culture makes a difference and it achieves that by intensifying its generic, universal quality. Pârvan thought that the worst mistake made by the Romanian society of his time was the confusion between Romanian popular culture and the Romanian superior thought and that the main task ahead was not what he calls “ferocious Roumanization” into the lower ethnographic, but the continue humanization toward the sublime, which can be achieved by “depersonalization” and “de-nationalization”. Within such a frame I do not think that Pârvan’s main purpose was to discover the roots of the passive rural. In his Getica from 1926 he does not attempt to provide a popular account of the national origins but to present a study of little known antiquities, based mainly on written sources and on excavations made by him or by his disciples.30 This work is difficult even for professional historians to read, from the first page. It has no methodological introduction and after a short preface, in which Pârvan declares all previous research on the Dacians worthless, starts with an intricate narration of population movements from the first 500 years of the first millennium BC, in which ethnic names are associated with archaeological finds, according to opinions formed in the German tradition of prehistoric archaeological research. There is no trace of anti-occidentalism in Getica; instead we find the interpretation of the Dacians as being to a great extent different from the southern Thracians and with a spread to the North, impossible nowadays to prove archaeologically. He even mentions the Nordic mentality of the Dacians he sees in their history two distinctive epochs: a Scythian and a Celtic one, the progress of local civilization being the consequence of Celtic expansion and influence. The international recognition of the Getica was unanimous. I will quote from one review and from a necrologue to show that Pârvan knew what he was doing and that his work, which introduced the Dacians firmly in the scientific accounts of the origins 29 Pârvan 1919: 59. 30 Babeş 1981: 325. 13 of the Romanians, was offering an occidental, scientifically respectable form, to these origins. The review is that of Albert Grenier, published in 1927: “[l’]exposé prend pour nous, en France, un intéret tout particulier à partir du second age du fer tout rempli du mouvement des invasions celtiques le long du Danube jusqu’aux rives de la Mer Noire. Une moitié environ du volume est en effet consacrée à l’étude des influences celtiques qui ont développé chez les Gétes une civilisation, non pas brillante sans doute, mais profonde et solide, qui s’épanouit en une véritable puissance politique”.31 He appreciates Pârvan for “la surete de la méthode et la vigueur d’esprit” and writes that “[c]e n’est pas seulement en Roumanie que M. Pârvan doit étre considéré comme un maître”.32 The review ends with the following words “Grace à M. Pârvan, l’archéologie dace et la jeune école archéologique roumaine s’imposent désormais à l’attention du monde savant”.33 In an obituary, published in the same year, 1927, and in the same journal, J. Carcopino writes that Pârvan has won for Romania “la belle place, indépendenate et glorieuse, que les sacrifices de la guerre lui ont attribués sur la carte”34 and that Romania had the duty to reconstitute “par le travail de ses fils, les titres authentiques de sa noblesse ancienne?” Then Carcopino continues “[C]e que Jullian fit pour la Gaule, Gsell pour l’Afrique française, Părvan, d’une volonté clairvoyante et tenace, entendait le réaliser pour son pays.” The interest for the Dacians was just a neccessary step in Părvan’s short life, not a commitment to a determining pre-Roman identity, and he started the study of the Dacians only after what the Union of 1918 because only then he was in a position to control all the archaeological research from Romania and to impose his views. According to one of his disciples he planned to continue his research with a study of the Slavs. We can better understand how Pârvan understood his position is a letter to Marton Roska, an important archaeologist from Transylvania: “You are making a mistake when you think that you can negotiate with me, as if we were equals. You are just of the many collaborators of the Romanian National Archaeological Institute, which was entrusted to my leadership. If you will leave for Hungary we will not loose half of the archaeology of the Romanian kingdom, but only a small part, which we work to replace by educating young researchers with studies at home and abroad. Therefore I think that you, as a loyal citizen of the Romanian state and objective scholar, have the duty to justify your very honorable position of assistant professor at a Romanian University by scientific publications in Romanian journals. My official future attitude towards you will depend on the loyal and full completion of your duty toward the Romanian state whose scientific clerk you are”.35 31 Grenier 1927: 328. 32 Grenier 1927: 329-330. 33 Grenier 1927: 330. 34 Carcopino 1927: 406. 35 Coresp. Acte: 275, apud Anghelinu 2003: 127 and n. 397.