Gallo-Roman Weapons
The most remarkable of the native insurrections was that organised in Lusitania by Viriathus. This extraordinary man was bred a shepherd; he turned robber, became the captain of a band of outlaws, and raising a standard to which all the disaffected flocked, he defeated several Roman armies. He was vanquished by treachery, the consul Servilius having bribed three of his followers to assassinate him in his sleep. After his murder, the rebellion, as the haughty conquerors termed every insurrection for self-defence, was speedily quelled. Spain was soon afterwards the theatre of the last struggle of the horrible civil wars with which Marius and Sulla desolated the Roman world. When Sulla had finally triumphed at Rome, Sertorius, a leader of the defeated party, fled to Spain, and there long bade defiance to the dictator’s power. He was at length vanquished by Cneius Pompeius Magnus, familiarly called Pompey the Great, and, like Viriathus, was murdered by his own treacherous partisans. Pompey, during his command in Spain, merited the good-will of the nation, which subsequently espoused his cause in his contest with Julius Cæsar. After Pompey’s death his party still held out in Spain. But Cæsar repaired thither in person; his military skill prevailed, and the province was shortly pacified.[b] As long as Rome treated the provincials merely as a conquered people the provincials remained unsubdued; but as soon as wiser and more friendly counsels generally prevailed, the Roman Spaniard grasped the hand that was extended to him, and became one of the proudest and most loyal citizens of the empire. Left to themselves, the tribes were ever divided, factious, disturbed. United under Lusitanian Viriathus or even under Roman Sertorius, they long successfully withstood the power of the republic. United under Julius and Augustus Cæsar, they became the most Roman of the provincials of Rome.
[229 B.C.-138 A.D.]
A Gallo-Roman
A great susceptibility to personal influence has ever been a striking characteristic of the Spanish people. Under the sympathetic Hasdrubal they accepted the dominion of Carthage; under the fiery Hannibal they fought, the hardiest and most loyal of his soldiers, in the Punic armies in Italy. In the early days after Saguntum, when Roman Scipio came, not as a destroyer but as a deliverer, and displayed his greater qualities of clemency and justice, the Spaniards would have compelled him to be their king. But Scipio was not always clement. The successors of Sempronius Gracchus were not always just. They were not even judicious. “For great men,” says the Spanish proverb, “great deeds are reserved.” And the coming of one of the greatest men the world has ever seen was the beginning of the end of the dark days of early Spanish history. Cæsar, indeed, marched sternly through the country at the head of his legions; nor did he stay his hand until he had reached far off Corunna, where he chastised and astonished the wild tribes of Brigantium or Finisterre; but his policy in the more settled districts was ever genial and pacific. Four times did Cæsar visit the peninsula; and the fourth time—his legions well filled with loyal and admiring Spaniards—he fought, “not for glory but for existence,” on the bloody field of Munda. And with the final triumph of the great Julius begins the peace and prosperity of Roman Spain.[j]
Disturbances, however, again broke out, and it was only under Cæsar’s successor, Augustus, that it was finally and completely subjugated, even the Cantabrians being then at last subdued. Once reduced to submission, Spain appears to have slumbered for ages in the tranquillity of servitude, under the despotic sway of the Roman emperors. It was esteemed one of the most valuable and flourishing provinces of the empire, containing, as we learn from Pliny,[h] not less than 360 cities. During her subjection to a thraldom, shared with all the then known world, Spain boasts of having given birth to the celebrated Roman poets Lucan and Martial, to the philosopher Seneca, and to two of the very few good Roman emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, as well as to many other men of distinguished character, though of somewhat inferior note.[b]