The last portion of the right bank of the Danube--the mountain-land on the two sides of the Margus (Morava), and the flat country stretching along between the Haemus and the Danube--was inhabited by Thracian tribes; and it appears necessary in the first instance to cast a glance at this great stock as such. It runs parallel in a certain sense to the Illyrian. As the Illyrians once filled the regions from the Adriatic Sea to the middle Danube, so the Thracians were formerly settled to the east of them, from the Aegean Sea as far as the mouths of the Danube, and not less on the one hand upon the left bank of the Danube, particularly in the modern Transylvania, on the other hand beyond the Bosporus, at least in Bithynia and as far as Phrygia. Herodotus is not wrong in calling the Thracians the greatest of the peoples known to him after the Indians. Like the Illyrian, the Thracian stock attained to no full development, and appears more as hard-pressed and dispossessed than as having any historically memorable course of its own. But, while the language and habits of the Illyrians have been preserved--though in a form worn down in the course of centuries--to the present day, and we with some right transfer the image of the Palikars from more recent history to that of the Roman imperial period, the same does not hold good of the Thracian stock. There is manifold and sure attestation that the tribes of the territory, which in consequence of the Roman provincial division has ultimately retained the name Thracian, as well as the Moesians between the Balkan and the Danube, and not less the Getae or Daci on the other bank of the Danube, all spoke one and the same language. This language had in the Roman empire a position similar to that of the Celts and of the Syrians. The historian and geographer of the Augustan age, Strabo, mentions the likeness of language among the peoples named; in botanical writings of the imperial period the Dacian appellations of a number of plants are specified.[120] When his contemporary, the poet Ovid, had opportunity given to him in the far-off Dobrudscha to reflect on his too dissolute course of life, he used his leisure to learn Getic, and became almost a poet of the Getae:-- _Ah pudet! et Getico scripsi sermone libellum.... Et placui (gratare mihi) coepique poetae Inter inhumanos nomen habere Getas._