CHAPTER II.

NUMANTIA.

(B.C. 209-B.C. 27.)

THE events that immediately followed the fall of Saguntum, important as they are in themselves and in the annals of Carthage and of Rome, are chiefly interesting to the student of Spanish history in so far as they led to the invasion of Spain,1 and the ultimate absorption of the whole country into the Roman Empire. Of the varying fortunes of Romans and Carthaginians; of the ever changing alliances between the high contending parties and the native Celtiberians; of the successes of Hannibal and his Spanish soldiers in far away Italy; of the coming of Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, who took the field with twenty thousand Celtiberian allies against Hasdrubal and his Carthaginians in Spain; of the defection of the Spaniards, and the defeat and death of the Roman generals in Spain; of all these things but little need be said in this place, partly because it concerns Spain so little, and partly because, in the plain language of Thomas Arnold,2" we really know nothing about them". What we do know is

1 The derivation of the name of Spain, España, Hispania, is most uncertain. To the Greeks the country was known as Hesperia, the land of the setting sun, and as we have seen in Scylax, ante, p. 1, as Iberia, the land of the Iberians, and of the Ebro; and as Hispania, which has been derived (1) from Phoen., Span= hidden or distant, as being the most remote land known to them; (2) from Phon., pahan a rabbit, from the number of rabbits found in the country, cuniculosa. On some of the coins struck in the reign of Hadrian, during his visit to the Peninsula, the bust of the Emperor is seen on the obverse, and on the reverse a female figure with an olive branch in her hands and a rabbit [conejo] at her feet, and the legend Hispania. Humboldt derives España from the Basque España, margin or edge, as being on the margin or edge or border of western Europe, an idea possibly apparent in the poetical name of Hesperia. See Marrast's edition of Humboldt (1866), pp. 54-56.

According to Mariana, Spain is called after its founder Hispanus, a son or grandson of Hercules; and he devotes many pages to the history of his reign! Mariana, i., cap. 8-11.

Hist. of Rome, vol. iii., p. 215; Bosworth Smith's Carthage, cap. xvii.

certainly not to the advantage of the Roman commanders, nor even of the Roman soldiers. Had they been more successful, their records would, no doubt, be more definite. But the arrival of Scipio Africanus in 209; his taking of New Carthage, or Carthagena, and his masterly display of unaccustomed humanity after the fall of the city, entirely changed the condition of affairs.

The historic or legendary episode of "The Continence of Scipio," which has formed the subject of so many well-known pictures, is supposed to have taken place after the capture of Carthagena. Whether the youthful commander actually restored the weeping virgin1 to her lover, or whether the graceful story is one of the fables of history, it is certain that Scipio distinguished himself by a most politic and most honourable clemency, more fruitful even than his military successes in obtaining for him the admiration and respect of the sympathetic Iberians, who offered to salute him as their king. When Scipio returned to Tarragona, in 208, Rome had well nigh triumphed over Carthage in Spain; while his crowning victory less than a year afterwards, with an army composed almost entirely of Spaniards, apparently put an end to the struggle.

But although the Carthaginians were thus defeated, it was impolitic as well as ungenerous in Scipio to treat his Spanish allies as a conquered people. The Iberians promptly responded to his change of attitude by rising against the Roman arms : and when Mago at length abandoned Cadiz [B.C. 206], the last of the Carthaginian possessions in Europe, the war in Spain was only about to begin. And the new enemy was far more stubborn than the old. The details of battle and siege are for the most part entirely wanting; but we read in the scanty annals of the time how the unknown Iberian defenders of a well-nigh forgotten town, with a determination hardly equalled at Saguntum, and not exceeded at Numantia, preferred death to surrender; and leaving a small guard within the city, to slay the women and children and to set fire to the town, sallied forth from unconquered Ataspa,2 and died every man with his face to

1 "Adulta virgo . . . eximia forma," Livy, xxvi., 50; Polyb. x., 19.

2 The town was Ataspa [see Livy, xxviii., 22-23] on the Bætis or Guadalquivir. It is referred to by Mariana, lib. vii., cap. 9, as a rebellious city as late as A.D. 888. The etymology of Ataspa is highly interesting; Asta in Basque means rock; and is the root of the word Asturia = the country of rocks, and Asturica = water of the rock; asta rock; ura = water. Ataspa is still used in modern Basque for a house at the foot of a rock or rocks," pa foot. Ataspa must thus,

in the time of Livy, have been an ancient Iberian town.

the foe, by the unsparing swords of the Roman besiegers [B.C. 206].

It was about this time, in 207, or more probably 206, that Scipio founded the city to the north of Hispalis, and on the other side of the river, which, peopled as it was by Italian troops and camp followers, was known as Urbs Italica, the birthplace of Trajan and of Theodosius the Great, the family city of Hadrian. Italica was long a celebrated municipium, and bore the proud title of Julia Augusta. But its rival Hispalis survives as Seville, while Italica is but a memory of departed greatness. The very name is lost; and on the spot where the town once stood a few wretched hovels are now known as the village of San Ponce or Seville la Vieja.

Of the marching and counter-marching of the Romans, recking all too little of Spanish friendship, now that the Carthaginians had taken their departure; of the intrigues of Massinissa and Syphax; of the Roman and African politics of the day, the student of early Spanish history need seek to know little or nothing. Suffice it here to say that by the year 205 the Roman Senate, rejoicing over Scipio's successes, already regarded Spain as a conquered country; and the entire Peninsula, conveniently divided by the river Ebro into two provinces, Citerior and Ulterior, 2

1 See Townsend's Journey in Spain (1791), vol. ii., p. 331. Italica, according to Mommsen (Hist., iii., 4), was intended by Scipio to be a Forum et conciliabulum civium Romanum, as Aquæsexta (Aix), in Gaul, afterwards was. As to the true signification of the word Italica see a long and very learned note by Masdeu, vii., pp. 339-350. He is, as usual, ultra-patriotic. Cf. Justino Matute y Gaviria, Bosquejo de Italica (Seville, 1827), and Ukert, Geog. ii., 372.

2 See Strabo, iii., 4, 7, 19; Cæsar, Bell. Gall., iii., 73; Pliny, iii., 1, 2. The geography of the time is even more confusing than the chronology. Hither Spain, or 'Iẞnpía, included generally the eastern portion of the province as citerior or nearer to Rome. Further Spain, or KEATIẞnpía, included the western portion of the province as ulterior or further from Rome. The river Ebro, if taken as a boundary, would give to Hither Spain only a corner of the north-east of the Peninsula; and Polybius makes the boundary start from a point near Saguntum ; and Urci, or Almeria, in Murcia, was, in later times, the southern starting-point of the common frontier. A line drawn on the map of modern Spain from Almeria to Saragossa and thence to Gerona would probably leave Hither Spain to the east and Further Spain to the west, much as the division existed during a great part of the first and second centuries B.C. The capital of Hither Spain was at one time as far south as New Carthage, though it was more permanently fixed by Augustus at Tarraco (Tarragona). The capital of Hispania Ulterior was sometimes Corduba and sometimes Gades. We find the divisions sometimes spoken of as 'Iowavía μεγάλη and Ισπανία μικρά, which is a much more reasonable nomenclature, if the Ebro was really the line of demarcation between the provinces. The fact is, no doubt, that the boundaries between Citerior and Ulterior Spain were never very clearly defined; and while at first Citerior included little more than the north-east corner of Spain, it had, by the time of Julius Cæsar, eaten up, as it were, the greater part of the Peninsula, except Bætica and Lusitania, which were always included in

was committed by Rome to the care of two Proconsular Prætors.1

But Rome reckoned without the Spaniards. Many long years had to pass, and many dark and disastrous deeds to be done, before the country was finally subdued. And the tardy conquest cost the great Republic more of her blood and of her treasure than the subjugation of the rest of the world.

From the day that Publius and Gnaeus Scipio landed at Rosas in 218 to the day when the mountaineers of remote Asturias laid down their arms before the generals of Augustus Cæsar, it was a struggle of full two hundred years, a struggle in which the greatest captains and the bravest troops of Rome were often humbled by the sturdiest and proudest of the barbarians.

An army of forty thousand legionaries was constantly maintained in the Peninsula, and although the tide of Roman conquest flowed gradually over the country, the conquerors were often driven back for a season, and were often well contented to hold their own. But Rome never abandoned the territory that she had once occupied. The proud boast that each camping-ground of the advancing army was ever Roman soil-Ubi castra, ibi Respublica-was not merely a sentence, it was a fact. So Iberia became slowly but surely Roman. Yet for long years the fortune of war seemed not unequally divided; and the frontier provinces of Roman Spain were too often reoccupied by the indomitable Celtiberians. From the very first, battles and skirmishes were of daily occurrence; and in less than ten years after the departure of Scipio the whole of Hither Spain was in revolt (198-197). Minucius, the Prætor in command, hardly made head against the insurgents; Marcus Cato, the consul, was despatched from Rome to take over the supreme command in Hispania. After two years of fighting, with varying fortune, an important victory enabled the Romans to effect a general disarmament of the provincials in 195, as the only means of securing peace in the province. But in spite of this prudent measure a Roman army was once more routed by

Further or Ulterior Spain.

This difficult question is very fully gone into by Masdeu: tom. vii., pp. 6-34 and 284-292. Cf. also Pliny, Nat. Hist., iii., 3, "Citerioris Hispania sicut complurium provinciarum, aliquantum vetus forma mutata est". And see, on all these questions the most interesting chapter, Les Provinces Espagnoles, in the second vol. of Mommsen, and Marquardt's Organisation de l'Empire Romain (Paris, 1892).

1The first governors were styled Proconsuls; afterwards they were Prætors, with Proconsular authority.

VOL. I.

2

the Celtiberians in 191. Nor does the perpetual fighting appear to have ceased until Æmilius Paullus (189) and Calpurnius (185) succeeded in pacifying or destroying the hostile tribes of northeastern or Hither Spain. Southern or Further Spain, indeed, was already counted among the Roman dominions; but Rome had no acquaintance with the country to the north of the Douro until the consulship of Quintus Flaccus in 181, and little or no real authority in those wild districts until the time of Augustus. During the thirty happy years that immediately followed the organisation of the province of the Ebro by Sempronius Gracchus in 179, Hispania Romana enjoyed, on the whole, the blessings of peaceful if not always of just government. And if Hispania Ulterior was wisely let alone by the legionaries, Hispani Citerior made rapid steps in the path of Roman civilisation.1

But an outbreak in Lusitania in 154 put an end to these halcyon days; and was itself but the commencement of new and greater troubles. In 153 Fulvius the Consul arrived from Rome with thirty thousand men; and, although reinforced by a troop of Numidian horse, with ten elephants, sent over by Massinissa from Africa, he was twice defeated by the Arivaci, under Carus of Segede, near Numantia. And these defeats were followed by the loss of all the Roman stores and military chest at Ocile, possibly the modern Ocana. The Roman war in the Peninsula differed, as Polybius remarked, from all other wars, both in its character and in its continuance. The wars in Asia and Greece were usually decided in a single battle, and a battle was usually decided by the first onset. But the Celtiberian war was protracted year after year, hardly interrupted even by winter; and every battle after being continued until nightfall was resumed at the dawning of the ensuing day.

The defeated Fulvius was succeeded in 152 by the Consul Marcellus, who, more prudent than his predecessor, entered into a treaty, honourable alike to the insurgents and to the Romans, which was signed under the walls of Numantia. To secure the necessary ratification by the Senate, envoys from the various tribes were sent to Rome, and were duly admitted

1 Two colonies were founded with the object of permanently fixing Roman civilisation in the country. One Carteia (a Latinised form of the Phoenician Carth=city) was founded near the modern Algeciras, for Celtiberian freed slaves and the illegitimate children of Roman legionaries by native women; the other for Romans and half-castes of higher rank at Cordoba, whose beautiful villas and the luxury of whose inhabitants soon became famous, and gained for it the name of the "Patrician" City.-H.