 Greetings! I am currently reading this fine term of knowledge and I stumbled upon an interesting passage that I thought to share with you all, so I'm reading about the Dacian spirituality. The Dacians, like many of the peoples of the Balkan and the Italic Peninsula, honored the spirit wolf. The Greek Lycaean, the wolfish Zeus, and the Roman Apollo Lycaeus, along with the goddess Pheronia, the mother of wolves, were all part of a long-established worship of the wolf. In Greece, philosophical gymnasia were dedicated to Lycaeus, a wolf god, hence the term Lyceum. The Romans, as is well known, believed the infants Romulus and Remus were raised by Lupa, a she-wolf. One of the most celebrated Roman holidays was Lybrocalia, wolf day. The Dacians likewise glorified the wolf, but at a higher spiritual level. According to Strabo, the name Dacia comes from Dai and Daos, both of which are very close to the Celtic Gaelic word Dauai, meaning wolf people. Legends and traditions claim that the Dacians were nicknamed wolf people, and so their land came to be referred to as Dacia. They considered the wolf to be the lord of animals. In their religious beliefs, the wolf was the only effective power against evil, so it was also regarded as a guardian warrior. Because wolves lived in packs and took good care of their offspring, the animals were models of family dynamics. Dacians considered the relationship between man and wolf so close that they believed in the transformation of man into werewolf. The military symbols of antiquity were often animals that inspired either horror or admiration. The Egyptians were proud of their cobra, the Greeks had the minotaur, half-man and half-bull, the Celts loved the boar and the Romans sported the eagle on their standards. The wolf was a standard of the Dacians. Dacians considered themselves to be wolf warriors and adopted a battle flag that was named Drago or Drago. It was the demonic representation of a portable deity with three meanings. The wolf's head symbolized the conquest of the surface of the earth, the snake body signified underwater domination, and the wings represented the vibration of life. The elongated part could represent the tail of a comet since the Dacians strongly believed that any luminous celestial display would destroy their enemies. The Dacogitian flag looked terrifying to the enemies because it projected the image of something undefeatable. It was carried on the tip of a lance and the open jaws of the wolf produced an eerie sound when the winds passed through it. It was, in essence, a flying deity believed to have the power to keep away evil spirits and protect its bearers from harm. A flying dragon unearthed at an archaeological site in Brahova in modern Romania provides evidence that the Dacians used this symbol since the 4th century BC. More than ten versions of this standard were chiseled five centuries later on the column of Tradian in Rome. Most likely each tribe had its own variation of the design. Two hundred years after the Roman Dacian wars were commemorated on the column, many cohorts Dacorum, Dacian cohorts, serving in the Roman army still proudly bore the wolf dragon standard in their travels throughout different parts of the world. It could be seen on the tombstones in a cemetery in Chester, Spurtania, where it marked the graves of the Dacian warriors who had served there.