The Period of the
Civil Wars, 133-44BC

From Numantia to Sertorius

After the fall of Numantia there was little in Spain to interest our ancient sources for half a century. When warfare of a sufficiently important nature did arise, it was of a character quite unlike anything which had been seen there hitherto. Instead of Romans fighting for glory and wealth against the indigenous inhabitants, the wars of the last century of the republic, in Iberia as elsewhere, consisted essentially of Romans fighting other Romans, in an extension of the political struggles that racked the capital itself. Although Spain was spared such scenes until the arrival of Q. Sertorius in Hispania citerior in 83 BC, it was to be involved in a surprisingly immediate way from then until the murder of Caesar in 44, which, seen from a later perspective, could be seen to have marked the end of the so-called 'free republic' at Rome.

Before the Sertorian war, our sources, whose interest centres almost exclusively on political and military matters, have little to say about Spain. From time to time, an occasional reference shows that praetors continued to be sent, as was to be expected, and probably for periods of two years, as they had before. Occasionally something more significant is noted. In 123, the consul Q. Caecilius Metellus conducted campaigns against the pirates in the Balearic Islands. He is said to have formed two new settlements there, at Palma and Pollentia on Mallorca, and to have drawn 3,000 Romans from Spain for the purpose.(1) Just what his relationship

1. Livy, ep. 60; Orosius 5.13.1. On the settlements, Strabo 3.5.1-2. Cf. M. G. Morgan, 'The Roman conquest of the Balearic Isles', CSCA 2 (1969), pp. 217-31.

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was with the provincia of Hispania citerior is not made clear in the accounts we have, and it may be that his command was designated as against the pirates as such, or even as 'the fleet'. In any case, he added two further Roman settlements to the short list we have noted already,(2) and the story of his being able to find 3,000 Roman settlers, if accurate, reveals that the number of such immigrants in Spain was beginning to become substantial. Once again, as in the earlier cases, Palma and Pollentia seem to have been given no status by the authorities in Rome at this stage, but to have been regarded simply as collections of people, some or all of whom were Roman citizens.(3)

The insignificance of the peninsula in military terms in the 110s is illustrated by a remark of Appian's that Ser. Galba, who was praetor in Hispania ulterior, probably in 111, was sent out without any troops, despite the problems that his predecessor had had with disturbances in the province, because of the shortage of manpower caused by the Cimbric invasions and the slave war in Sicily.(4) However, in the next decade, we hear once again of more Lusitanian rebellions, met by the Romans with varying success. Q. Servilius Caepio, praetor in Ulterior in 109, celebrated a triumph over the Lusitanians after his return to Rome in 107, and in 98 L. Cornelius Dolabella did the same.(5) It is no doubt in this context that the otherwise unrecorded commander in the same province, L. Caesius, received the surrender in 104 of a populus who occupied the settlement at Villavieja, near Alcántara, which was recorded on the recently discovered tabula Alcantarensis.(6) The use of a surrender (deditio) in a Lusitanian context shows that at least in this case the Roman commander was dealing with a people who were not exclusively nomadic. The populus, whose name is only partly visible on the bronze, are said to have possessed

2. Above p. 78.
3. Pliny, NH 3.77, calls them simply oppida civium Romanorum.
4. Appian, Ib. 99.430.
5. Sources on these triumphs are given by Degrassi in Inscr. It. vol. 13.1, pp. 85 and 561-2.
6. R. López Melero, J. L. Sinchez Abal and S. Garcia Jiménez, 'El Bronce de Alcintara: una deditio del 104. a.C.', Gerión 2 (184), pp. 265-323; J. S. Richardson, Hispaniae, appendix V. For a full examination of the larger significance of this document for Roman international law, see D. Nörr, Aspekte des römischen VöIkerrechts: die Bronzetafel von Alcántara (Munich 1989).

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buildings, lands and laws, as well as having captured prisoners, stallions and mares; and this sounds as though it was a settled community, which also continued the Lusitanian tradition of raiding and rustling. There are other signs too of a connection between land and warfare, of the sort that we have already seen in the Lusitanian wars.(7) The campaign of the praetor in Hispania ulterior in about 102, M. Marius, against the Lusitanians was followed by a settlement not of Lusitanians (as had been carried out previously) but of Celtibenians, who had helped in the campaign.(8) In a more violent fashion, T. Didius, consul in 98, who was in Hispania citerior from his consulship down to his return to Rome to triumph over the Celtiberians in 93, is said to have resettled the Arevaci from Termantia in an unfortified position in the plain, having sacked the town and killed 10,000 of the inhabitants. He also had dealings with the Celtiberians that Marius had settled. Having spent nine months besieging an otherwise unknown town, called by Appian 'Kolenda', he deceived these same people, who had resorted to brigandage in order to support themselves on the poor land they had received, into believing that they would be given some of the Kolendians' land. In a style reminiscent of the worst excesses of Ser. Sulpicius Galba in 150, he then massacred them all, men, women and children.(9) Here a policy (if it can be dignified with that name) which had previously been used in Lusitanian areas was used among the Celtiberians, further to the east.

Didius was the first consul recorded as present in a Spanish provincia (with the possible exception of Q. Metellus in 123/122) since the return of Scipio Aemilianus in 133. In the following year, the consul P.Licinius Crassus went out to the other province, and returned to triumph over the Lusitanians in 93, just three days after Didius' celebration.(10) Otherwise nothing is known about what Crassus did, apart from a visit to the famous Cassiterides (the 'Tin Islands'), and possibly that he ordered a people called the Bletonenses to desist from human sacrifice.(11)
That consuls should be sent is not in itself very surprising. We

7. Above p. 76.
8. Appian, Ib. 100.433.
9. Appian, Ib. 99.432. For Galba, see above p. 61.
10. Inscr. It. vol. 13.1, pp. 85 and 562-3.
11. Strabo 3.5.11; Plutarch, quaest. Rom., 83; cf. C. Cichorius, Römische Studien (Berlin 1922), pp. 7-12.

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know too little of the military situation in Spain to be able to speculate about it with any certainty, but, as in the mid-second century BC, the sending of these senior magistrates coincides with a time at which the other major campaigns in which the Romans had been involved, against Jugurtha in north Africa and the invading Cimbri and Teutones in the north, had just come to an end. What is more surprising is the length of time for which they stayed, Didius being in the nearer province for five or six years, and Crassus in Hispania ulterior for perhaps four years. The reason for these prolonged tenures is far from clear, but they are not to be compared with the period spent by Didius' successor, C. Valerius Flaccus, the consul of 93, who did not return to Rome until his triumph in 81. Moreover, for at least part of the time, he seems to have been responsible also for the adjacent province of Gallia transalpina. Cicero describes him as being there in 83, and his triumph is said to have been from Celtiberia and Gaul.(12) In this case the reason for the prolonged tenure and the accumulation of responsibilities is clear enough. The situation in Rome and Italy, where the Social War with the Italian allies from 91 to 87, followed by the disruption of normal arrangements because of the struggles of Marius and Cinna against Sulla, meant that extraordinary measures were necessary.(13)

Even from the much reduced information the sources provide during these 50 years, it is clear that much of the activity of the Roman commanders had changed little since the early and middle second century BC. Warfare was still the main preoccupation of the praetors and consuls who held the two provinciae, and the means they used to pursue it could still be as disreputable as ever.

12. Appian, 1b. 100.436-7; Cicero, Quinct. 6.24 and 7.28; Granius Licinianus 35.6 (Flem.) (cf. Inscr. It. vol. 13.1, p. 563). It should be noted that N. Criniti, in the most recent Teubner edition of Licinianus supports Flemisch, who believes that the whole sentence referring to Flaccus' triumph is a gloss. However, contrary to the view of L. A. Curchin, Roman Spain: conquest and assimilation (London 1991), p. 42, this is not reason enough to reject the evidence the sentence provides for the twofold triumph, which must come after 83. Crassus' successor may have been P. Scipio Nasica (praetor probably in 93, although Obsequens, 51, has him punishing rebellious chieftains and destroying their towns in 94). The date of his return is unknown.
13. On the situation in the provinces in this period, see E. Badian, Studies in Greek and Roman History (Oxford 1964), pp. 71-104; and on Flaccus, G. Fatis, Contrebia Belaisca IL Tabula Contrebiensis (Zaragoza 1980), pp. 111-23.

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There are some signs, however, of a shift in the standpoint of the authorities at Rome with regard to the area. On two occasions senatorial commissions were at work in Spain, once, as already noted, after the fall of Numantia, and again in the mid-90s, when Didius held Hispania citerior.(14) The work undertaken by these men is completely unknown, and there is no reason to believe, as was once the general opinion amongst scholars, that such groups were invariably concerned with the setting up of large-scale administrative structures for the running of a province. Their earliest use was to settle the affairs of areas in which Roman commanders had been fighting, particularly with regard to the communities in the area and their relationships to one another and to Rome. In the Greek world, they had been employed, for instance, after the end of the second and third Macedonian wars, and on neither occasion had the Romans continued to allocate the areas concerned as provinciae thereafter.(15) It may well be that, in the case of those parts of northern Spain that Scipio, Brutus and Didius had been fighting in, the commissioners extended some of the obligations, such as the payment of stipendium, which were already normal elsewhere in Spain, to the tribes who now fell under Roman control; but it is also likely that they were involved in adjusting land-holding and requirements to provide troops.(16)

There are also other signs of a different and more immediate involvement by the senate in what was going on in the two provinciae, which is unlike what has been seen hitherto. In 123, the tribune of the plebs, C. Gracchus, is said to have demanded that grain sent by Q. Fabius Maximus, who was in charge of one of the Spanish provinces, should be sold and the money returned to the cities from which he had taken it. He also persuaded the senate to censure Fabius for making Roman control of the province hated and insupportable.(17) Gracchus' complaints sound very much like

14. Appian, Ib. 100.434.
15. In 196: Polybius 18.43-44; Livy 33.27-35. In 167: Livy 45.28-40.
16. It should be noted that the passage of Appian alone which mentions these commissioners seems to suggest that they had come originally to deal with settlements in the time of M. Marius, and were still present five years later, when they agreed to Didius' massacre of those who had previously been given land with the agreement of the senate (Appian, Ib. 100.434-4). Something is clearly astray here, and it is by no means clear what actually happened.
17. Plutarch, C Gracchus 6.2.

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those which were brought against the three former praetors by the Spanish communities in 171.(18) If so, this indicates the continuation of the taxation system which was probably introduced by Gracchus' father in 178; but it also suggests that, on this occasion at least, abuses of the taxation system were seen to be the concern not only of the provincial communities, but of the Roman senate itself. What is more, if Plutarch's account is to be trusted, it appears that in 123 the senate felt it appropriate to intervene against a holder of imperium while still in place, and without recourse to the prolonged and inconclusive trial-procedure employed in 171.

One other anecdote, although hardly reliable in itself, may suggest a similar attitude. Valerius Maximus, who made a collection of stories in the first century AD to illustrate various moral situations, tells that Cn. Cornelius Scipio was forbidden by the senate to go to his Spanish provincia because he did know how to behave properly.(19) If, as seems probable, this anecdote belongs to the late second century BC, it may reflect, as did the story about C. Gracchus and Fabius Maximus, the notion that it was the senate's business to ensure that those in the provinciae did not suffer unduly at the hands of the men they were sending out. That such a notion was current is likely enough. C. Gracchus himself, in the year in which he attacked Fabius, passed a law which provided a relatively easy method of access to a Roman court for a non-Roman or a non-Roman community to mount a prosecution of a former magistrate or promagistrate who was accused of improperly taking monies. Although the sources suggest that several senators were opposed to this measure, they also agree that there was a widespread sense of anxiety in the senate about the activities of provincial commanders, and an acknowledgement that something ought to be done about it.(20)

In the provinciae at the same time, some of the other elements

18. Above p. 71.
19. Val. Max. 6.3.3: 'quod recte facere nesciret'.
20. This law is normally (and rightly) identified with the lex repetundarum of the tabula Bembina (FIRA 11,7.), on which see particularly A. N. Sherwin-White, 'The lex repetundarum and the political ideas of Gaius Gracchus', JRS 72 (1982), pp. 18-31; A. W. Lintott, Judicial reform and land reform in the Roman Republic (Cambridge 1992). A new and corrected text, with translation and commentary, may be found in M. H. Crawford et al., Roman Statutes (London 1996), no. 1.

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of the provincial system, as it can be seen later, began to emerge. In one of the speeches Cicero wrote to be given against C. Verres, the praetor of Sicily from 73 to 71, who was accused of extortion before a court which was a direct descendent of that set up by C. Gracchus, he tells of the action of L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi, who was praetor in Hispania ulterior in about 113. Piso broke his gold ring, and had a replacement made in front of the seat in the forum at Corduba from which he dispensed justice, with the goldsmith weighing out the metal for the ring in full public view.(21) Piso was clearly setting out to demonstrate his own probity, but it is interesting to note that he had a place from which he normally exercised jurisdiction. Of course, the inhabitants of Corduba were at least largely composed of Romans in any case, who would properly come to a Roman magistrate or promagistrate for the resolution of cases; but it would appear that at least by this time (and almost certainly for some time before this) there existed a sufficiently large number of cases for a regular tribunal to be necessary.

More surprising is the evidence of the tabula Contrebiensis. This bronze tablet, found in the excavation of a Celtiberian town in the hills on the southern side of the Ebro valley, contains a record of a judgement made by the senate of the town, Contrebia Belaisca, on a water-rights dispute between two other tribes. The form of the judgement, which had been set up for them on application by C. Valerius Flaccus in his capacity as proconsul, and which is dated to 87 BC, is based almost entirely on the formula used by the praetors in the courts in Rome. The law which is applied by the judgement is not, however, Roman law, which in any case would not apply, because neither of the parties concerned has Roman citizenship and it is only to Roman citizens that Roman law applied. What is happening is that this document, of considerable legal sophistication and issued by the person who had Roman jurisdiction in the area, has been used to resolve a dispute between peoples who did not come under the provisions of the Roman law (the ius civile, the 'law of the citizens'). Indeed, it is likely that few of those involved in the process even knew any Latin. The language of Contrebia was certainly still Celtiberian, as is clear from two official announcements on bronze inscriptions, set

21. Cicero, 2 Verr. 4.56.

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up there probably shortly after the hearing of the case by the Contrebian senate.(22) Here we can see the beginnings of the long process by which the forms of Roman law came to be used throughout the Roman world, and not only by those who held the Roman citizenship.(23)
Valerius Flaccus' action in this case seems to belong to those areas of responsibility which still remained under the control of the commander on the spot, and there is no sign here of any senatorial intervention. It is true that there are some small indications of further interest in the senate at this time than had been present earlier. When M. Marius settled his ill-fated Celtiberian allies on new land, Appian states explicitly that this was done with senatorial approval.(24) This may be no more than another way of expressing the clause which we have already seen added to agreements made by the commanders, that the contents of the agreement should last so long as the people and senate wished it; but it is more likely that, if Appian is reporting this correctly, he is referring to something more specific. If so, this would appear to be an exception to the normal pattern, continuing throughout this period, of land-settlements made on the commander's initiative. Palma and Pollentia on Mallorca certainly seem to be in this category, but perhaps the most striking is the case of Emporion, or, as the Romans must by now have been calling it, Emporiae. Clear evidence has come to light in recent excavations, that towards the end of the second century the earlier military establishment, on the rocks rising behind the Greek city, was entirely destroyed, to be replaced by a town laid out in a strictly orthogonal Roman style, with a forum and a large temple and porticoes.(25) Even so, this town, newly founded and self-evidently Roman, still had no official status within the Roman

22. A. Beltrán and A. Tovar, Contrebia Belaisca I: el bronce con alfabeto 'iberico' de Botorrita (Zaragoza 1982); M. A. Díaz Sanz and M. M. Medrano Marqués, 'Primer avance sobre el gran bronce celtiberico de Contrebia Belaisca (Botornita, Zaragoza)', AEA 66 (1993), pp. 243-8.
23 G. Fatis, Contrebia Belaisca IL Tabula Contrebiensis (Zaragoza 1980); P. Birks, A. Rodger and J. S. Richardson, 'Further aspects of the tabula Contrebiensis',JRS 74 (1985), pp. 45-73.
24 Above p. 85, and n. 8.
21 J, Aquilé, R. Mar, J. M. Nolla, J. Ruiz and E. Sanmartí, El Fòrum Romà d'Empúries (Barcelona 1984), pp. 48-77.

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system.(26) It is probable that at about the same time the wall around the citadel at Tarraco was extended to include the civilian area of the town.(27)

Towns were not the only places where settlements were taking place in Catalunya. In those parts within easy reach of the Mediterranean coast, considerable numbers of rural villas, large farms on a Roman pattern, dating from the late second and early first centuries BC have been discovered, especially in the areas round Badalona and Barcelona. Badalona itself (ancient Baetulo) seems to have come into existence at this time, perhaps in part as a centre of exchange for those farming in the neighbourhood.(28)

The area of Catalunya, and especially the coastal plains, seems to have been developed considerably during this same period, and the Roman authorities clearly played a part in this which was not confined to the building of the new Emporiae. In the mountainous region behind and to the north-west of Barcelona, milestones from the republican period show that a proconsul named M'. Sergius constructed a road, which ran from Vic, then the centre of the Ausetani, probably reaching the coast at Tarragona. Another republican milestone from Lleida (ancient Ilerda), set up by another proconsul, Q. Fabius Labeo, marks a point on a road running inland from the coast, up the valley of the Ebro. Labeo was probably in charge of Hispania citerior at some stage between 120 and 110,(29) and if these roads belong together to a development

26. The authors of El Fórurn Romà d'Empúries (see footnote 25 above) believed, on the basis of an inscription from the site, that Emporiae became a colonia Latina in 112, at the same time as the new town was built; but see now IRCat 3.29, where it is shown that this inscription does not refer to a colonia, and belongs to the Augustan period.
27. X. Aquilue and X. Dupré, Reflexions entorn de Taracco en època tardorepublicana (Forum 1, Tarragona, 1986).
28 J. Guitart Duran, Baetulo (Badalona 1976); M. Prevosti Monclús, Cronologia i poblament a Parea rural de Baetulo (Badalona 1981). On Catalunya in general see S. Keay, 'Processes in the development of the coastal communities of Hispania citerior in the republican period', in T. Blagg and M. Millett (eds), The early Roman empire in the west (Oxford 1990), pp. 120-50; and M. Miret, J. Samnarti and J. Santacana, 'From indigenous structures to the Roman world: models for the occupation of central coastal Catalunya', in G. Barker and J. Lloyd (eds), Roman Landscapes (London 1991), pp. 47-53.
29. He is probably to be identified with an official who produced coins in 124 (M. H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage, 1 (Cambridge 1974) p. 294), which suggests a career pattern which would lead to a praetorship in this period.

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of a network of routes in this part of Spain, probably Sergius also belongs to the same period.(30) It would be interesting to know whether such activity required the sanction of the senate, or whether, as with so much else in these distant provinces, the initiative lay essentially with the commanders. In either case, it appears that there had been a decision to improve the communications in this part of Hispania citerior. The reasons must in part have been military, which was the basic reason for all road-building at this period, and no doubt this development is to be linked to the building of the via Domitia from Italy through southern France to Spain in the early years of the penultimate decade of the second century BC; but this in itself suggests a greater stabilization of the Roman military presence, which cannot be unconnected with the construction of a new town at Emporiae.

There are also significant and remarkable signs of the adoption of Roman and Italian ways in some of the great sanctuaries of the Iberians. At the site at Cerro de los Santos at Montealegre del Castillo on the south western edge of the dry upland plains, some 50 km south west of Albacete, a sanctuary, apparently linked to a spring whose water contains elements of magnesium and Sulphur, had been established at least in the fourth and third centuries BC, and continued into the Roman period, with a classical style of building and votive statuettes, which in the later stages are shown wearing Roman patterns of clothing.(31) At another sanctuary, in the mountains south of the plain, at the Ermita de la Encarnación, near Caravaca de la Cruz (Murcia), the rebuilding of the site included the erection of two temples of a design that clearly shows that the builders had in mind temples in southern Italy. Moreover, they were decorated with terracotta decorations which had been imported from Italy during the second century.(32) This illustrates

30. For Serglus' milestones, see IRCat 1.175, 176 and 181; and for Fabius', IRCat 2.89. For the interpretation of this evidence, see especially M. Mayer and I. Rodi, Ta epigrafia republicana en Cataluña: su reflejo en la red viaria', in G. Fatis (ed.), Reunión sobre epigrafta romano-republicana hispinica, 1983 (Zaragoza 1985), pp. 157-70, who also record a fifth milestone, of different shape, from Ametlla de Mar, on the coast, just north of the mouth of the Ebro.
31. M. Ruiz Bremón, 'Esculturas romanas en el Cerro de los Santos', AEA 59 (1986), pp. 67-88.
32. S. F. Ramallo Asensio and R. Arana Castillo, 'Terracotas arquetectónicas del santuario de la Encarnación (Caravaca de la Cruz, Murcia)', AEA 66 (1993), pp. 71-106.

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to a remarkable extent the connections which had developed before the end of the second century, both in terms of trade and of architectural imitation.

The other area in which similar developments might be expected is the valley of the Baetis, which, although it had not had Roman forces present for quite so long, and had been more disrupted by the wars of the mid-second century (especially that against Viriathus) than was true for Catalunya, was even more attractive agriculturally. During the second century there seems to have been little substantial building at Italica, despite its foundation by Scipio as early as 206. In the last years of the second century, however, it too saw more construction on the Roman model.(33) There are also indications of agricultural development in the wide plains of the Baetis valley itself.(34)

The evidence we have, slight though it is, suggests that, despite the sporadic and occasionally ferocious warfare that continued in the two provinces in these 50 years, they also saw the beginnings of important changes, both in the development of relations between the senate and the provincial communities and in the establishment of what might be called a Roman civilian presence, alongside the military presence, which had been by far the main, if not effectively the only form that the inhabitants had experienced previously. The contrast can, of course, be overdrawn. The silver mines were, as we have already seen,(35) attracting Romans and Italians in large numbers by the mid-second century BC, and the remains of amphorae from the camps of Scipio Aemilianus at Numantia, and on Roman and non-Roman sites in the north-east and the valleys of the Ebro and the Guadalquivir show that Italian wine was being imported to Spain in quantity.(36) On the other

33. See the contributions to Italica: actas de las primeras journadas sobre excavaciones en Italica (EAE 121, 1982) by R. Corzo Sinchez ('Organizacion de territorio y evolucion urbana en Italica', pp.299-319) and M. Bendala Galin ('Excavaciones en el cerro de los Palaclos', pp. 29-73).
34. This is sketched briefly by A. Ruiz Rodriguez, M. Molinos and M. Castro López, 'Settlement and continuity in the territory of the Guadalquivir valley (6th century BC - 1st century AD) in G. Barker and J. Lloyd, Roman Landscapes (London 1991) pp. 29-36.
35. Above pp. 73 and 80.
36. A. Schulten, Numantia vol. 4 (Munich 1929) taf.73, nos.1-22. M. Beltrin Lloris, Las anforas romanas en España (Zaragoza 1970), pp. 317-29. One amphora, from a non-Roman site near Barcelona, carries the Roman consular

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hand, the number of Roman towns was still very small, and, with the exception of Cartela, it is not clear that any of them were recognized as communities with any privileges within the Roman System.(37) The provinciae Hispaniae remained what they had always been, areas of responsibility allotted to Roman magistrates and promagistrates, within which they exercised their imperium. For the most part, their tasks remained essentially military. Even C. Valerius Flaccus, who was responsible for issuing the remarkable formula on which the resolution of the dispute recorded on the tabula Contrebiensis was based, had just before put down a rebellion in which Appian tells us he killed some 10,000 rebellious Celtiberians, and executed the ring-leaders of a group who had burned down their senate house with the senators inside it because they had refused to join the rebellion." It was not his contribution to provincial jurisprudence that won Flaccus his triumph in Rome.

One last example illustrates well both the changes and the continuity that mark this period. Between 91 and 87, Rome was engaged in the bitter and difficult war with the Italian allies. With the exception of the long tenure of Hispania citerior by Valerius Flaccus, this war seems to have had little effect on the peninsula at the time. In one case, however, it did have at least an indirect impact. In 89, the consul, Cn. Pompeius Strabo granted the privilege of Roman citizenship to a group of Spanish cavalrymen who were serving with him in the war, as a reward for their bravery, under the terms of the lex Iulia. The inscription which records this decree lists the names of the people who received the citizenship, arranged according to their places of origin.(39) For the most part, they have native Iberian names, but in the case of the three from Ilerda (modern Lleida) they have Roman names, although their fathers' names are native. This must indicate some sort of distinction between Ilerda and the other towns of the Ebro valley and Catalunya, from which all the cavalrymen seem to come. It cannot

date of 119 (J. M. Nolla, 'Una produccio caracteristica: les amfores "DB"', Cypsela 2 (1977) pp. 221-2).
37. Above pp. 77-8.
38. Appian, Ib. 100.436-7.
39 ILLRP 515 = ILS 8888; N. Criniti, L'epigrafe di Asculum di Gn. Pompeio Strabone (Milan 1970). Criniti has added further notes and bibliography in a brief mantissa (Milan 1980).

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be, as has been suggested, that they already held the Roman citizenship by some means, since that would make Pompeius' grant futile. The most probable explanation is that these men were using Roman names before they had received any Roman status, either for themselves or for their communities.(40) The presence of these people on this inscription from Ascoll in central Italy shows not only that the Romans were making use of Spanish troops alongside their own forces, but also the extent to which Roman ways were gradually infiltrating the non-Roman communities. All of the men who received this privilege from the consul of 89 would take back to their communities an enhanced status that came from their service of Rome, and, as the Romanized names born by the men from Ilerda shows, a few had received some sort of recognition from Romans in the province before Pompeius' grant.(41) It is clear that these marks of recognition were not simply honorific, but had practical benefits attached. It can scarcely be coincidental that the name of the squadron as a whole is the same as that of the tribe which successfully applied, two years later, to C. Valerius Flaccus for the resolution of their disputed rights to a water channel.(42)

The Civil Wars (i): Sertorius

The relative lack of involvement of the Spanish provinciae with the internal struggles of Rome came to an abrupt end in the late 80s. The return of Sulla from the east in 83, following his truce with Mithridates of Pontus at the river Dardanus, coincided with the departure for Hispania citerior of Q. Sertorius, praetor in that year, and a supporter of Sulla's opponent, C. Marius, who had died three years earlier. Indeed, Sertorius remained in Italy for long enough to see the beginnings of the collapse of the Marian resistance to Sulla, before departing for Spain.(43)

40. For a similar interpretation, and other instances, see E. Badian, Foreign Clientelae (Oxford 1958), pp. 256-7. Compare the Anauni, in the region of Tridentum, who were acting illegally as Roman citizens, before being granted citizenship by the emperor Claudius In AD 46 (ILS 206).
41. This must have been in their own right, since their fathers had still been using native names.
42. Above p. 89.
43. Plutarch, Sertorius 6.1-3; Appian, bell. civ. 1.86.392; Ib. 101.438-9.

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The events of the decade which follows Sertorius' arrival, while clear enough in outline, are frustratingly difficult to establish with geographical or chronological precision. In part, the reason for this is the nature of the sources. Plutarch, whose life of Sertorius, included among his biographical essays, illustrating the lives of and moral characters of great Greeks and Romans by comparing them in pairs, is full of anecdotal detail, but not especially interested in precisely when or where events took place.(44) Of the Roman historians who wrote about Sertonius, Livy's account exists for this period only in the Epitome, a brief list of the content of each book, and, in one fragment, dealing with events in Ebro valley in 77; while Sallust, whose lost Historiae included a full account of the war, survives only in fragments, quoted by later writers, mostly to show his unusual use of language.(45) Of the later historians, writing in the second century AD, Appian includes a brief account in his history of the civil wars, and Florus gives a typically rhetorical and inaccurate rehash of what once must have been found in Livy.(46) Faced with these unpromising and scattered materials, scholars have made various attempts to construct a coherent account, but the fact that fullest sources are not interested in providing such precision, and that those which might have done so exist only in fragmentary form, makes the enterprise almost impossible.(47)
The other, and more fundamental problem results from the image that the sources give of Sertorius, and which it appears that he attempted to give of himself. The story of the white deer which was presented to him by a Spanish peasant, and which he declared to be a gift from the gods, bringing messages and good luck, and

44. Indeed he is quite explicit in denying the significance of what are traditionally regarded as historically important events for establishing the character of his subJects (Plutarch, Alexander 1.2-3).
45. The fundamental edition is that of B. Maurenbrecher (Leipzig 1891); some of the fragments are now to be found in the new Oxford text of Sallust, edited by L. Reynolds (Oxford 1991).
46. Appian, bell. civ. 1.108-117; Florus 2.10.22.
47. The most influential attempt has been that of A. Schulten, Sertorius (Leipzig 1927). More recently, see P. 0. Spann, Quintus Sertorius and the legacy of Sulla (Fayetteville 1987), and the notes by T. R. S. Broughton, MRR 3 (Atlanta 1986), pp. 160-5. A further problem is presented by the inaccuracy of all these sources in recording Iberian place-names, which has led to frequent emendation of the texts, especially of Plutarch and Appian.

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the manner in which he is said to have manipulated the presence or absence of this animal to influence his Spanish followers, is an indication of his ability as a publicist; and one which made a profound influence not only on the 'superstitious' native population, but also on the more sophisticated Romans and Greeks who repeatedly relate it." A similar aura of spirituality surrounds the story that he would have preferred to leave the war and the tyranny of Rome behind him and sail away to the Isles of the Blest, located in the Atlantic Ocean, some distance from the Pillars of Hercules (the modern Straits of Gibraltar), but was dissuaded by some of those with him.(49) There can be little doubt that the mystique of Sertorius was indeed a part of his character and of his policy, but this is not helpful to any attempt to construct a precise chronology.

The outline of events is, however, fairly readily established. After his arrival in Spain, Sertorius made himself popular with the Spanish communities by reforming tax abuses and by relieving the population of the requirement to billet Roman troops, which had made Roman rule very unpopular;(10) but in the following year, 81 BC, he was forcibly expelled from the peninsula by C. Annius, who had been sent to replace him by the Sullan government in Rome. He retired to Africa, whence, after some involvement with disturbances in Mauretania, he was recalled by the Lusitanians who requested him to act as their supreme commander, much as both Hasdrubal and Scipio had been asked by the Iberians of the Baetis valley in the third century.(51) This was the beginning of a war in Spain between Sertonius and his Spanish allies against the now officially established authorities in Rome, which was to last until his death some eight years later.(52) In 79, Q. Caecillus Metellus Pius, the consul of the previous year, was dispatched to Hispania ulterior to deal with him, but found himself unable to come to

48. Valerius Maximus 1.2.4, 1.3.5; Plutarch, Sertorius 11.3 -8 and 20; Gellius, NA 15.22; Frontinus, Strat. 1.11.13; Appian, bell. civ. 1.110.514.
49. Plutarch, Sertorius 8-9; Sallust, Hist. 1. 10 1-3 (M).
50. Plutarch, Sertorius 6.4.
51. Above, pp. 17 and 34.
52. On the date of Sertorius' death, see W. H. Bennet, 'The death of Sertorius and the coin', Historia 10 (1961), pp. 459-72, who argues persuasively for 73 against the traditional date of 72; and the doubts presented by B. Scardigli, 'Sertorio: problemi cronologici', Athenaeum 49 (1971), pp. 259-70.

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grips with an elusive enemy, who was able to inflict numerous minor defeats on him. In the same period, Sertorius' quaestor, Hirtuleius, defeated M. Domitius Calvinus, the proconsul in Hispania citerior." More important still, he was in 77 joined by substantial forces, under the command of M. Perperna, fleeing from the failed rebellion of M. Aemilius Lepidus, the consul of 78, who had raised an army in Etruria against the regime in Rome."

In 77 the senate decided to increase the military forces in Spain to attempt to crush Sertorius, and chose Cn. Pompeius to hold a command alongside Metellus with imperium pro consule.(55) Pompeius had at that time not only not held either a consulship or a praetorship, but was too young to have held either. He had attracted the attention of Sulla through his contribution to the Sullan side during the fighting which had brought the dictator to power in Rome, and had shown his military prowess in crushing the revolt of Lepidus early in the year; but although he had been awarded a triumph by Sulla and already used the cognomen 'Magnus' ('The Great'), he was even so still an extraordinary choice, especially for a senate that was largely made up of the supporters of the now dead Sulla. It was Sulla who had restated and strengthened the rules for the age at which magistrates could obtain office, and had taken great care to restrict the activities of the holders of imperium.(56) The choice of Pompeius under these circumstances must reflect not only their perception of his abilities but also their frustration at the inability of Metellus to conclude the war. A speech of a senior senator, L. Marcius Philippus, mentioned by Cicero, expresses precisely this sentiment.(57) It was not of course the first time that such a man had been sent to Spain, but the obvious parallel with the sending of the younger Scipio in 210 suggests that for some of the senators the situation in 77 was

53. Livy, ep. 90. Hirtuleius was also responsible for the defeat of L. Manlius, proconsul in Transalpine Gaul (Caesar, BG 3.20.1; Plutarch, Sertorius 12.4; Orosius 5.23.4). Note that Sertorius continued to use the titles of the Roman magistracy, despite his rejection in Rome, as mentioned by Plutarch, Sertorius 22.4.
54. Plutarch, Sertorius 15.1; Appian, bell civ 1.107.504 and 108.508.
55. See the sources quoted in MRR 1.90.
56. Appian, bell. civ 1.100.466. Other references in MRR 1.75.
57. Cicero, Phil. 11.8.18.

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as dangerous as that after the death of the two Scipio brothers in 211.

Despite the great hopes that Pompeius carried with him, he was initially even less successful than Metellus, being defeated by Sertorius at the battle of Lauro, not far south of Saguntum.(58) It is probably at this time that Sertorius captured the town of Contrebia in the Ebro valley and was active against other towns in the same area.(59) From this point onwards, however, Sertorius' fortunes declined. His most successful collaborator, Hirtuleius, was defeated twice by Metellus, once at Italica in the Baetis valley and a second time near Segovia, where he lost his life.(60) In a great battle, probably near Sigüenza in the north-east of the meseta, Sertorius met with the combined armies of Pompeius and Metellus, and was defeated in a close-fought struggle.(61) After this, Sertorius seems to have reverted to the guerrilla warfare that had been so successful at the outset, although it appears that he still controlled some parts of the Mediterranean coastline, and (perhaps most astonishing of all) had a treaty with Rome's great enemy in the east, Mithridates, king of Pontus.(62) Pompeius wrote a letter to the senate, demanding in decidedly threatening terms that he should be sent additional resources, or else he might have to return with his army; but one reaction to this, recorded by Plutarch, expressed uncertainty as to whether it would be Pompeius or Sertorius who would march back into Italy.(63) The reality, however, was that Sertorius could only win by a war of attrition, and it eventually

58. Plutarch, Sertorius 18.3-6.
59. Livy 91, fr. 22(W). On the identification of Contrebia with modern Botorrita, see G. Fatis, Contrebia Belaisca II: Tabula Contrebiensis (Zaragoza 1980), pp. 46-57.
60. Sallust, Hist. 2.59(M); Livy, ep. 91; Frontinus, Strat. 2.3.5 and 2.7.5; Orosius 5.23.10 and 12; Florus 2.10.7, who alone identifies the site of the second battle.
61. Livy, ep. 92; Plutarch, Sertorius 21.1; Appian, bell. Civ 1.110.515. On the site, and the text of Plutarch on which the identification rests, see K. Ziegler, 'Plutarchstudien', RhMus 83 (1934), pp. 1-20 at p. 7; P. O. Spann, 'Saguntum vs. Segontia', Hist. 33 (1984), pp. 116-19.
62. Strabo 3.4.10 says that after his expulsion from Celtiberia he fought battles at Hemeroskopelon (an unknown site on the east coast) and Tarraco. Strabo also identifies Dianium (modern Denia) as his naval headquarters (3.4.6). Treaty with Mithridates: Plutarch, Sertorius 23-4; Appian, Mithr. 68.286-90; cf. Sallust, Hist. 2.79(M); Livy, ep. 93.
63. Sallust, Hist. 2.98(M); Plutarch, Pompeius 20.1; Sertorius 21.6; Lucullus 5.2-3.

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became clear that both sides could play that game. The territory of the peoples of the northern meseta, and especially the Vaccaei, and, as Florus states in a typically moralist but (on this occasion) accurate phrase, it was wretched Spain which suffered from the mutual hostility of the two Roman armies.(64) Of the two, however, Sertorius had more to lose. It was he who relied on the support of the Iberians, especially now he was cut off from both the Lusitanians, who had originally summoned him back to Spain, and the Celtiberians. In the end, quarrels amongst the Romans who made up his officer corps led to a conspiracy, and he was assassinated by his second-in-command, Perperna, at a banquet at their headquarters at Osca (modern Huesca).(65) Most of the Iberians are said to have deserted Perperna and surrendered to Pompeius shortly after.

It is clear that Sertorius was a remarkable leader, with a gift for the guerrilla warfare which, as Viriathus had shown, was so well suited to the territory of Spain. Moreover, he had great diplomatic skills, as his negotiations with Mithridates showed. It is also likely that he was able to maintain contacts with those within the political world of Rome from which he had come. Perperna is said to have offered to Pompeius a dossier of letters from high-placed personages in Rome, expressing their support for Sertorius, but Pompeius, no doubt wisely, destroyed them without reading them, and put to death Perperna himself and the other conspirators.(66) However, Sertorius has been credited with considerably more than this. Mommsen thought he was perhaps without equal among the Romans in terms of his talent.(67) Some have seen him as an ideologically committed democrat, leading a last resistance against the oligarchy imposed by Sulla.(61) Others have seen him as a conscious and successful promoter of 'Romanization'.(69) Of these views, which are by no means exclusive of one another, the second is both less anachronistic and, for present purposes, more interesting. There can be no doubt that Sertorius, as he appears in our

64. Florus 2.10.22.8.
65. Plutarch, Sertorius 25-6. For other sources, see MRR 1.118.
66. Plutarch, Sertorius 27.2-4.
67. Th. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte 38 (1889), p. 20.
68. Thus P. 0. Spann, Quintus Sertorius and the legacy of Sulla (Fayetteville 1987); L. A. Curchin, Roman Spain (London 1991), p. 46.
69. C. H. V. Sutherland, The Romans in Spain (London 1939), pp. 94-6.

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sources, spent considerable time and energy on developing a sense of cohesion among his disparate forces, and a sense of privilege among his allies. This is particularly true in the case of his relations with the Iberians in the north-east. He is said to have set up at Osca an establishment for the education of the sons of the Iberian nobles, in which they wore Roman clothes and learned Greek and Latin. Plutarch says that in reality they were hostages, and that, in the end, Sertorius treated them as such when his support began to fall away, but he also makes it clear that at the outset at least this was welcomed by the Iberians, and strengthened the bonds between himself and them.(70) It also appears that he gave a sort of quasi-citizenship to at least some of those who fought with him, as Plutarch describes his army as consisting of 26,000 'whom he called Romans', as well as 700 Libyans, 4,000 Lusitanians and 700 cavalry.(71) In return for this he received large-scale support from his allies, some of whom devoted themselves to him even to the extent of fighting to the death to protect him.(72) At a more mundane but perhaps more useful level, they clearly also supported him well financially, and the period of the Sertorian wars saw a final burst of production of Iberian silver denarii, which represent substantial contributions to his war chest by his Iberian allies.(73) In some ways he was no doubt able to build on the unpopularity of Roman rule, as he is said to have done at the beginning of his time in Spain; and perhaps one of the most telling indications of this is the lack of any mention of Spanish allies for Metellus or Pompeius in what was, after all, a war between Romans, not between Romans and Spaniards.
It is clear, then, that in a particular sense Sertorius was involved in 'Romanization'; but it is easy to exaggerate both the extent and

70. Plutarch, Sertorius 14 and 25.3-4.
71. Plutarch, Sertorius 12.1-2. Caesar, BG 3.25.5-6 attributes the high level of military expertise to be found among certain Aquitanians in 56BC to their training when fighting with Sertorius (cf. Cassius Dio 39.6; Orosius 6.8.21). Vegetius, 1.7, comments on the excellence of his choice of soldiers, but that may well refer only to Romans.
72. Sallust, Hist. 1.125(M); Plutarch, Sertorius 14.4-5. On the phenomenon, cf. F. Rodriguez Adraclos, 'La fides iberica', Emerita 14 (1946), pp. 128-209, esp. pp.162-207.
73 A. H. Crawford, Coins and Money under the Roman Republic (London 1985), pp. 209-11.

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the originality of what he did. There is no suggestion, for instance, that when he set up a Senate, or, as Plutarch puts it, 'what he called a senate, this consisted of anything other than former senators who had fled to him from Rome.(74) As for the 'Romans' in his army, the 'giving of Roman names to native Spaniards who had no proper claim to the Roman citizenship is one which, as we-have seen, appears to have been practised by others before Sertorius, and Plutarch is quite explicit that he gave Iberians no place in his command.(75) Sertorius can be seen to have been taking advantage of the lack of recognition by the authorities in Rome of what had been happening in Spain over the past half-century to develop a quasi-Roman power-base of his own within the peninsula. From this point of view, his importance is not so much as a promoter of Romanization, as an indication of how far it had come already. He, also demonstrates in a startling and unexpected fashion, the uses to which the relatively unfettered and unchecked power of the provincial commander within his provincia could be used to exploit the resources of the area against Rome itself.

From this perspective, Sertorius' opponents, Metellus and Pompeius, seem to be in the same line of development, if at a slightly different place on that line. Pompeius is credited with founding at Pompaelo (modern Pamplona) a non-Roman settlement, in the tradition of Ti. Gracchus at Gracchurris in the early 170s; and Metellus, apart from leaving the remains of a semi-permanent military camp, just to the north of Cáceres in the modem province of Extremadura, was also probably responsible for the settlement, called Caecilia Metellinum, usually identified with Medellín, perched high on a steep hill by the side of the river Guadiana (the Roman Anas), overlooking the broad expanse of the valley. The status of this town at its foundation is unknown, but, although later it was a Roman citizen colony, the probability is that this status was only given under Caesar, and that, like virtually all the

74. Plutarch, Sertorius 22.3
75. Plutarch, Sertorius 22.4. Above p. 95.
76. Pompaelo: Strabo 3.4.10. Caecilia Metellinum: Pliny, NH 4.117. On the camp near Cáceres, see G. Ulbert, Cáceres el Viejo (Madrider Beiträge 11, 1985). The camp at Almazán (Soria) may also belong to these campaigns (G. Gainer and T. Ortego, 'Neue BEobachtungen am r6mischen Lager bel Almazin (prov. Soria)', MM 10 (1969), pp. 172-84). On the status of Metellinum, see H. Galsterer, Untersuchungen, p. 14.

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other foundations we have seen hitherto, it had no privileged position at this stage.
There are indications too that in at least some of the cities which had appeared since the Romans arrived, the imitation of Roman ways had established itself. Cicero mentions in passing that Metellus while in Corduba listened to native-born poets praising his deeds, and his comment on the style of language and delivery makes it clear that they were speaking in Latin.(77) It is also clear, from occasional passing references, that Metellus and Pompeius built on the relations between Roman commanders and native inhabitants which already existed. Here they had an advantage over Sertorius in that they could offer to their friends and supporters the citizenship of Rome itself. Pompeius gave civitas to L. Cornelius Balbus, a wealthy citizen of Gades, and he and Metellus achieved the same status for the family of the Fabii at Saguntum.(78) In both these cases, the families of the men concerned appear, like those from Ilerda to whom Pompeius' father gave citizenship, to have already acquired Roman names from other and earlier contact with members of the major Roman families. Metellus and Pompeius were simply taking this process one vital step further.(79)

Nevertheless, for Metellus and Pompeius, the two provinces were still essentially areas of military activity. When Gades renewed its treaty with Rome in 78, it was as a military ally in a dangerous war-zone,(80) and when the two commanders triumphed on their return to Rome in 71, they celebrated triumphs just as though they had been fighting there a century earlier, and certainly not against Roman forces in Roman ternitory.(81) In a similar style, Pompeius was to erect an immense monument to his victory astride the road which runs through the Pyrenees from France into Spain. This edifice included not only an effigy of Pompeius

77. Cicero, pro Archia 10.26.
78. Cicero, pro Balbo 3.6; 22.50-1.
79 On the activities of Metellus, as shown in the appearance of Caecilli in later inscriptions, see S. L. Dyson, 'The distribution of Roman republican family names in the Iberian peninsula', Ancient Society 11/12 (1980/1), pp. 284-5. The case for Pompeius is less clear (Dyson, ibid. 288-9).
80. Cicero, pro Balbo 15.34.
81. Triumphs could not be celebrated for a victory in a civil war (Valerius Maximus 2.8.7).

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himself but also an inscription commemorating the 876 towns that he had brought back into Roman control. Pliny remarks that, tactfully, there was no mention of Sertorius.(82) This was the symbol of the victory of a conqueror of foreign peoples, not of the restorer of peace to a troubled part of the Roman realm.

The Civil Wars (ii): Caesar and Pompeius

The years that followed the return of Pompeius and Metellus to Rome in 71 were some of the most crucial in the history of Rome. In these years the Roman republic collapsed into a form of monarchy, and the oligarchy that had ruled Rome and the Mediterranean world found itself for the first time dominated by a single ruler, who showed no sign that he would do as Sulla had done, resign from office once the machinery of the state was reestablished. To a large extent, the manner in which the republic fell was due to its own success as an aggressive, military state, for it was the armies, which had been sent out, avowedly to serve in the provinciae, which the great commanders of the late republic were to use to secure their own power.

It is not surprising that in these circumstances the history of the Spanish provinces in this period is dominated by the figures of Pompeius and Caesar, but it is remarkable just how large a part these two men play in the events of the last decades of the republic in the area. Pompeius, of course, must already have established himself as the major Roman figure in the eyes of the inhabitants of Hispania citerior as a result of the Sertorian war, and the aftermath of that war remained with the region for some time. In 70, M. Pupius Piso, who had been praetor in 72 or 71, celebrated a triumph over the Celtiberians, whose territory Pompeius had ravaged after the collapse of the Sertorian alliance

82 Pliny, NH 3.3.18, 7.26.96, 37.2.15; cf. Sallust, Hist. 3.89(M); Strabo 3.4.1, 3.4.7; Florus 2.10.9; Cassius Dio 41.24.3. On the trophies of Pompeius, see I. Rodi, 'Els models arquitectónics dels trofeus de Pompeu als Pireneus', in Hornenatje al Prof. Miquel Tarradell (Barcelona 1993), pp. 645ff.; J. Arce, 'Los trofeos de Pompeyo "in Pyrenaei iugis", AEA 67 (1994), pp. 261-4; F. Beltrán Lloris and F. Pina Polo, 'Roma y los Pireneos: la formación de una frontera', Chiron 24 (1990), pp. 103-33 at pp. 113-17.

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following Sertorius' murder.(83) However, in Hispania ulterior at least a more settled pattern was emerging. In 68, C. Antistius Vetus held the command, and his quaestor was C. Iulius Caesar. This, so far as we know, was Caesar's first contact with either of the Spanish provinces, to which he subsequently was to claim an especial attachment.(84) He is said, by Suetonius, writing in the early second century AD, to have spent his time, on instructions from Antistius, going round the conventus, hearing cases in court. Suetonius seems to envisage a pattern of assize-courts, of the type that were certainly present in Spain by the time of Augustus, and, while it is by no means certain that such a system was in place by this stage, there is no reason to doubt that there was enough juridical or quasi juridical activity required in the further province to occupy much of the time of a member of the proconsul's staff. (85)

In the next few years, military matters in Rome were once again centred on the activities of Pompeius, who in 67 was given by a law proposed by a tribunes of the plebs (the lex Gabinia) an immense command to remove the menace of the pirates who were threatening sea-going traffic throughout the Mediterranean. As some had been active as allies of Sertorius,(86) and the coast of Spain (and especially the straits of Gibraltar) was a crucial part of the sea-routes which were so affected, two of Pompeius' group of 15 legati pro praetore were placed within Spanish territory, one in the Balearic Islands and one at Gades.(87) Pompeius succeeded in his task in an extraordinarily short time, by denying the pirates the use of their land-bases, and was available from 66 to be sent, under another tribunician law (the lex Manilia), to fight against Mithridates in the east. The conquest of Mithridates and the reorganization of the area of Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, took him from

83. The sources refer to Uxama, Clunia and Calagurris, where (notoriously) cannibalism was said to have taken place (Sallust, Hist. 3.86 and 87; Val. Max. 7.6: ext. 3; Florus 2.10.9; Oros. 5.23.14; Exsuperantius 8.6).
84. According, at least, to a speech given to him in the anonymous Bell. Hisp. 42.
85. Suetonius, Div. Caes. 7; cf. Velleius Paterculus 2.43.4.
86. Plutarch, Sertorius 7.
87. Appian, Mithr. 95.434; Florus 1.41.9. J. Leach, Pompey the Great (London 1978), pp. 55-77; R. Seager, Pompey: a political biography (Oxford 1979), pp. 28-43.

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66 to 62, when he returned to Rome to celebrate a magnificent triumph.(88)

The next time that we hear very much about Spain itself is when Caesar returns there again in 61, this time as proconsul in Hispania ulterior, having held the praetorship in 62. Although the sources are inevitably coloured by pro- and anti-Caesarian bias from the period of the later civil wars, it is clear that he was engaged both in military activity and in using his position as the representative of the Roman people to sort out various problems, and in the process acquiring influence in the area.(89) He had to deal with Lusitanian raids into the Baetis valley, and, in a manner which is familiar from his later time in Gaul, turned the pursuit of these peoples into a reason for extending his activities much further north into the territory of the Callaeci in modern Galicia. It was for this that he hoped to win a triumph on his return to Rome, an expectation that was frustrated by his need to enter Rome before he could celebrate it, in order to present himself in person as a candidate for the consulship of 59.(90) He is also said to have assisted the local communities which were in financial difficulties because of the excessive demands of Roman money-lenders and, with senatorial permission, to have cancelled a large punitive tax imposed by Metellus during the Sertorian war.(91)

Caesar's tenure of Hispania citerior, although typically active and vigorous, does not seem to have been different in essence from that of any other provincial commander. He, like his predecessors, seems to have attempted, with some success, to build up his links with the area by establishing relationships of clientela with the local communities, and is said, for example, to have bestowed benefits on Gades at the request of Balbus.(92) It is unlikely, however, that he would have been able, even if it had occurred to

88. On Pompeius in the east, see A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman foreign policy in the east, 168 BC to AD 1 (London 1984), pp. 186-234.
89. Appian, bell. civ. 2.8.26-7, represents him as interested only in acquiring glory and money, while Plutarch, Caesar 12, gives a far more sympathetic account.
90. Livy ep. 103; Plutarch, Caesar 12; Cassius Dio 37.52-3.
91. Plutarch, Caes. 12; Bell. Hisp. 42. However, Suetonius, Div. Caes. 54, and Appian, bell. civ. 2.8.26, say that he extorted large amounts of money from the provincials.
92. Cicero, pro Balbo 19.43.

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him, to establish a sufficient weight of patronage to match that of Pompeius in Hispania citerior. In any case, Pompeius was to renew and reinforce his connection with Spain within a few years. In 55, as consul, he received under a special law (the lex Trebonia), which gave provinces to him and to his fellow consul, M. Licinius Crassus, command over the whole of Spain for five years. This law was a parallel arrangement to one, proposed by the two consuls themselves at the beginning of their year of office, which renewed Caesar's tenure of Gaul for a similar period.(93) By so doing, they reinforced the co-operation between the three men which had begun in Caesar's consulship in 59, through which, much to the distress of other senators such as Cicero, they had, with some difficulties, been able to manage in their own interests much of the political life of the city.

Pompeius' command in Spain was quite unlike any that had been seen there before. Instead of going to the peninsula, he operated in absentia through legati, as he had done in the command against the pirates in 67. The fundamental difference, however, was that on this occasion there was no great task of warfare and reorganization to be accomplished, as had been the case against the pirates and in the east. It is true that Q. Caecilius Metellus Nepos, proconsul in Hispania citerior in 56, had been involved with a revolt of the Vaccaei, but he had captured their stronghold of Clunia, perched on a -high hill overlooking the rolling plains of Castile, with little difficulty, and defeated them in a subsequent encounter. This was put forward as the reason for making Spain a single great command, but the weakness of the excuse and the absence of Pompeius himself from his provincia demonstrate that the reality was quite different.(94) The need that was met by this extraordinary command was not to be found in the Iberian peninsula, but in the necessity for the three great men of the time, Pompeius, Caesar and Crassus, each to have forces at their disposal, to meet opposition from enemies in Rome, or, as it turned out, from one another."

93. See sources listed in MRR 1.215 and 217.
94. Cassius Dio, 39.33.2 and 39.54.
95. Note the complaint of Caesar at Ilerda in 49 that the seven legions which Pompeius had retained in Spain had nothing to do with the pacifying of the provinciae, and everything to do with preparations for a war against himself (Caesar, BC 1.85).

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So, when towards the end of 50, following the death of Crassus fighting against the Parthians in the deserts to the east of his province of Syria, relations between Pompeius and Caesar finally broke down entirely, it was clear that Spain would be one of the areas in which the great war between them would be fought. Early in February 49, after Caesar's move across the Rubicon out of his provincia of Cisalpine Gaul and into Italy and the breakdown of subsequent negotiations, Cicero assumed that it was to Spain that Pompeius would go, and that he himself would go with him.(96) The Pompeian connection with Spain was such that, even after Pompeius had in fact left Italy for Greece rather than heading westwards, Caesar himself was sufficiently worried about the support for his adversary that he determined to secure his own positionbefore pursuing him. In some ways this was an obvious move, since there were still three commanders in the peninsula who were there in virtue of being Pompeius' legati under the terms of the lex Trebonia of 55, L. Afranius having three legions in Hispania citerior, M. Petreius two in the upper Baetis valley, and M. Terentius Varro another two in Lusitania in the west.(97) The explanation which Caesar himself gives, however, is not confined to the military situation. He was indeed concerned that preparations might be made behind his back, were he to follow Pompeius across the Adriatic, and that an invasion of Gaul and Italy might be launched from there; but he was particularly anxious because, of the two provinciae, one was tied to Pompeius as a result of the patronage which the latter had been able to exert over so many years.(98) This, of course, was Hispania citerior, where Pompeius had fought against Sertorius from 77/76 to 72.

The reference to the Sertorian war is interesting, and not only as an explanation of the extent of Pompeius' following. The role that Caesar was attributing to Pompeius by implication was precisely that which had so concerned the senate in the 70s when played by Sertorius himself, of acting as an alternative Roman power, built upon not only Roman military strength, but on the support of the people living there, and in particular the Iberian and Celtiberian inhabitants of the Ebro valley and the regions

96. Cicero, ad Att. 7.18.2.
97. Caesar, bell. civ. 1.38.1.
98. Caesar, bell. civ. 1.29.3-30.1; cf. 1.61.3; 2.18.7.

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immediately to the north and south of that river.(99) No doubt in part this was a view that Caesar would be happy to propagate, as it suggests that he, not Pompeius, was the legitimate authority in Rome; but at a less paradoxical level, the spectre of Sertorius still haunts the early months of the war between the two. It was he who had raised the possibility of a Roman doing what Hannibal had done in 218. One result of this fear can perhaps be seen in the way in which two writers, both of them writing in the years immediately after the end of the wars between Caesar and Pompeius, deal with military affairs in Spain. The first is the remark of Cicero, writing in his treatise de officiis in 44, that the war against the Celtiberians which ended in the sack of Numantia in 133, was not simply a war for supremacy between Rome and Numantia, but a war for survival.(100) The historian Sallust, in his account of the conspiracy of Catiline, tells of the sending of one C. Piso to the two Spanish provinciae, in the context of a failed attempt to murder the consuls, coming into office in January 66.(101) The plan, according to Sallust, was that Piso, an associate of Catiline, would stir up trouble there; but that, when the plot failed, Piso was none the less sent out because some people in the senate were worried about the power which Pompeius was acquiring through his command against Mithridates. Nothing came of this, since, according to Sallust, Piso was killed in Spain by a group of equites loyal to Pompeius. The story, as has often been recognized, is incoherent and probably false,(102) but it is likely that it had at least an appearance of plausibility to those at the time Sallust wrote, who not only remembered Sertorius' success in the 70s, but had just lived through a civil war in which both the use of Spain as a base for one side in the conflict and the loyalty of parts of the peninsula to Pompeius had been central factors.

Caesar's first move was to send his legatus, C. Fabius, from Narbo in southern Gaul (modern Narbonne) to occupy the Pyrenaean passes, which were being held by Afranius. The Pom-

99 See the typically penetrating observation of A. Momigliano, in his review of Syme's The Roman Revolution, MJRS 30 (1940), p. 78.
100. Cicero, de off. 1.12.38. See above p. 80.
101. Sallust, Cat. 18-19. Piso was indeed in Spain as quaestor pro praetore in this period, as seen from an inscription erected by him in Rome (ILLRP 378).
102. R. Seager, 'The First Catilinarian Conspiracy', Historia 13 (1964), pp. 338-47.

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peians responded by bringing Petreius, with additional troops he had recruited from the Lusitanians, up to join with Afranius, who had also gathered further local support from the peoples of Celtiberia, Cantabria and the north-west. Varro was left in control in the south. Together Afranius and Petreius moved to hold the town of Ilerda (modern Lleida), a crucial point in the network of roads leading from the coast into the Ebro valley, and also down from the crossing points of the Pyrenees.(103) Fabius attempted to win over some of the local people, and attempted to establish bridges across the river Sicoris (the modem Segre, a tributary of the Ebro, on which Lleida stands). Caesar, spurred on by a rumour that Pompeius himself was marching through north Africa, moved rapidly into Spain, and engaged with the Pompeians at Ilerda.(104) Although at first this seemed indecisive, and indeed the Pompeians in letters to their friends in Rome claimed it as a victory, Caesar succeeded in cutting off their supplies and making their position impossible to hold. A Caesarian naval victory off Massilia (modern Marseilles) increased the problems of the Pompeians, and local communities in the Ebro valley and in Catalunya in general, began to come over to his side.(105) At this point, the knowledge that Pompeius' reputation and patronage in northern Spain was far greater than Caesar's, tempted Afranius and Petreius into a move that was to prove disastrous. Because so much of the later stages of the war against Sertorius 'had been fought in Celtiberia, in the northern part of the meseta, those who had been on both sides during that war bad reason to know about Pompeius, and either to fear him, even when not himself present, or to remember his benefits to them with gratitude. Caesar, on the other hand, was no more than a name.(106) They therefore decided to transfer the war to Celtiberia.

Getting there, however, was more of a problem. In a brilliant move, which took his forces through rough territory in the dry and broken landscape south of Ilerda, Caesar succeeded in outflanking his opponents and blocking their way to the Ebro. Now short of water as well as food, and with frequent desertions of both Roman and Spanish troops, Afranius and Petreius headed

103. Caesar, bell. civ. 1.37-8.
104. Caesar, bell. civ. 1.39 and 41-6.
105. Caesar, bell. civ. 1.60.
106. Caesar, bell. civ. 1.61.3.

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back towards Ilerda, but before they could get there were forced to capitulate to Caesar, having failed to persuade him to engage them in a full-scale battle.(107)

The situation in the further province was, if we are to believe Caesar, quite different from that which he had faced in the north. M. Varro, left in sole charge after the departure of Petreius to Join Afranius, at first felt inclined to go over to Caesar, because he knew the whole province was well inclined towards him, but decided not to do so on hearing the initial news from the two Pompeian commanders at Ilerda. Consequently, he commanded that warships be built, and installed a pro-Pompeian in Gades to watch over the city. He also raised cash from the provincials by forced exactions, removed the treasure from the famous temple of Hercules at Gades, and compelled the whole province to swear allegiance to himself and to Pompeius On hearing what had really happened in Hispania citerior, he withdrew into Gades. Caesar, determined not to leave any Pompeian troops in Spain, because of the danger of renewed support from Pompeius friends in the nearer province, decided to sort out Hispania ulterior before returning to Italy.(108)
Although it may well be that Caesar overemphasizes the extent of his own support in southern Spain, it is likely enough that Pompeius' patronage was smaller there, and that success against Afranius, and Petreius will have won Caesar friends. He says that he sent Q. Cassius Longinus, a tribune of the plebs who had been active in his interest in Rome, with two legions, and an order to the magistrates and leaders of all the communities to meet him at Corduba on a fixed day.(109) The response was great, with representatives from these communities and the more important of the Roman citizens in the province coming to Corduba, as requested. In the meantime, the conventus (the assembly of Roman citizens) at Corduba decided to shut its gates against Varro, and Carmo and subsequently Gades expelled the Pompeian garrisons. When one of his legions, the legio vernacula, made up of soldiers drawn from Roman citizens in Spain and recruited in the period immediately before the outbreak of the war, withdrew their support, Varro

107. Caesar, bell. civ. 1.60-87. On the campaign of Ilerda, see also Appian, bell. civ. 2.42, Cassius Dio 41.20-22. J. Harmand, 'Usar et I'Espagne durant le second "bellum civile"', in Legio VII Gemina (León 1970), pp. 186-94.
108. Caesar, bell. civ. 2.17-18.
109. Caesar, bell. civ. 2.19. 1: magistratus principesque omnium civitatum.

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realized that their was no hope of continuing, and agreed to surrender to Caesar.(110) Caesar himself, having thanked the Roman citizens and the indigenous Spaniards for their assistance, returned the money which Varro had seized (or so he tells us in his account) and, after handing over the provincia to Q. Cassius, departed for Massilia, calling in at Tarraco en route.(111) From Massilia he returned to Rome to carry out a series of emergency reforms and to prepare for his crossing of the Adriatic to face Pompelus the following year.

Caesar had intended to finish off the potential problems presented by Spain by his campaigns in 49. It was not an unreasonable expectation, since the Pompeian stronghold of Hispania citerior seemed to be under control, and the further province had come over to Caesar relatively easily. The problems which Spain caused to the Caesarian side through the rest of the war seem indeed to have originated from one of his own partisans, rather than from activity by the Pompeians. Q. Cassius Longinus, whom Caesar had left in charge in Hispania ulterior, had been quaestor when Pompeius had held the whole of Spain during the late 50s, but this had engendered in him a dislike of the region, especially because there had been an attempt on his life while he was there.(112) Once in charge, he mounted an attack against the Lusitanians, which was successful, but then returned to the Baetis valley, and proceeded to make himself exceedingly unpopular. He is reported (in the Bellum Alexandrinum, which, although not by Caesar himself, continues the account of the civil war after Caesar's own work breaks off) to have come to Corduba to administer justice, and while there to have extorted money from the wealthier classes in the province by a financial fraud. He caused further discontent by enrolling a further legion, which not only led to the recruitment of some but placed large costs on the province in general.(113) Under the circumstances, it was perhaps not surprising

110. Caesar, bell. civ. 2.19.5-20.8. On the legio vernacula, see E.' Gabba, 'Aspetti della lotta in Spagna di Sesto Pompeio', in Legio VII Gemina (León 1970), pp. 134-7; P. Le Roux, L'armée romaine et l'organisation des provinces ibériques d'Auguste à l'invasion de 409 (Paris 1982), pp. 42-5.
111. Caesar, bell. civ. 2.21.
112. Cicero, ad. Att. 6.6.4 and adfam. 2.15.4; Bell. Alex. 48.1 and 50.1. Longinus' presence in Hispania ulterior in 49 is also attested by an inscription from Ulia (P. J. Lacort Navarro, R. Portillo and A. U. Stylow, 'Nuevas inscripciones latinas de Córduba y su provincia', Faventia 8 (1986), pp. 69-110, at pp. 69-78.
113. Bell. Alex. 48-50.

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that another attempt on his life followed. More surprising is that many of those who were involved in the plot were men who, although provincials, were members of his own entourage. Cassius survived the attempt, and put to death a number of those whom he identified as members of the conspiracy, although he also extracted money from others for not executing them.(114)
The real problem Cassius faced, however, was with the army. The soldiers in those legions most attached to the provincia, the legio vernacula and the second legion (which the Bellum Alexandrinum describes as containing men who had become 'provincial' as a result of long residence there) hated Cassius as much as the rest of the provincials, and in the course of the assassination attempt had almost been persuaded by a false report of Cassius' death to hand over command to one of the conspirators.(115) He caused further discontent among the Roman population by extorting money for allowing them to avoid conscription for service with the Caesarian forces in Africa, from where Cassius himself had been summoned before the attempted assassination. The position was made more acute by the news, which Cassius received as he recovered from his wounds, that Pompeius had been defeated at Pharsalus and was in flight. This might be expected to raise hopes in the local population that the war would be ended and the need for further conscription reduced, but (according to the Bellum Alexandrinum) made Cassius more determined than ever to exploit the situation while there was still time.(116) Whatever the exact cause, it rapidly became clear that the legio vernacula and the second legion had mutinied against Cassius, and marched towards Corduba, led by a man from Italica, named T. Thorius, who declared that he would recover the province for Pompeius. Worse still, the officer that Cassius sent to Corduba, the quaestor, M. Marcellus, had been prevailed upon by the people of Corduba to join them against his commander.(117) In fact the forces under Thorius, on learning that the Cordubans were as hostile as they were to Cassius, but not prepared to go against Caesar, rapidly decided that they too were not anti-Caesarian. This left Cassius

114. Bell. Alex. 52-5.
115. Bell. Alex. 53.5-6. A. T. Fear, 'The Vernacular Legion of Hispania ulterior', Latomus 50 (1991), pp. 808-21, believes that this legion consisted entirely of non citizen native Spaniards, but this makes the interpretation of this passage difficult.
116. Bell. Alex. 56.1-3.
117. Bell. Alex. 57-8.

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with what was in effect an internal civil war within a pro-Caesarian province. The situation was only resolved by the intervention of M. Aemilius Lepidus, the Caesarian proconsul in Hispania citerior, who had been called in by Cassius, and who persuaded first Marcellus, and then Cassius to hand over control to him. Early in the following year, 47 BC, C. Trebonius, Cassius' successor arrived, and Cassius, without waiting to hand over to him, sailed in bad weather from Malaca with his loot, only to be drowned when his ship sank in the mouth of the Ebro.(118)

The instability of the position in Hispania ulterior had not escaped the notice of the remains of the Pompeian forces, now based in the province of Africa, just across the sea. Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus in March 47, had high hopes that Spain would come into the Pompeian camp.(119) The Pompeian generals therefore sent Cn. Pompeius, the elder son of the dead leader, to the Balearic islands, which he managed to capture and, although illness prevented him from landing in Spain proper, Pompeian sympathizers in the further province caused considerable difficulties for Trebonius.(120) Probably early in 46, Cnaeus succeeded in landing on the mainland, and besieged Carthago Nova. After the defeat at Thapsus in February 46, he was joined by other Pompeians who managed to escape, and succeeded in establishing himself on a sufficiently firm footing so that the Caesarian legati, Q. Pedius and Q. Fabius Maximus, appear to have made no serious attempt to dislodge him.(121) Before the end of the year, however, Caesar had decided to go to Spain to sort out matters himself.(122)

He found Cn. Pompeius and his younger brother, Sextus, in the Baetis valley, the former besieging the town of Ulia, the latter at Corduba. It is clear, even from the unfavourable accounts which are all that survive, that Cnaeus had been taking a strong line with any pro-Caesarians that he found in the towns in the province.(123)

118. Bell. Alex. 63-4.
119. Cicero, ad Att. 11. 12.3.
120. Cassius Dio, 43.29; Bel1. Afric. 23.
121. Cassius Dio, 43.31.1.
122. Cicero, ad Att. 12.7 and 12.8; Cassius Dio 43.28.2.
123. The main source of this campaign is the Bellum Hispaniense, an infuriatingly muddled account from a writer who appears to have been in Caesar's army. The commentary of A. Klotz, Kommentar zum Bellum Hispaniense (Berlin 1927), although dated, is still useful.

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Already in January 45, he was described by one of Cicero's correspondents as foolish and cruel,(124) and after Caesar's arrival he tortured and put to death all those in the town of Ucubi (modem Espejo) whom he suspected of favouring his opponent.(125) Partly as a result of this behaviour, although no doubt also because the eventual outcome of the struggle was by now clear, there are reports of desertions from the Pompeian forces by Roman citizens from the province.(126) The extent of these desertions should, however, be set against the record that in the battle which took place at Munda in March, 300 equites were killed, some of whom came from Rome, but the rest from the province.(127)

After the battle at Munda, the precise site of which remains a matter of debate,(128) Caesar spent some time clearing the province of Pompeians. Corduba, split by disagreements between Pompelians and Caesarians, was eventually captured after a siege. Cn. Pompeius himself escaped to Carteia after Munda, but, once the extent of Caesar's control of the province became known, the Carteians also began to fall out about whether to protect him. Pompeius fled with a squadron of 20 ships, but Caesar's legatus, C. Didius, chased him along the coast with the fleet from Gades. Catching the Pompeians when they had to land to take in fresh water, Didius then pursued Pompeius inland, and eventually entrapped him in a fortified tower. Unable to retreat from here, because he was already severely wounded, he was eventually captured, killed and beheaded, and his head sent to Hispalis (modern Sevilla) for public display. During this same period of confusion, with towns being taken by Caesar's forces and the remnants of Pompeius' army scattered through the area, there seems also to have been opportunity for the Lusitanians who had been brought into the Baetis valley by Pompeius to bolster his forces to make a little profit for themselves out of the chaos. At

124. C. Cassius, in Cicero, adjam. 15.19.4.
125. Bell. Hisp. 20.
126. Thus the three equites from Hasta, Bell. Hisp. 26.
127. Bell.Hisp. 31.9.
128. Bell.Hisp. 28-31. For the debate on the site of Munda, see R. Corzo, 'Munda y las vias de comunicación en el "Bellum Hispaniense"', Habis 4 (1973), pp. 241-52; A. Caruz Arenas, 'La última campaña de césar en la Bética: Munda', in J. F. Rodríguez Nella (ed.), Actas de la I Congreso de la Historia de Andalucía (Córdoba 1978), pp. 143-57.

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one point they occupied Hispalis, having been invited in by a group of Pompeians, and Caesar, fearing for the survival of the town if he attempted to drive them out, allowed them to escape. Even so, they managed to burn a number of ships anchored in the river during their departure, although many were ridden down by Caesar's cavalry.(129) Didius, after he had captured and disposed of Pompeius, was ambushed by some Lusitanians who had been serving with Pompeius, and himself killed, the Lusitanians escaping with the collected booty.(130)

When Caesar left Spain in June 45, he had spent just seven months finishing off the war against the sons of Pompeius.(131) It is true that the war was not over, as he left Sextus Pompeius still at large. Sextus was to prove a difficult enemy, and it was not until the autumn of 44, some six months after Caesar's murder on 15 March 44, and 18 months after the battle of Munda in March 45, that he made an agreement with M. Aemilius Lepidus, who had been assigned Hispania citerior under the arrangements made by Caesar before his death, and withdrew from Spain, setting up in Sicily a naval command for himself in the western Mediterranean. By then he had caused considerable problems for the Caesarian commanders by waging a guerrilla war in Celtiberia and the northwest.(132) Nonetheless, Caesar's campaign was remarkable for its speed and success in re-establishing control in the south of the peninsula. On his return to Rome, he celebrated a triumph, and moreover allowed triumphs also to Q. Pedius and Q. Fabius Maximus, who had been his legati.(133)

Spain at the End of the Civil Wars

The civil wars, both that against Sertorius and that between Caesar and the Pompeians, caused immense physical damage in the areas in which they took place. Pompeius, writing to the senate in 74, described how that part of Hispania citerior which was not under the control of the enemy, had (with the exception of the coastal

129. Bell. Hisp. 35-9.
130. Bell. Hisp. 40.
131. Noted by Nicolaus of Damascus, de vita Augusti 10-12. M
132. Appian, bell. civ. 2.105, 4.83; Cassius Dio 45.10.1-6.
133. Inscr. It. 13.1, pp. 87 and 566f.

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towns) been ravaged either by himself or by Sertorius.(134) The destruction of towns by Caesar and his adversaries was also substantial, and has left its mark, not only in the literary record but in the archaeological evidence of destruction at sites such as Botorrita and Azaila, in the Ebro valley, and Osuna in the province of Hispania ulterior.(135) Even so, it is in these unpromising circumstances that we first have evidence of a substantially greater number of Romans and Romanized Spaniards than ever before.

One problem about determining the nature of this increase is the difficulty of distinguishing Romans resident in Spain from those who, whether as citizens or not, use Roman names but were born in Spain of indigenous stock. The historian, Velleius Paterculus, writing under the emperor Tiberius, describes Cornelius Balbus, who was born in Gades and acquired citizenship from Pompeius during the war against Sertorius, as non Hispaniensis natus, sed Hispanus, that is, not born a Roman citizen resident in Spain but a native Spaniard.(136) As already noted, this man was almost certainly using a Roman name before he received the citizenship,(137) and it is very difficult indeed to determine, in the cases of individuals who appear in the contexts of the Sertorian and later civil wars, to which category they belong. L. Decidius Saxa, for instance, who served with Caesar in the Ilerda campaign and later was elected as a tribune of the plebs in 44 and served under Marcus Antonius in Syria until his death there in 40 at the hands of Parthian invaders, was described by Cicero as a Celtiberian, but was almost certainly born in Spain of Italian descent.(138) The army on the Pompeian side in 49 included those who were born in Spain (especially the legio vernacula) and others, in the second legion, who are described as having 'become provincial' as

134. Sallust, Hist. 2.98.9 (M).
135. Azaila: M. Beltrán, Arqueología y bistoria de las ciudades antiquas de Cabezo de Alcalá de Azaila (Teruel) (Zaragoza 1976). Botorrita: G. Fatis, Contrebia Belaisca II: Tabula Contrebiensis (Zaragoza 1980), pp. 27-9. See also the inscribed lead sling-shots from Osuna, Ategua (near Corduba) and Utrera ILLRP 1104-5; CIL 2.4965, 1.
136. Vell. Pat. 2.51.
137. Above p. 103.
138. Caesar, bell. civ. 1.66.3; Cicero, Pbil. 11.5.12, 13.13.27; Livy, ep. 127; Cassius Dio 48.25. See R. Syme, 'Who was Decidius Saxa', JRS 27 (1937), pp. 127-37 (= Roman Papers 1 (Oxford 1979), pp. 31-41).

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a result of their prolonged residence there.(139) As these men were recruited into the legions, they were at least considered to be Romans by their commanders. Some held positions of command in the army.(140) On the other hand, when the pro-Pompeians in Hispalis were looking for Lusitanians to help them against Caesar in 45, after the battle of Munda, they approached one Caecilius Niger, who, despite his Roman name, is described as a barbarian, and is not likely to have been granted citizenship.(141) At the far end of the scale are those who are certainly not citizens, but serve with Roman armies outside Spain during this period. Caesar had Spanish cavalry with him during his campaigns in Gaul in the mid50s, and again during the civil war when he was fighting the Pompeians in Africa in 46.(142) What these men called themselves we have no way of knowing, but their position was just like that of the squadron of horse to which Cn. Pompeius Strabo gave citizenship in 89.(143) Their service in the Roman army would not only have made them think of themselves in Roman terms, but also opened the possibility of access to citizenship.

It is also clear that several of the towns, although having no Roman status or privilege at this time, were beginning to look more Roman. In the north, Contrebia (Botorrita) and Azaila both had Roman-style buildings at the time of their destruction, probably during the Ilerda campaign, and the latter in particular possessed baths and a temple. In the south, the descriptions of the towns in the literary sources include mention of a forum and porticoes at Hispalis (144) and a basilica at Corduba.(145) In both these places it may be assumed that the presence of Roman citizens was

139. Bell. Alex. 58.3. This is based upon the emendation of Nipperdey, which is discussed by E. Gabba, 'Aspetti della lotta in Spagna di Sesto Pompeio', in Legio VII Gemina (León 1970), p. 135.
140. Thus the considerable number in Cassius' entourage at the time of the attempt on his life: Bell. Alex. 52-5.
141. Bell. Hisp. 35.
142. Caesar, bell. Gall. 5.26.3; 7.55.3. Bell. Afric. 39.
143. Above pp. 94-5.
144. Caesar, bell. civ. 2.20.4. On the extent of Hispalis at this period, see J. M. Campos. Carrasco, 'Estructura urbana de la Colonia Iulia Romula Hispalis en 6poca republicana', Habis 20 (1989), pp. 245-62, and the more sceptical critique of L Rodriguez Ternifio, 'Alguncs cuestiones sobre 11 urbanismo de Hispalis en época republicana', Habis 21 (1990), pp. 205-27.
145. Bell. Alex. 52.

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highly influential in determining the nature of the buildings. Hispalis and Corduba each had a conventus civium Romanorum, an unofficial assembly of citizens which functioned in places which were not recognized or privileged by the Romans.(146) The pattern is exemplified by the case of Gades. It was already a city of great importance, with a treaty dating back probably to the third century, and certainly to the Sertorian wars.(147) When Caesar was there in 49, he is said to have given Roman citizenship to the Gaditanes, and either then or within the next six years it seems to have acquired the status of a municipium, that is a recognized community of Roman citizens.(148) The effect on the physical structure of Gades was immediate. The younger Balbus, nephew of the man to whom Pompeius had given citizenship in the Sertorian war, proceeded to construct a new city there on a scale which invited comparison (although no doubt exaggerated) with Caesar's building programme in Rome. Certainly this included a theatre, in which, in Roman fashion, rows of seats were reserved for the upper class of equites. (149)

If Gades was granted the status of a municipium, this was an exception. It is possible that the same was done for Olisipo (modern Lisbon), although this can be deduced only from its title, municipium 01isipo Feficitas Iulia.(150) For the most part Roman citizens seem, as we have seen, to have been in less formal communities. The extent of these is, however, likely to have been considerable. The commanders in charge of Hispania ulterior in particular are regularly mentioned as undertaking jurisdiction as part of their duties.(151) Sometimes it is clear that this jurisdiction involved Roman citizens, but even if non-Romans were concerned, the fact that they came to the court of a Roman commander shows

146 Hispalis: Caesar, bell. civ. 2.20.5. Corduba: Caesar, bell. civ. 2.19.2; Bell. Alex. 57.5.
147. Above p. 111.
148. Livy, ep. 110; Cassius Dio 41.24.1. Asinius Pollio describes the younger Balbus as taking to himself the post of I111vir, which indicates municipal status (Cicero, adfam. 10.32.2).
149. Cicero, ad Att. 12.2.2; adfam. 10.32.2.
150. CIL 2.176. Cf. F. Vittinghoff, Römische Kolonisation und Bürgerrechtspolitik (Mainz 1952), p. 78; H. Galsterer, Untersuchungen zum römischen Stadtewesen auf der iberischen Halbinsel (Berlin 1971), p. 42.
151. Thus Caesar as quaestor in 68 (Suet. Div. Iul. 7); M. Varro in 49 (Caesar, bell. civ. 2.18.5); Q. Cassius in 48 (Bell. Alex. 49).

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that the ethos in which they were operating was essentially a Roman one.(152)

The most marked change, however, was the establishment for the first time in Spain of a number of coloniae of Roman citizens by Caesar, either during or immediately after his campaigns against the two Pompeius brothers in 45. This was part of a plan of settlement, partly of the soldiers who had fought with him during the civil war and also of substantial numbers of civilians from among the lower classes of the population of Rome itself. Suetonius states that he distributed 80,000 citizens to colonies in this way, and although there are reasons to doubt the number, there is no reason to doubt the general policy.(153) Precise identification of these settlements is difficult, because within a few decades further colonies had been established by Augustus, and it is often difficult to distinguish between them.(154) However, it is possible to be fairly certain about six or seven, Tarraco (modern Tarragona)(155) and perhaps Carthago Nova (Cartagena) in Hispania citerior, and Hasta (Mesa de Asta), Hispalis (Sevilla), Urso (Osuna) and Ucubi (Espejo) in the Baetis valley. To, these, Itucci should perhaps also be added as it is listed as being in the area by Pliny, in his list of Spanish towns, and its full name (Colonia Itucci Virtus Iulia) suggests it is also Caesarian. Its location unfortunately cannot be identified. No settlements can be identified elsewhere with any certainty, which suggests that Caesar concentrated his attention on those areas in which he had been campaigning during the 40s.(156)

Even with this no doubt incomplete information, it is clear that these colonies are not all alike, and that the nature of those in Hispania citerior differs markedly from those in the other province. Both Tarraco and Carthago Nova had been major Roman

152. Compare the position of L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi in the late second century lic, above p. 89.
1532 Suetonius, Div. Iul. 42. 1. See P. A, Brunt, Italian Manpower 225 BC -AD 14 2nd edn (Oxford 1987), pp. 255ff.
154. On these problems, see Brunt, Italian Manpower, pp. 234ff.
155. Tarraco, had the title Colonia Iulia Urbs Triumphalis, which indicates a settlement commemorating Caesar's victories; cf. Florus, Verg. orator an poeta 8.
156. On the settlements in Spain, see F. Vittinghoff, Römiscbe Kolonisation, pp. 72-81; H. Galsterer, Untersuchungen, pp. 17-30; P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower, appendix 15.

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bases since the time of the war with Hannibal, and in each there were communities of Roman citizens playing a major role in the life of the city before the establishment of the Caesarian colony.(157) In these cases, it might well be argued that the status of a Roman colony was a fitting recognition of their important place in the Roman control of the Mediterranean seaboard. The same cannot be said of those in the Baetis valley. Hispalis was indeed the site of a conventus civium Romanorum, as might be expected of a city which was then, and is still, a major seaport through which the produce of the area, both agricultural and mineral, might reach the Mediterranean, and there was, as we have seen, a certain amount of building. The other towns, however, hardly come into this category. There were indeed Romans at Hasta, three of whom, described as equites Romani, deserted to Caesar just before Munda,(158) but all of them appear to be essentially indigenous communities, Hasta on a hill north of Gades, Urso on a high position overlooking the central part of the Baetis valley, and Ucubi in the mountainous region south-east of Corduba. What links all these communities together is that all (with the exception of Itucci) are known to have been favourable to the two Pompei, even after their defeat at the hands of Caesar at Munda.(159) In these cases it is most unlikely that their designation as the site of a colonia was a reward for services rendered. The context against which Caesar's policy should be seen is exemplified by the speech given to him by the author of the Bellum Hispaniense at the very end of the surviving section of his work, when, addressing the people of Hispalis, he complains bitterly of their ingratitude to him.(160)

The same point may be seen from a negative perspective by considering those towns and cities in the area which did not

157. Tarraco: G. Alfóldy, Tarraco (Forum 8, Tarragona 1991), pp. 31-2. For Cartagena, note the inscription specifying four men who set up a column, dedicated to the Genius oppidi, and were probably equivalent to the IIIIviri, although they do not use that title (ILLRP 117). The absence of their title, if any, no doubt explains their absence from L. A. Curchin, The Local Magistrates of Roman Spain (Toronto 1990).
158. Bell. Hisp. 26.
159. Hispalls: Bell. Hisp. 35-6. Hasta: Bell. Hisp. 36. Urso: Bell. Hisp. 41 (here called 'Ursao'). Ucubi: Bell. Hisp. 27.
160. Bell. Hisp. 42.4ff.

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receive colonial status. Gades, which had thrown out the commander imposed upon it by Varro in 49 and was the naval base for the Caesarians in 45, received Roman citizenship from Caesar in 49 and may well have been recognized as a municipium at the same time, but was not at any point a colonia.(161) Corduba, which had been founded by Marcellus in 152 and had been the centre of Caesar's operations in 49, was probably not given the status of a colonia before the time of Augustus.(162) Of the smaller towns, that which was most loyal to Caesar was Ulia, described in the Bellurn Hispaniense as the community which throughout this period was most deserving of the favour of the Roman people, also seems to have had to wait for the reign of Augustus before it became a municipium.(163)

The nature of the colonies in the Baetis valley, and the way in which they functioned, can be seen in some detail from a remarkable inscription, discovered at Osuna in the 1870s. This contains, on four bronze tablets, part of the lex coloniae Genetivae Iuliae, the founding law of the colony at Urso.(164) Although only about half of the complete statute survives, much can be gleaned from it about the intentions of Caesar, who is described as ordering its establishment.(161) The colony is to be governed by a system which is clearly modelled on that of Rome itself, with two chief magistrates, the duoviri, who are responsible, amongst other things for jurisdiction, and two aediles. These magistrates are to have a staff of assistants, some of whom are to be citizens of the colony, whose honoraria are carefully specified, and some public slaves.(166) The council is to consist of a body of decuriones, modelled on the senate in Rome, whose decrees the magistrates are explicitly enjoined to carry out.(167) Other rules deal, amongst other things,

161. Caesar, bell. civ. 20; Bell. Hisp. 37.
162. Caesar, bell. civ. 19 and 21. H. Galsterer, Untersuchungen, pp. 9-10.
163. Bell. Hisp. 3. See the discussion by C. Castillo, 'Miscellanea epigrafica Hispano-Romana', SDHI 52 (1986), pp. 353-94, at pp. 376-87.
164. FIRA 11.21 = A. D'Ors, Epigrafia Juridica de La Espafia Romana (Madrid 1953) no. 7; see also the essays contained in J. González (ed.), Estudios sobre Urso (Sevilla 1989). A new text and commentary on this law appears in A H. Crawford et al., Roman Statutes (London 1996).
165. Lex Urs. cap. 104, 106 and 125.
166. Lex Urs. cap. 62.
167. Lex Urs. cap. 129.

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with the prohibition of burials and cremations within the walls of the colony (just as no one could be interred within the pomerium at Rome);(168) the management of the drains, roads and water-supply of the colony; 1611 the assignment of seats at public spectacles;(170) and the control of dinner-parties given by those intending to run for office.(171)

Two points which also emerge from the law indicate the nature of the colony itself. In a section dealing with accusations against decurions of unworthiness to hold office, the charge of being an ex-slave (libertinus) is explicitly excluded, even although in later laws relating to other communities only those born free are allowed to be magistrates.(172) This suggests (as is the case in other Caesarian foundations) that there were a considerable number of such former slaves in the colony, which would be expected if it had been established to provide land for the lower classes of Rome. This may also explain the title of the colony as it appears in the list of Spanish towns given by the elder Pliny, Colonia Genetiva Iulia Urbanorum.(171) It does not, of course, follow that there were no veteran soldiers settled at Urso, and indeed an inscription from the town records a former centurion of the thirtieth legion who served two periods as duoviri, probably soon after the foundation of the colony, although there is no way of telling how many other such settlers were placed there.(174) The second point occurs in a section describing the right of the duoviri, or their deputy (the praefectus iure dicundo) to levy troops from among the population of the colony in times of military danger. They are to conscript forces not only from among the colonists but also from those who are described as incolae contributz, that is persons living in the territory of the colony and attached to it, but not citizens there.(175) These are almost certainly the same people mentioned in an earlier

168. Lex Urs. cap. 73.
169. Lex Urs. cap. 77-9.
170. Lex Urs. cap. 125-7.
171. Lex Urs. cap. 132.
172. Lex Urs. cap. 105; cf. Lex Malacitana (FIRA i2.24) cap. 54.
173. Pliny, NH 3.12.
174. ILS 2233; cf. Curchin, Magistrates, no. 291. P. Le Roux, L'armée romaine, pp. 50-1, suggests that a contingent of the thirtieth legion was settled at Urso.
175. Lex Urs. cap. 103; cf. U. Laffi, Adtributio e Contributio (Pisa 1966), pp. 128-33.

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chapter as being liable to public service for the upkeep of the walls and roads. They are said to have their domicile or own property within the boundaries of the colony, and they have the same duties as the coloni themselves, even although they are not coloni.(176) These are to be identified with the original inhabitants of Urso, whose land and town had effectively been confiscated in order to establish the colony.

The placing of a colony at Urso was not a reward to the local inhabitants, but a punishment for their support of the two Pompei during the civil wars; and it is likely that the same was true of the other coloniae in the Baetis valley. Such a policy, although it was different from that employed, for instance, in Hispania citerior, is not in itself surprising. The treatment of Urso and the others is similar to that meted out to Italian towns which had opposed him by the dictator Sulla after his return to Rome in 82,(177) There is a pleasant irony in the fact that this status, for which cities clamoured in later times, first appeared in the Baetis valley as a penalty. It is not the case, however, that the establishment of a colonia was the only way in which Caesar provided land for settlement, nor that the giving of the title of colonia was invariably punitive. As mentioned already, there is no reason to believe that Caesar intended to punish either Tarraco or Carthago Nova (if that is Caesarian), and it may be that in such cases the title alone was given without settlement as a mark of favour.(178) On the other hand, Livy mentions Caesar settling Romans at Emporiae after the defeat of the sons of Pompeius, who had become mixed in with the earlier Spanish and Greek inhabitants by his time, with the Spaniards and later the Greeks receiving Roman citizenship.(179) Emporiae does not seem to have had any status at this date however, and probably only became a municipium under Augustus.(180)

Whatever the cause of these various settlements, there can be no doubt that their establishment in the peninsula contributed greatly to the process whereby the valleys of the Baetis and Ebro and the Mediterranean coastal strip became more 'Roman-

176. Lex Urs. cap. 98.
177. Appian, bell civ. 1.96; cf. P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower, pp. 304ff.
178. F. Vittinghoff, Römische Kolonisation, p. 27.
179. Livy 34.9.2-3.
180. P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower, pp. 603-4.

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ized'. It is also clear, however, that this was not something that began with the colonization policy of Julius Caesar. Contrary to first expectations, the wars with Sertorius and between the Caesarians and the Pompeians seem to have made Spain more rather than less 'Roman'. The increasing numbers of Roman and Italian immigrants and of indigenous people using, with whatever justification, Roman-style names is one indication of this. Another indication is the problem which both M. Terentius Varro in 49 and Q. Cassius Longinus in 47 had with those who both felt a loyalty to particular Romans and to the area in which they had been born or had lived for a long time.(181) Caesar's often expressed anxieties about the extent of Pompeius' hold over the peoples of Hispania citerior are another sign of the same phenomenon.(182) The change whereby from the time of Sertorius down to the death of Caesar, almost all the fighting in Spain (with the exception of occasional expeditions to the extreme north-west) was between two sets of Romans, as compared with the previous periods, which had seen only campaigns by Roman armies against firstly Carthaginians and then indigenous tribes, led to a change in attitude among those who lived in the regions affected. They seem by the end of the Caesarian/Pompeian wars to have regarded themselves to a far greater extent as part of the Roman world than was true before. The tenor of the two speeches recorded as being given by Caesar, one at Corduba in 49, expressing thanks for the loyal help he had received from the different groups in Hispania ulterior, and the other accusing the citizens of Hispalis of ingratitude in opposing him,(183) also presupposes the same attitude on the part of the inhabitants of the province, at least as it was seen by a commander looking for their support. The military aspect of the Provinciae, continues to be of immense importance in the relations between Rome and the peninsula, but the alteration in the form of military activity involved has also altered the nature of the relationship. Similarly, the pattern of settlement, also changing in the new circumstance of the late republic, both shapes and echoes the increasingly 'Roman' nature of those parts of Spain in which the Romans had been present longest.

181. Thus Caesar, bell. civ. 2.20; Bell. Alex. 53.6.
182. See above pp. 108 and 111-12.
183. Caesar, bell. civ. 2.21; Bell. Hisp. 42.

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Despite these significant changes, it must be remembered, however, that for many of those in Rome, the Iberian peninsula was still a strange and distant place. Caesar, during his tenure of Hispania ulterior in 61 and 60 is said to have ended certain barbarous habits of the people of Gades, but Asinius Pollio, in an attack on the younger Balbus in a letter to Cicero, describes him not only as adopting Caesar's unconstitutional practices in seizing for himself the chief magistracy of Gades and appointing his candidates to the office for two years in advance, but also as acting in a barbarous fashion in burning alive a former Pompeian soldier, while ignoring his protests that he was a Roman citizen, and forcing other Roman citizens to fight against wild beasts at Hispalis.(184) In Rome itself, this view was clearly one which was current among the governing and literary classes. Cicero, in a speech delivered in a law court in 54 and again in a letter to his friend Atticus in 46, uses the names of peoples and places in Spain to indicate regions which were beyond the edge of the civilized world;(185) and his references to the alleged Celtibenian origin of Decidius Saxa in the Philippics, delivered in Rome in 43, the year of his death, are clearly meant to carry the same connotation.(186) Not for the first time, the picture of Spain as perceived from Rome differed from that of the commanders on the spot, but it was a result of the civil wars that those in command there were men who, like Caesar and Pompeius, also controlled the policy of the Rome itself. In the period between the arrival of Sertorius and the departure of Caesar, events in the peninsula were of fundamental significance for the future of Rome; and this not only affected the way in which Spain was seen by such men on their return to Rome, but also the view that those who lived there had of their place in the Roman world.(187)

184. Cicero, pro Balb. 19.43; Asinius Pollio, in Cicero, adfam. 10,32.3.
185. Cicero, pro Planc. 34.84; ad Att. 12.8.
186. See above, p. 117.
187. So also E. Gabba, 'Aspetti della lotta in Spagna di Sesto Pornpeio', in Legio VII Gemina (León 1970), pp. 154-5.