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Getae (singular Geton) was the name by which ancient writers referred to a Thracian tribe living beside the Danube, especially south of the river in what is today northern Bulgaria, but also in the Muntenian plain and in Dobruja.• There is dispute among historians regarding the nature of the relations of the Getae with the Dacians. The Romanian scholar Lucian Boia argues that the ancient writers distinguished among the two people, treating them as distinct groups of the Tracians, even if Justin states that the Dacians are derived from the Getae.. At a certain point in Romanian historiography, the expression "Geto-Dacians" was coined to suggest the existence of a single tribe. An element of support of this theory was found in Strabo, who wrote in his Geographia that the two people spoke the same language, to which Boia argues that it would be naive to assume that Strabo knew the Thracian dialects so well. According to Herodotus (4.93), the Getae were "the noblest as well as the most just of all the Thracian tribes." When the Persians, led by Darius the Great, campaigned against the Scythians, the Thracian tribes in the Balkans surrendered to Darius on his way to Scythia, and only the Getae offered resistance (Herod. 4.93). Although thought of as a war-like people, Getae were also able to show diplomacy. When the king of Macedon Lysimachus tried to conquer the Getae living North of Danube, he was defeated. The Getae king Dromichaetes took him prisoner but he treated him well. Dromichaetes convinced Lysimachus that there is more to gain as an ally than as an enemy of the Getae and released him. The Getae's two principal gods were Zalmoxis and Gebeleixis. "This same people, when it lightens and thunders, aim their arrows at the sky, uttering threats against the god; and they do not believe that there is any god but their own." - Herodotus, 4.94. Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia mentions* a tribe called the Tyragetae, apparently a Daco-Thracian tribe who dwelt by the river Tyras (the Dniester). Their tribal name appears to be a combination of Tyras and Getae. At the close of the fourth century CE, Claudian, court poet to the Emperor Honorius and the patricius Stilicho, habitually uses the ethnonym Getae to refer poetically to the Visigoths.
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