DARDANI

An Illyrian people (their name may derive from the same root as 'dardhe', the Albanian for 'pear') but also linked with Thracians and with Asia Minor, inhabited the upper Vardar valley and the Kosovo region in the southern Balkans.

They were neighbors of Macedon on the north-west, with whose kings they fought several major wars between the 4th and 2nd cent. BC and subsequently with Roman proconsuls, until they were finally defeated perhaps by M.Antonius in 39 BC or M.Licinius Crassus in 29/8 BC.

'They are so utterly wild that they dig caves beneath their dunghills and live there; but still they have a taste for music and are always playing musical instruments, both flutes and strings' (Strabo 7.5.7); they are also known to have had some knowledge of medicinal plants, according to Pedanius Dioscorides.

They were included in the Roman province Moesia and, after the late 1st cent.AD, in Upper Moesia. Under the Flavians a 'colonia' was settled in their territory at Scupi (mod. Skopje). They were still notorious as bandits in the following century (SHA Marc.21.7).

In the late empire it was the homeland of several emperors, notably Constantine I and Justinian, the latter marking his birthplace with the new city Justiniana Prima (now located at Caricin Grad in southern Serbia).

J.J.Wilkes,

"Oxford Classical Dictionary," 3rd ed. (1996), pp.429,430