THE COMATI OR 'LONG-HAIRED' ONES: A CLASS OF DACIAN WARRIOR

A Dacian Warrior

9.1 “Decebalus had sent envoys even before his defeat, not the long-haired men [comati] this time, as before, but the noblest among the cap-wearers [pileati]."

 From http://www.trajans-column.org/?page_id=41

I've managed to confirm, through numerous scholarly sources[1], that the free warrior class among the Dacians were referred to as the comati, 'the long-haired ones.'  There are too many resources to list here, and I encourage any doubtful readers to pursue their own research on this topic.  I have approached some leading experts on Dacian language, social structure and warfare and will post their responses below as soon as I receive them.

For now I will only state this:  I have made a very strong argument for the presence of Uther Pendragon at the Birdoswald/Banna Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall.  I've also discussed his relationship with the dragon-comet and the Dacian draco, as the Dacians garrisoned Banna for centuries.  Now we may have one more reason to link Uther to a comet.  For if the Dacian free warriors thought of themselves as the long-haired ones, a designation that is all but identical with the Greek kometes, a 'long-haired [star]', i.e. a comet, then we might well apply even more significance to Merlin's pronouncement in Geoffrey of Monmouth's HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF BRITAIN that the dragon-star was Uther himself.

This is not to say that I'm equating the long-haired ones with comets, in the sense of a certain class of Dacians being "comet warriors."  Nothing of the sort.  I am instead suggesting that it might have been possible for the military designation and comets to have become confused in popular tradition.  Of course, it may be the case that the long hair of these warriors was meant to symbolize the long hair of comets. Such warriors would have been viewed as particularly sacred because they partook of the nature of these heavenly bodies.

As I've demonstrated before, in the early Welsh elegy MARWNAT VTHYR PEN, we are told God (not Merlin/Myrddin) transforms the hero, so that he becomes 'like a star in the gloom.'  The Gorlassar epithet, used in this poem for Uther himself, was converted into a separate personage in the fiction of Geoffrey.  Scholars insist the epithet, which means literally 'the very blue/greeb/blue-green', has to do with Uther's enameled armor and/or weapons.  I would contend instead that it describes a comet, which to the naked eye can appear blue or green in color.  

[1] For example, the following from Dr. Graziela Byros, WEINBERG COLLEGE
OF ARTS & SCIENCES, Northwestern University, Department of Classics:

"Based on the little we know about the organization of pre-Roman Dacian society from ancient sources, the comati (=long-haired ones, from the Lat. adj.  comatus, -a, -um = long-haired) were the commoners, the lower class, who are certainly depicted on Trajan’s column as fighting in the Dacian Wars alongside the Dacian aristocratic warrior class (forming the cavalry), known in Latin as the pileati (from pileus = cap), because they wore a distinctive cap (as can be seen in depictions on the Column), or in their native Dacian language as tarabostes.

Capillatus does mean “long-haired,” like comatus, but in common Latin idiom capillatus tended to be used in reference to soft, effeminate men, dandies, whereas comatus was used more in reference to the “long-haired barbarians” (like the Gauls –see Gallia Comata, Dacians etc.). But they are synonyms in terms of basic meaning."

https://www.classics.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/faculty-directory/graziela-byros.html