| Rome's possession of Spain is
dated from 218 BC, though its conquest was to take another
two centuries. The beginning of this period was marked by
the Second Punic War (Carthage vs Rome, the one where Hannibal
and his elephants crossed the Alps). This was ended in 201
BC with Scipio's campaign in which he captured Cartagena and
Gadir (present-day Cádiz) and finally defeated Hannibal at
Zama in North Africa.
While cities like Cartagena and Gadir had belonged to the
Carthaginians, the penultimate of a long line of Mediterranean
nations to establish a colonial presence in Spain, the predominant
populations were Celts and Iberians. The Iberians were coastal
dwellers with the way of life that comes with the Mediterranean
climate, i.e., they were farmers, fishermen or traders, and
drank wine, while the Celts lived in the slightly rainier
interior of the peninsula, so they were herdsmen, and drank
beer. But these two peoples had become mixed to the extent
that historians more often than not refer to them as Celtiberians,
particularly the inhabitants of the Ebro basin: the Romans,
more given to endearingly bluff empire-building than to ethnological
nit-picking, called them simply hispani.
With Carthage out of the way, the Romans were able to set
about their conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and it was
not to be an easy task. They met little resistance in coastal
areas, which had, after all seen Phoenicians, Greeks, and
Carthaginians come and go, but inland was a different story.
The Lusitanians, who inhabited what are now Portugal and Estremadura,
led revolts culminating in that of Viriathus. These uprisings
only came to an end when the Romans bribed Viriathus's own
people to assassinate him. And this was not an end to Rome's
troubles, for by that time a number of tribes on Spain's meseta
had revolted. These rebellions became the Celtiberian Wars,
which lasted two decades and required a brilliant general,
Scipio the Younger, to win.
Celtiberians were not uncivilized, they wore textiles and
were trading people, so they knew the value of a sestertium,
but they were a pretty wild lot: hardy, fierce, superstitious
and bellicose. They were never great soldiers, but they were
tremendous warriors, and they scared the hades out of Rome's
legionnaires, who dreaded service in Spain. The Celtiberians
never united enough to form decent armies, but that also hampered
their decisive military defeat, and their guerilla tactics
were extremely effective against the Romans. What is more,
the hispani outnumbered the Roman forces deployed against
them and were actually better armed: the Celtic iron short
sword was later adopted by the Romans, and the Iberians used
a kind of sabre which put the fear of Jupiter into Roman soldiers.
As Mark Williams observes in The Story of Spain, Gaul
fell to Julius Caesar in a matter of ten years, while the
hispani held out for two hundred.
The walled town of Numantia had some 6,000 inhabitants belonging
to the Arevaci tribe, and became the chief focus of resistance
when the Romans besieged it and failed miserably to take it.
In one incident, twenty thousand of Rome's finest were forced
to surrender, initiating a very short and very uneasy peace,
which came to an end in 133 BC when the indignant Roman senate
sent Scipio to bring the Numantines to heel. Scipio's army
came to number 50,000-60,000 men, but originally he was only
able to take some 4,000 Roman troops with him. The rest were
recruited locally, and required licking into shape first.
Scipio was more patient than his predecessors and refrained
from attacking the heavily defended town. Instead, he made
the siege watertight, building a circle of forts and walls
around the Numantine hill, and sealing off the River Duero
to prevent supplies coming in by boat (his strategy also included
intimidating and perhaps bribing neighouring tribes to keep
out of things). The Numantines' attempts to break the blockade
were in vain and so were the provocative sallies which had
worked so well for them before (the tactics were sally, get
attacked, flee, get followed, ambush - you have seen cowboys
and Indians do more or less the same in the movies), but Scipio
simply refused to take the bait. On the one occasion that
the Numantines were able to get out and seek help from a neighbouring
town, Lutia, Scipio got wind of it and forestalled any supporting
action by occupying Lutia, gathering all 400 men of fighting
age together and having their hands chopped off. After nine
months of starvation (it is possible that there was cannibalism),
the Numantines were forced to sue for peace. From here on,
history and legend part company:
Version 1 - the legend: Scipio would only accept unconditional
surrender, and the Numantines determined to continue to the
end. When they could withstand no longer, they got drunk,
set fire to the town around them and died in the flames.
Version 2 - the history: Scipio would only accept unconditional
surrender, and the Numantines knew that this meant execution
or slavery. They agreed to surrender, but asked for and were
given an extra day so that those who wished could take their
own lives as they saw fit.
You will find variations on these - the Numantines hurling
themselves off cliffs and so on - but the essential difference
always remains, between a collective, near-universal suicide
and a large number of individual suicides. Oddly, those responsible
for the legend were the Romans themselves. The event was quite
well documented by Appianus, but the story of Numantia made
such an impact on the Romans that later historians began to
romanticise it (and I expect Miguel de Cervantes drew on these
later accounts for his play, The Siege of Numantia,
though I am afraid I have never read it or seen it performed).
Those who chose to surrender were sold into slavery, and
Scipio razed Numantia to the ground: the ruins that can be
seen on the site nowadays are, for the most part, those of
a later Ibero-Roman settlement. Scipio was given (or bestowed
upon himself) the honorific Numantinus for this victory, but
the cost to Rome had been enormous, and the conquest was far
from complete: Cantabria would take another century to reduce,
and the Basque Country was never properly subdued. But the
destruction of Numantia marked the end of the Celtiberian
Wars.
Numantine
Links
Selected Links
Tierraquemada
Among other things, the Celtiberian Cultural Association dedicates
itself to highly rigorous reenactments of events from the
Celtiberian Wars, particularly as related with Numantia.
Numancia
Detailed and analytical account of the siege, its background
and its consequences. Spanish-only, unfortunately.
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