nly, as
the Greeks did till lately, still keep the Roman name, but who speak
neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slav nor Skipetar, but a dialect of
Latin, a tongue akin, not to the tongues of any of their neighbors, but
to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain. And any one who has given any
real attention to this matter knows that the same race is to be found,
scattered here and there, if in some parts only as wandering shepherds,
in the Slavonic, Albanian, and Greek lands south of the Danube. 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. Their lands, Moesia, Thrace specially so
called, and Dacia, were added to the empire at various times from
Augustus to Trajan. That they should gradually adopt the Latin language
is in no sort wonderful. Their position with regard to Rome was exactly
the same as that of Gaul and Spain. Where Greek civilization had been
firmly established, Latin could nowhere displace it. Where Greek
civilization was unknown, Latin overcame the barbarian tongue. It would
naturally do so in this part of the East exactly as it did in the
West.[5]

Here then we have in the Southeastern peninsula three nations which have
all lived on to all appearances from the very beginnings of European
history, three distinct nations, speaking three distinct languages. We
ha