SS a ae en ea ne ee ae eS 
DaAcIAN PLANT—NAMES 147 
late importation, from the Latin it may be claimed, and the Latin 
Sambucus was by the Romans said to be derived from their use 
of its wood for their musical instrument sambuca, the Gr. oaj130z7,. 
But musical instrument and name are traceable to Syria, and any 
connection with sambucus the elder was probably an after thought. 
A connection may exist however in the Dacian for elder, which 
comes to us as o¢u, and may suggest Gr. o¢fas ‘‘awe,” the holy 
wood ;* or may have lost its last syllable and may have been iden- 
tical with Latin samducus in the form of sabucus used by Sam- 
monicus. 
Other Dacian names which may have been derived from the 
Latin (or may have been merely cognate with it) are 4d¢ for Por- 
tulaca (the Greek being the dissimilar dvd pdyr7y), and 7 out paar pa. 
for Colocynth (Gr. zodoxv6y), where the Dacian suggests modifica- 
tion from such a Latin source as /ort-astrum,=twist-plant, not 
unnatural for a plant in repute for violent emetic properties, as 
colocynth was then and now. 
The other Dacian names have varying degrees of difference 
from the Greek ; from names of incongruous suggestion like that 
for Eryngium, ocxovzvogs, which may be read as cucumber-bunch, 
and for Adiantum, gcAogdé0eda, which seems a stuttering utterance 
of the lover of seseli + ; to names of no obvious suggestion, as Ovy 
for Urtica and xoovardyy for Chelidonium majus. 
The Dacians—How happened it that a people speaking a 
language even as much like classical Greek as the foregoing names 
indicate, should have been living in Dacia? and who were these 
Dacians who were so far developed as to have transmitted to us 
their name for Aster? Following the views of Robert Roes- 
ler, “ Romanische Studien, Leipsic, 1871," recent students believe, 
as Rennell Rodd, 1892, that the pre-Roman Dacians were of the 
old Thracian race, and were kindred in speech and blood to the 
Greeks. These Dacians, north of the Danube, were conquered 
by Trajan 106 A. D., who planted his Roman colony among them, 
withdrawn by Aurelian under pressure from the Goths 150 years 
later. The Roman army, officials and colonists, now moving south 
ipleinhtha ge 
'T ~ es , on ” 
* The Greeks now call an amulet rijov EbAov, ‘* revered wood. 
T Dioscorides’ céoe2:, later kavaadida and Zi ordylium oficinale, common in Grecian 
nds, 
