Burebista
Burebista united the Getae and Dacians of the Carpathians and the lower Danube into one kingdom in the decades Rome was fighting its civil wars, destroyed the Celtic Boii and Taurisci to the west, took the Greek cities of the Black Sea coast from Olbia to Apollonia, was courted by Pompey before Pharsalus and marked down by Caesar for a campaign, and was murdered in the same year as Caesar by his own nobles; the kingdom fell into four and then five pieces and was not reassembled until Decebalus, and modern Romania dates itself from him. What is known comes from Strabo, a decree of the city of Dionysopolis, and Jordanes. He became king about 82 BC and, Strabo says, raised his people by training, sobriety and obedience to their commands to the point where in a few years he had a great empire and could send two hundred thousand men to war. The instrument was a priest, Decaeneus, who had been in Egypt and was given almost royal power, and who persuaded the Dacians to cut down their vines, which Strabo found remarkable. He crossed the Danube into Thrace, Illyria and Macedonia, and about 60 BC destroyed the Boii under their king Critasirus and the Taurisci in the plain of the middle Danube, which the Romans afterwards called the Boian desert. The Greek cities of the west Pontic coast fell one by one between 55 and 48, Olbia so thoroughly that it was still half-empty a century later. The decree of Dionysopolis honours the envoy Acornion, who went to the king as the first and greatest of the kings of Thrace and carried his offer of alliance to Pompey at Heraclea in 48. Pompey lost. Caesar, in the last months of his life, was assembling an army in Macedonia for a war against the Dacians and the Parthians, and both men were dead by the spring of 44, and the king was killed in a rising of the nobility whose cause the sources do not give. His stronghold in the Orăștie mountains and the sanctuaries at Sarmizegetusa were begun under him and finished under Decebalus, and the Roman conquest of 106 is the reason Romania speaks a Latin language.
- Lived: 110 BCE – 44 BCE
- Nationality: Dacian
- Roles: king, monarch
