Download Authenticity and More: The Pre-Roman Origins of the Romanians

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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.