SPAIN.

Conclusion of the conquest.The accidents of external policy caused the Romans to establish themselves on the Pyrenaean peninsula earlier than in any other part of the transmarine mainland, and to institute there two standing commands. There, too, the republic had not, as in Gaul and Illyricum, confined itself to subduing the coasts of the Italian sea, but had rather from the outset, after the precedent of the Barcides, contemplated the conquest of the whole peninsula. With the Lusitanians (in Portugal and Estremadura) the Romans had fought from the time that they called themselves masters of Spain; the “more remote province” had been instituted, strictly speaking, against these tribes and simultaneously with the “nearer” one; the Callaeci (Gallicia) became subject to the Romans a century before the battle of Actium; shortly before that battle the subsequent dictator Caesar had, in his first campaign, carried the Roman arms as far as Brigantium (Corunna), and consolidated afresh the annexation of this region to the more remote province. Then, in the years between the death of Caesar and the sole rule of Augustus, there was unceasing warfare in the north of Spain; no fewer than six governors in this short time won triumphs there, and perhaps the subjugation of the northern slope of the Pyrenees was effected chiefly in this epoch.24 The wars with the cognate Aquitanians on the north side of the mountains, which fall within the same epoch, and the last of which was victoriously ended in the year 72727., must stand in connection with these events. On the reorganising of the administrative arrangements in 72727. the peninsula went to Augustus, because there was a prospect of extensive military operations there, and it needed a permanent garrison. Although the southern third of the more remote province, thenceforth named from the river Baetis (Guadalquivir) was soon given back to the government of the senate,25 by far the greater portion of the peninsula remained constantly under imperial administration, including the greater part of the more remote province, Lusitania and Callaecia,26 and the whole of the large nearer one. Immediately after the institution of the new supreme control Augustus resorted in person to Spain, with a view, in his two years’ stay (728, 729)26,25., to organise the new administration, and to direct the occupation of the portions of the country not yet subject. This he did from Tarraco as his headquarters, and it was at that time that the seat of government of the nearer province was transferred from New Carthage to Tarraco, after which town this province is thenceforth usually named. While it appeared necessary on the one hand not to remove the seat of administration from the coast, the new capital on the other hand commanded the region of the Ebro and the communications with the north–west and the Pyrenees. Against the Astures (in the provinces of Asturias and Leon), and above all, the Cantabri (in the Basque country and the province of Santander), who obstinately held out in these mountains and overran the neighbouring cantons, a warfare attended by difficulties and heavy losses was prolonged—with interruptions, which the Romans called victories—for eight years, till at length Agrippa succeeded in breaking down the open resistance by destroying the mountain towns and transplanting their inhabitants to the valleys.

Military organisation in the North–west.If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted. Matters were still apparently far from having reached a proper pacification in north–western Spain. There is still mention in Nero’s time of war–expeditions against the Asturians. A still clearer tale is told by the occupation of the country, as Augustus arranged it. Callaecia was separated from Lusitania and united with the Tarraconensian province, to concentrate in one hand the chief command in northern Spain. Not merely was this province then the only one which, without bordering on an enemy’s country, obtained a legionary military command, but no fewer than three legions27 were directed thither by Augustus—two to Asturia, one to Cantabria; and, in spite of the military pressure in Germany and in Illyricum, this occupying force was not diminished. The headquarters were established between the old metropolis of Asturia, Lancia, and the new Asturica Augusta (Astorga) in Leon that still at present bears its name. With this strong occupation of the north–west is probably connected the construction of roads undertaken there to a considerable extent in the earlier imperial period, although we are not able to demonstrate the connection in detail, seeing that the allocation of these troops in the Augustan age is unknown to us. Thus there was established by Augustus and Tiberius for the capital of Collaecia, Bracara (Braga), a connection with Asturica, that is, with the great headquarters, and not less with the neighbouring towns to the north, north–east, and south. Tiberius made similar constructions in the territory of the Vascones and in Cantabria.28 Gradually the occupying force could be diminished, and under Claudius one legion, under Nero a second, could be employed elsewhere. But these were regarded only as drafted off, and still at the beginning of the reign of Vespasian the Spanish garrison had resumed its earlier strength; it was reduced, in the strict sense, only by the Flavian emperors, by Vespasian to two, by Domitian to one legion. From thence down to the time of Diocletian a single legion, the Seventh Gemina, and a certain number of auxiliary contingents garrisoned Leon.

No province under the monarchy was less affected by outward or by inward wars than this land of the far west. While at this epoch the commanderships of the troops assumed, as it were, the positions of competing parties, the Spanish army played throughout a secondary part in that respect; it was only as helper of his colleague that Galba entered into the civil war, and mere accident carried him to the first place. The force holding the north–west of the Peninsula, which even after its reduction still strikes us as comparatively strong, leads us to infer that this region had not been completely obedient even in the second and third centuries; but we are unable to state anything definite as to the employment of the Spanish legion within the province which it held in occupation. The struggle against the Cantabrians had been waged with the help of vessels of war; subsequently the Romans had no occasion to institute a permanent naval station there. It is not till the period after Diocletian that we find the Pyrenaean peninsula, like the Italian and the Graeco–Macedonian, without a standing garrison.

Incursions of the Moors.That the province of Baetica was, at least after the beginning of the second century, visited on various occasions from the opposite coast by the Moors—the pirates of RÎf—we shall have to set forth in detail when we survey the affairs of Africa. We may presume that this serves to explain why, although in the senatorial provinces elsewhere imperial troops were not wont to be stationed, by way of exception Italica (near Seville) was provided with a division of the legion of Leon.29 But it chiefly devolved on the command stationed in the province of Tingi (Tangier) to protect the rich south of Spain from these incursions. Still it happened that towns like Italica and Singili (not far from Antequera) were besieged by the pirates.

Introduction of Italian municipal law.If preparation was anywhere made by the republic for the great all–significant work of the imperial period—the Romanising of the West—it was in Spain. Peaceful intercourse carried forward what the sword had begun; Roman silver money was paramount in Spain long before it circulated elsewhere outside of Italy; and the mines, the culture of the vine and olive, and the relations of traffic produced a constant influx of Italian elements to the coast, particularly in the south–west. New Carthage, the creation of the Barcides, and from its origin down to the Augustan age the capital of the Hither province and the first trading port of Spain, embraced already in the seventh century a numerous Roman population; Carteia, opposite to the present Gibraltar, founded a generation before the age of the Gracchi, was the first transmarine civic community with a population of Roman origin (iii.4)iii.4.; the old and renowned sister–town of Carthage, Gades, the modern Cadiz, was the first foreign town out of Italy, that adopted Roman law and Roman language (iv.573)iv.543.. While thus along the greatest part of the coast of the Mediterranean the old indigenous as well as the Phoenician civilisation had already, under the republic, conformed to the ways and habits of the ruling people, in no province under the imperial period was Romanising so energetically promoted on the part of the ruling power as in Spain. First of all the southern half of Baetica, between the Baetis and the Mediterranean, obtained, partly already under the republic or through Caesar, partly in the years 739 and 74015,14. through Augustus, a stately series of communities with full Roman citizenship, which here occupy not the coast especially, but above all the interior, headed by Hispalis (Seville) and Corduba (Cordova) with colonial rights, Italica (near Seville) and Gades (Cadiz) with municipal rights. In southern Lusitania, too, we meet with a series of equally privileged towns, particularly Olisipo (Lisbon), Pax Julia (Beja), and the colony of veterans founded by Augustus during his abode in Spain and made the capital of this province, Emerita (Merida). In the Tarraconensis the burgess–towns are found predominantly on the coast—Carthago Nova, Ilici (Elche), Valentia, Dertosa (Tortosa), Tarraco, Barcino (Barcelona); in the interior only the colony in the Ebro valley, Caesaraugusta (Saragossa), is conspicuous. In all Spain under Augustus there were numbered fifty communities with full citizenship; nearly fifty others had up to this time received Latin rights, and stood as to inward organisation on a par with the burgess–communities. Among the rest the emperor Vespasian likewise introduced the Latin municipal organisation on occasion of the general imperial census instituted by him in the year 74. The bestowal of burgess–rights was neither then, nor generally in the better imperial period, extended much further than it had been carried in the time of Augustus;30 as to which probably the chief regulative consideration was the restricted right of levy in regard to those who were citizens of the empire.

Romanising of the Iberians.The indigenous population of Spain, which thus became partly mixed up with Italian settlers, partly led towards Italian habits and language, nowhere emerges so as to be clearly recognised in the history of the imperial period. Probably that stock, whose remains and whose language maintain their ground up to the present day in the mountains of Biscay, Guipuscoa, and Navarre, once filled the whole peninsula, as the Berbers filled the region of north Africa. Their language, different from the Indo–Germanic, and destitute of flexion like that of the Finns and Mongols, proves their original independence; and their most important memorials, the coins, in the first century of the Roman rule in Spain embrace the peninsula, with the exception of the south coast from Cadiz to Granada, where the Phoenician language then prevailed, and of the region northward of the mouth of the Tagus and westward of the sources of the Ebro, which was then probably to a large extent practically independent, and certainly was utterly uncivilised. In this Iberian territory the south–Spanish writing is clearly distinguished from that of the north province; but not less clearly both are branches of one stock. The Phoenician immigration here confined itself to still narrower bounds than in Africa, and the Celtic mixture did not modify the general uniformity of the national development in a way that we can recognise. But the conflicts of the Romans with the Iberians belong mainly to the republican epoch, and have been formerly described (ii.221 f.)ii.209f.. After the already mentioned last passages of arms under the first dynasty, the Iberians vanish wholly out of sight. To the question, how far they became Romanised in the imperial period, the information that has come to us gives no satisfactory answer. That in the intercourse with their former masters they would have always occasion to make use of the Roman language, needs no proof; but under the influence of Rome the national language and the national writing disappear even from public use within their own communities. Already in the last century of the republic the native coinage, which at first was to a large extent allowed, had become in the main set aside; from the imperial period there is no Spanish civic coin with other than a Latin legend.31

Language.Like the Roman dress, the Roman language was largely diffused even among those Spaniards who had not Italian burgess–rights, and the government favoured the de facto Romanising of the land.32 When Augustus died the Roman language and habits prevailed in Andalusia, Granada, Murcia, Valencia, Catalonia, Aragon; and a good part of this is to be accounted for not by colonising but by Romanising. By the ordinance of Vespasian previously mentioned the native language was restricted de jure to private intercourse. That it held its ground in this, is proved by its existence at the present day; what is now confined to the mountains, which neither the Goths nor the Arabs ever occupied, must in the Roman period certainly have extended over a great part of Spain, especially the north–west. Nevertheless Romanising certainly set in very much earlier and more strongly in Spain than in Africa; monuments with native writing from the imperial period can be pointed to in Africa in fair number, hardly at all in Spain; and the Berber language at present still prevails over half of north Africa, the Iberian only in the narrow valleys of the Basques. It could not be otherwise, partly because in Spain Roman civilisation emerged much earlier and much more vigorously than in Africa, partly because the natives had not in the former as in the latter the free tribes to fall back upon.

The Spanish community.The native communal constitution of the Iberians was not perceptibly to our view different from the Gallic. From the first Spain, like the Celtic country on either side of the Alps, was broken up into cantonal districts; the Vaccaei and the Cantabri were hardly in any essential respect distinguished from the Cenomani of the Transpadana and the Remi of Belgica. The fact that on the Spanish coins struck in the earlier epoch of the Roman rule it is predominantly not the towns that are named, but the cantons,—not Tarraco but the Cassetani, not Saguntum but the Arsenses—shows, still more clearly than the history of the wars of the time, that in Spain too there once subsisted larger cantonal unions. But the conquering Romans did not treat these unions everywhere in like fashion. The Transalpine cantons remained even under Roman rule political commonwealths; the Spanish were, like the Cisalpine, simply geographical conceptions. As the district of the Cenomani is nothing but a collective expression for the territories of Brixia, Bergomum, and so forth, so the Asturians consist of twenty–two politically independent communities, which to all appearance do not legally concern each other more than the towns of Brixia and Bergomum.33 Of these communities the Tarraconensian province numbered in the Augustan age 293, in the middle of the second century 275. Here, therefore, the old canton–unions were broken up. This course was hardly determined by the consideration that the compactness of the Vettones and the Cantabri seemed more hazardous for the unity of the empire than that of the Sequani and the Treveri; the distinction doubtless was chiefly based on the diversity of the time and of the form of conquest. The region on the Guadalquivir became Roman a century and a half earlier than the banks of the Loire and the Seine; the time when the foundation of the Spanish organisation was laid was not so very far from the epoch at which the Samnite confederacy was dissolved. There the spirit of the old republic prevailed; in Gaul the freer and gentler view of Caesar. The smaller and powerless districts, which after the dissolution of the unions became the pillars of political unity—the small cantons or clans—became changed in course of time, here as everywhere into towns. The beginnings of urban development, even outside of the communities that attained Italian rights, go far back into the republican, perhaps into the pre–Roman, time; subsequently the general bestowal of Latin rights by Vespasian must have made this conversion general or very nearly so.34 In reality there were among the 293 Augustan communities of the province of Tarraco 114, and among the 275 of the second century only twenty–seven, that were not urban communities.

Levy.Of the position of Spain in the imperial administration little is to be said. In the levy the Spanish provinces played a prominent part. The legions doing garrison–duty there were probably from the beginning of the principate raised chiefly in the country itself; when afterwards on the one hand the occupying force was diminished, and on the other hand the levy was more and more restricted to the garrison–district proper, Baetica, sharing in this respect the lot of Italy, enjoyed the dubious blessing of being totally excluded from military service. The auxiliary levy, to which especially the districts that lagged behind as regards urban development were subjected, was carried out on a great scale in Lusitania, Callaecia, Asturia, and not less in the whole of northern and inland Spain; Augustus, whose father had formed even his bodyguard of Spaniards, recruited in none of the territories subject to him (setting aside Belgica) so largely as in Spain.

For the finances of the state this rich country was beyond doubt one of the most secure and most productive sources; but we have no detailed information transmitted to us.

Trade and commerce.The importance of the traffic of these provinces admits of being inferred in some measure from the careful provision of the government for the Spanish roads. Between the Pyrenees and Tarraco there have been found Roman milestones even from the last times of the republic, such as no other province of the West exhibits. We have already remarked that Augustus and Tiberius promoted road–making in Spain mainly for military reasons; but the road formed by Augustus at Carthago Nova can only have been constructed on account of traffic, and it was traffic mainly that was served by the imperial highway named after him, and partly regulated, partly constructed anew by him. This road, continuing the Italo–Gallic coast–road and crossing the Pyrenees at the Pass of Puycerda, went thence to Tarraco, then pretty closely followed the coast by way of Valentia as far as the mouth of the Jucar, but thence made right across the interior for the valley of the Baetis,35 then ran from the arch of Augustus—which marked the boundary of the two provinces, and with which a new numbering of the miles began—through the province Baetica to the mouth of the river, and thus connected Rome with the ocean. This was certainly the only imperial highway in Spain. Afterwards the government did not do much for the roads of Spain; the communes, to which these were soon in the main entrusted, appear, so far as we see, to have provided everywhere—apart from the tableland of the interior—communications to such an extent as was required by the state of culture in the province. For, mountainous as Spain is and not without steppes and waste land, it is yet one of the most productive countries of the earth, both through the abundance of the fruits of the soil and through its riches of wine and oil and metals. To this were early added manufactures, especially in iron wares and in woollen and linen fabrics. In the valuations under Augustus no Roman burgess–community, Patavium excepted, had such a number of rich people to show as the Spanish Gades with its great merchants spread throughout the world; and in keeping with this was the refined luxury of manners, the castanet–players who were here at home, and the Gaditanian songs, which circulated, like those of Alexandria, among the elegant Romans. The nearness of Italy, and the easy and cheap intercourse by sea, gave at this epoch, especially to the Spanish south and east coasts, the opportunity of bringing their rich produce to the first market of the world, and probably with no country in the world did Rome pursue so extensive and constant a traffic on a great scale as with Spain.

That Roman civilisation pervaded Spain earlier and more powerfully than any other province, is confirmed by evidence on various sides, especially in respect to religion and to literature.

Religious rites.It is true that in the territory that was still at a later period Iberian, and remained tolerably free from immigration—in Lusitania, Callaecia, Asturia—the native gods, with their singular names, ending mostly in –icus and –ecus, such as Endovellicus, Eaecus, Vagodonnaegus, and the like, maintained their ground still even under the principate at the old seats. But not a single votive stone has been found in all Baetica, which might not quite as well have been set up in Italy. And the same holds true of Tarraconensis proper, only that isolated traces are met with on the upper Douro of the worship of Celtic gods.36 No other province shows an equally energetic Romanising in matters of ritual.

The Spaniards in Latin literature.Cicero mentions the Latin poets at Corduba only to censure them; and the Augustan age of literature was still in the main the work of Italians, though individual provincials helped in it, and among others the learned librarian of the emperor, the philologue Hyginus, was born as a bondsman in Spain. But thenceforward the Spaniards undertook in it almost the part, if not of leader, at any rate of schoolmaster. The natives of Corduba, Marcus Porcius Latro, the teacher and the model of Ovid, and his countryman and friend in youth, Annaeus Seneca,—both only about a decade younger than Horace, but for a considerable time employed in their native town as teachers of eloquence, before they transferred their activity in that character to Rome—were the true and proper representatives of the school–rhetoric that took the place of the republican freedom and sauciness of speech. Once, when the former could not avoid appearing in a real process, he came to a stand–still in his address, and only recovered his fluency when, to please the famous man, the court was transferred from the tribunal to the school–hall. Seneca’s son, the minister of Nero and the fashionable philosopher of the epoch, and his grandson, the poet of the sentimental opposition to the principate, Lucanus, have an importance, as doubtful in literature as it is indisputable in history, which may in a certain sense be put to the account of Spain. In the early times of the empire, likewise, two other provincials from Baetica, Mela under Claudius, Columella under Nero, gained a place among the recognised didactic authors who cultivated style—the former by his short description of the earth, the latter by a thorough, in part poetical, picture of agriculture. If, in the time of Domitian, the poet Canius Rufus from Gades, the philosopher Decianus from Emerita, and the orator Valerius Licinianus from Bilbilis (Calatayud not far from Saragossa) are celebrated as literary notabilities by the side of Virgil and Catullus and by the side of the three stars of Corduba, this is certainly the fortune also of one likewise a native of Bilbilis, Valerius Martialis,37 who himself yields to none among the poets of this epoch in elegance and plastic power, or yet in venality and emptiness, and we are justified in taking into account withal the fact of their being fellow–countrymen; yet the mere possibility of weaving such a garland of poets shows the importance of the Spanish element in the literature of the time. But the pearl of Spanish–Latin authorship is Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35–95) from Calagurris on the Ebro. His father had already acted as a teacher of eloquence in Rome; he himself was brought to Rome by Galba, and occupied, especially under Domitian, a distinguished position as tutor of the emperor’s nephews. His textbook of rhetoric and, in some degree, of the history of Roman literature, is one of the most excellent which we possess from Roman antiquity, pervaded by fine taste and sure judgment, simple in feeling as in presentation, instructive without weariness, pleasing without effort, contrasting sharply and designedly with the fashionable literature that was so rich in phrases and so empty of ideas. It was in no small degree due to him that the tendency became changed at any rate, if not improved. Subsequently, amidst the general emptiness the influence of the Spaniards comes no further into prominence. What is, historically, of special moment in their Latin authorship is the complete clinging of these provincials to the literary development of the mother–country. Cicero, indeed, scoffs at the clumsiness and the provincialisms of the Spanish votaries of poetry; and even Latro’s Latin did not meet the approval of the equally genteel and correct Roman by birth, Messalla Corvinus. But after the Augustan age nothing similar is again heard of. The Gallic rhetors, the great African ecclesiastical authors have, as Latin writers, retained in some measure a foreign complexion; no one would recognise the Senecas and Martial by their manner and style as belonging to one or to another land; in hearty love to his own literature and in subtle understanding of it never has any Italian surpassed the teacher of languages from Calagurris.