The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
of Tingi (Tangier) to protect the rich south of Spain from these incursions. Still it happened that towns like Italica and Singili (not far from Antequera) were besieged by the pirates.
Introduction of Italian municipal law.
If preparation was anywhere made by the republic for the great all–significant work of the imperial period—the Romanising of the West—it was in Spain. Peaceful intercourse carried forward what the sword had begun; Roman silver money was paramount in Spain long before it circulated elsewhere outside of Italy; and the mines, the culture of the vine and olive, and the relations of traffic produced a constant influx of Italian elements to the coast, particularly in the south–west. New Carthage, the creation of the Barcides, and from its origin down to the Augustan age the capital of the Hither province and the first trading port of Spain, embraced already in the seventh century a numerous Roman population; Carteia, opposite to the present Gibraltar, founded a generation before the age of the Gracchi, was the first transmarine civic community with a population of Roman origin (iii. 4)[iii. 4.]; the old and renowned sister–town of Carthage, Gades, the modern Cadiz, was the first foreign town out of Italy, that adopted Roman law and Roman language (iv. 573)[iv. 543.]. While thus along the greatest part of the coast of the Mediterranean the old indigenous as well as the Phoenician civilisation had already, under the republic, conformed to the ways and habits of the ruling people, in no province under the imperial period was Romanising so energetically promoted on the part of the ruling power as in Spain. First of all the southern half of Baetica, between the Baetis and the Mediterranean, obtained, partly already under the republic or through Caesar, partly in the years 739 and 740[15, 14.] through Augustus, a stately series of communities with full Roman citizenship, which here occupy not the coast especially, but above all the interior, headed by Hispalis (Seville) and Corduba (Cordova) with colonial rights, Italica (near Seville) and Gades (Cadiz) with municipal rights. In southern Lusitania, too, we meet with a series of equally privileged towns, particularly Olisipo (Lisbon), Pax Julia (Beja), and the colony of veterans founded by Augustus during his abode in Spain and made the capital of this province, Emerita (Merida). In the Tarraconensis the burgess–towns are found predominantly on the coast—Carthago Nova, Ilici (Elche), Valentia, Dertosa (Tortosa), Tarraco, Barcino (Barcelona); in the interior only the colony in the Ebro valley, Caesaraugusta (Saragossa), is conspicuous. In all Spain under Augustus there were numbered fifty communities with full citizenship; nearly fifty others had up to this time received Latin rights, and stood as to inward organisation on a par with the burgess–communities. Among the rest the emperor Vespasian likewise introduced the Latin municipal organisation on occasion of the general imperial census instituted by him in the year 74. The bestowal of burgess–rights was neither then, nor generally in the better imperial period, extended much further than it had been carried in the time of Augustus;30 as to which probably the chief regulative consideration was the restricted right of levy in regard to those who were citizens of the empire.
Romanising of the Iberians.
The indigenous population of Spain, which thus became partly mixed up with Italian settlers, partly led towards Italian habits and language, nowhere emerges so as to be clearly recognised in the history of the imperial period. Probably that stock, whose remains and whose language maintain their ground up to the present day in the mountains of Biscay, Guipuscoa, and Navarre, once filled the whole peninsula, as the Berbers filled the region of north Africa. Their language, different from the Indo–Germanic, and destitute of flexion like that of the Finns and Mongols, proves their original independence; and their most important memorials, the coins, in the first century of the Roman rule in Spain embrace the peninsula, with the exception of the south coast from Cadiz to Granada, where the Phoenician language then prevailed, and of the region northward of the mouth of the Tagus and westward of the sources of the Ebro, which was then probably to a large extent practically independent, and certainly was utterly uncivilised. In this Iberian territory the south–Spanish writing is clearly distinguished from that of the north province; but not less clearly both are branches of one stock. The Phoenician immigration here confined itself to still narrower bounds than in Africa, and the Celtic mixture did not modify the general uniformity of the national development in a way that we can recognise. But the conflicts of the Romans with the Iberians belong mainly to the republican epoch, and have been formerly described (ii. 221 f.)[ii. 209 f.]. After the already mentioned last passages of arms under the first dynasty, the Iberians vanish wholly out of sight. To the question, how far they became Romanised in the imperial period, the information that has come to us gives no satisfactory answer. That in the intercourse with their former masters they would have always occasion to make use of the Roman language, needs no proof; but under the influence of Rome the national language and the national writing disappear even from public use within their own communities. Already in the last century of the republic the native coinage, which at first was to a large extent allowed, had become in the main set aside; from the imperial period there is no Spanish civic coin with other than a Latin legend.31
Language.
Like the Roman dress, the Roman language was largely diffused even among those Spaniards who had not Italian burgess–rights, and the government favoured the de facto Romanising of the land.32 When Augustus died the Roman language and habits prevailed in Andalusia, Granada, Murcia, Valencia, Catalonia, Aragon; and a good part of this is to be accounted for not by colonising but by Romanising. By the ordinance of Vespasian previously mentioned the native language was restricted de jure to private intercourse. That it held its ground in this, is proved by its existence at the present day; what is now confined to the mountains, which neither the Goths nor the Arabs ever occupied, must in the Roman period certainly have extended over a great part of Spain, especially the north–west. Nevertheless Romanising certainly set in very much earlier and more strongly in Spain than in Africa; monuments with native writing from the imperial period can be pointed to in Africa in fair number, hardly at all in Spain; and the Berber language at present still prevails over half of north Africa, the Iberian only in the narrow valleys of the Basques. It could not be otherwise, partly because in Spain Roman civilisation emerged much earlier and much more vigorously than in Africa, partly because the natives had not in the former as in the latter the free tribes to fall back upon.
The Spanish community.
The native communal constitution of the Iberians was not perceptibly to our view different from the Gallic. From the first Spain, like the Celtic country on either side of the Alps, was broken up into cantonal districts; the Vaccaei and the Cantabri were hardly in any essential respect distinguished from the Cenomani of the Transpadana and the Remi of Belgica. The fact that on the Spanish coins struck in the earlier epoch of the Roman rule it is predominantly not the towns that are named, but the cantons,—not Tarraco but the Cassetani, not Saguntum but the Arsenses—shows, still more clearly than the history of the wars of the time, that in Spain too there once subsisted larger cantonal unions. But the conquering Romans did not treat these unions everywhere in like fashion. The Transalpine cantons remained even under Roman rule political commonwealths; the Spanish were, like the Cisalpine, simply geographical conceptions. As the district of the Cenomani is nothing but a collective expression for the territories of Brixia, Bergomum, and so forth, so the Asturians consist of twenty–two politically independent communities, which to all appearance do not legally concern each other more than the towns of Brixia and Bergomum.33 Of these communities the Tarraconensian province numbered in the Augustan age 293, in the middle of the second century 275. Here, therefore, the old canton–unions were broken up. This course was hardly determined by the consideration that the compactness of the Vettones and the Cantabri seemed more hazardous for the unity of the empire than that of the Sequani and the Treveri; the distinction doubtless was chiefly based on the diversity of the time and of the form of conquest. The region on the Guadalquivir became Roman a century and a half earlier than the banks of the Loire and the Seine; the time when the foundation of the Spanish organisation was laid was not so very far from the epoch at which the Samnite confederacy was dissolved. There the spirit of the old republic prevailed; in Gaul the freer and gentler view of Caesar. The smaller and powerless districts, which after the dissolution of the unions became the pillars of political unity—the small cantons or clans—became changed in course of time, here as everywhere into towns. The beginnings of urban development, even outside of the communities that attained Italian rights, go far back into the republican, perhaps