This Romance language is spoken in Wallachia and Moldavia, and in parts of Hungary, Transylvania, and Bessarabia. On the right bank of the Danube it occupies some parts of the old Thracia, Macedonia, and even Thessaly.
It is divided by the Danube into two branches: the Northern or Daco-romanic, and the Southern or Macedo-romanic. The former is less mixed, and has received a certain literary culture; the latter has borrowed a larger number of Albanian and Greek words, and has never been fixed grammatically.
The modern Wallachian is the daughter of the language spoken in the Roman province of Dacia.
The original inhabitants of Dacia were called Thracians, and their language Illyrian. We have hardly any remains of the ancient Illyrian language to enable us to form an opinion as to its relationship with Greek or any other family of speech.
219 b. c., the Romans conquered Illyria; 30 b. c., they took Moesia; and 107 a. d., the Emperor Trajan made Dacia a Roman province. At that time the Thracian population had been displaced by the advance of Sarmatian tribes, particularly the Yazyges. Roman colonists introduced the Latin language; and Dacia was maintained as a colony up to 272, when the Emperor Aurelian had to cede it to the Goths. Part of the Roman inhabitants then emigrated and settled south of the Danube.
In 489 the Slavonic tribes began their advance into Mœsia and Thracia. They were settled in Mœsia by 678, and eighty years later a province was founded in Macedonia, under the name of Slavinia.
Berosus, as preserved in the Armenian translation of Eusebius, mentions a Median dynasty of Babylon, beginning with a king Zoroaster, long before Ninus; his date would be 2234 b. c.
Xanthus, the Lydian (470 b. c.), as quoted by Diogenes Laertius, places Zoroaster, the prophet, 600 before the Trojan war (1800 b. c.).
Aristotle and Eudoxus, according to Pliny (Hist. Nat. xxx. 1), placed Zoroaster 6000 before Plato; Hermippus 5000 before the Trojan war (Diog. Laert. proœm.).
Pliny (Hist. Nat. xxx. 2) places Zoroaster several thousand years before Moses the Judæan, who founded another kind of Mageia.