CHAPTER IV.

The Organisation of Spain.

After his brief stay of some six months in Gaul, Augustus went on to Spain, arriving at Tarraco in time to celebrate his eighth consulship in that city on the 1st of January B.C. 26. He remained in Spain the whole of that year and the greater part of the year following, nor did Rome see its master again till early in 24. It was an anxious and critical time. The campaign which he had come to prosecute against the Cantabrian and Asturian highlanders proved difficult, harassing and even dangerous; Augustus himself, worn out by fatigue and care, was taken seriously ill at Tarraco; and Horace no doubt faithfully represented the general Roman feeling when in a strain1 whose lightness of tone only half disguises the sense of relief and even emotion which it conveys, he welcomed the absent prince back to Rome from "wild Iberia." 3

If we may trust Dio and Horace, Augustus went to Gaul in B.C. 27, with the intention of crossing over into Britain and so completing the work begun by Cæsar even to the uttermost ends of the sea. But when he came to Gaul the confusion left by the intertribal feuds which had followed closely upon Cæsar's conquest obliged him to stay where be was and to begin the indispensable process of reorganisation. Then in the following year, when the

1. Od. iii. 14.

2. Note especially the "male ominatis parcite verbis" in the third

stanza.

3. Od. iv. 5.

interrupted design was about to be resumed and the order was about to be given to march on Britain, the simultaneous outbreak of two serious little wars, one with an Alpine tribe (the Salassi) living in the upper valley of the Doria Baltea and so commanding the passage over the Little and the Great St. Bernard, and the other with the Cantabri and Astures in northern Spain, obliged him to look nearer home. Against the Salassi, who had long been a thorn in his side, and whose fondness for blackmailing rendered the passes insecure, he sent Terentius Varro,2 and after Varro had conquered them and sold every man, woman and child of the unfortunate little people, to the number of 44,000, in the market-place of Eporedia, he planted a Roman colony on the spot where Varro had encamped (Augusta Prætoria, now Aosta), and so secured the communication between Italy and the Rhine on the one hand, Italy and Lyons on the other, once for all. The Spanish war he reserved for himself. It was the second of the only two foreign wars conducted by Augustus in person, the Dalmatian war of B.C. 36 having been the first, and the result was not such as to make him desirous of repeating the experiment.

The Romans had been busy conquering Spain for just two hundred years, and the work was not yet finished. Their armies made their first appearance in Spain during the Second Punic War, in order to cut Hannibal's communications and destroy his base, and once there, they stayed, if only to prevent any repetition of the enterprise which had so nearly ruined Rome. The Carthaginians,

1. They had risen in B.C. 36 and 34. [Dio Cassius xlix., 34 and 38, but both passages may refer to one rising.]

2. Probably identical with the Terentius Varro who died while consul in B.C. 23, and therefore not the famous Licinius Varro Murena, the conspirator of B.C. 22.

and before them the Phoenicians, had done part of the work for their Roman successors. The rich valley of the Baetis (Guadalquivir), and indeed the whole country southwards to the Mediterranean which was afterwards known as Baetica (Andalusia), had become more Phoenician than Iberian, and the people showed little of the Iberian passion for hard knocks. It was not there, nor on the Eastern coast where not only Phoenicians but Greeks had paved the way and where communication with Italy was kept up by the Roman fleet, that the Romans found any serious difficulty. But even after they were strongly planted in the South and East, they had still to conquer the Centre, the West and the North of the Peninsula, in other words the Celtiberi, the Lusitani, and the highlanders, Cantabrian and Asturian, of the Biscay coast. The fall of Numantia in B.C. 133 marked the conquest of the Celtiberi; the murder of Viriathus, the greatest of all Spanish guerillaleaders, in B.C. 140, that of the Lusitani. The latter, however, who were still imperfectly subdued, earned a bad name with the Romans as banditti,2 and some seventy years after the death of Viriathus they formed the nucleus of military strength on which Sertorius based his extraordinary enterprise. After Sertorius' murder in B.C. 72 there is no record of Lusitanian insurrection, and when Augustus made his appearance in the Peninsula it was all pacified with one exception. That exception was the mountain land of the Astures and Cantabri, covering the

1. Livy xxxiv. 17. Omnium Hispanorum maxime imbelles habentur Turdetani.

2. Even as late as B.C. 37, the antiquarian Varro, writing in that year, says (de re rustica, i. 16, 2) :-multos enim agros egregios colere non expedit propter latrocinia vicinorum, ut in Hispania prope

Lusitaniam.

3. Cæsar's campaign against the inhabitants of the Sierra Estrella (B.C. 60) was a local affair, and moreover he began it.

modern provinces of Asturias and Santander, and showing a wall-like face to the corn-growing plateau on the South. Those fierce highlanders regarded their peaceful neighbours as their natural prey, and the Romans had to bring them to order or to confess themselves unable to protect their own subjects and taxpayers from a remorseless enemy. They accomplished the task more or less successfully after six years' fighting (B.C. 25-19), and so brought to a close the two centuries of conquest which began in the first year of the Second Punic War.

The conquest of Spain thus took twenty times as long as the conquest of the Three Gauls. What is the reason of that extraordinary difference?

The geography of Spain has always been the key to the history and even the character of its inhabitants. Its peninsular form, and its singularly definite frontier on the one side where it is not surrounded by the sea, give the country a superficial appearance of unity. In reality it is broken up into separate sections by a succession of transverse mountain-ranges which are cut by no great river running from north to south. The dip of the country is from east to west, and accordingly the chief rivers rise. near the Mediterranean and flow into the Atlantic.1 "Nature," it has been said by one who knew Spain well,2 "by thus dislocating the country, seems to have suggested localism and isolation to the inhabitants, who, each in their valleys and districts are walled off from their neighbours." So is explained that powerlessness for combination on a great scale which Strabo absurdly ascribes to the "morose

1. "Spain," says Réclus, "like peninsular Italy, turns her back upon the east. The plateaus slope down gently towards the west; the principal rivers, the Ebro alone excepted, flow in that direction, and the watershed lies close to the Mediterranean shore."

2. Richard Ford.

ness" of the Iberians, whereas that distrustful temper was itself a mere result of the geographical conditions. "They are bold in little adventures," says Strabo, "but never undertake anything of magnitude, inasmuch as they have never formed any extended power or confederacy. On this account the Romans, having carried the war into Iberia, lost much time by reason of the number of different sovereignties, having to conquer first one, then another, in fact it occupied nearly two centuries, or even longer, before they had subdued the whole." There was no Spanish Vercingetorix to combine the greater part of the country against the Romans, and so to give them a chance of smashing resistance by one downright blow, and they had no choice but to conquer a rough and mountainous country, affording every opportunity for guerilla warfare and putting every obstacle in the way of the commissariat, bit by bit.

In this dislocated, disunited Spain the Iberians formed, not indeed the only, but far the largest portion of the population, and the one which stamped its character on all the rest. What these Iberians were is an old problem as yet unsolved, but perhaps the most probable view is that which connects them with the primitive Berber population which the intrusive Arab element has overlaid, without assimilating, in Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco. Whether Spain was originally colonised from Africa, or Africa from Spain, is another question arising out of the first to which no definite answer can be given. But the fact that there was a strong Iberian element in Sardinia, Corsica, the part of Gaul betwene the Rhone and the Pyrenees, and perhaps Sicily, points to a wider diffusion of the race than can readily be understood if we make North Africa the starting point, and the general character of North-African history suggests the conclusion that from the earliest times the