D ESCRIPCIÓN DE C LASES

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oman Spain was a world full of cities, shaped by its hun-dreds of urban territories. This was every bit as much the case in late antiquity as it had been during the high impe-rial period. Students of late antiquity tend to lump Spain together with Gaul or Britain, as part of the western prov-inces generally, but the depth and breadth of Spanish urbanism meant it had far more in common with Italy or North Africa.¹Spain was the Roman Republic’s first great imperial venture overseas. Thus the Ro-man influence lasted longer and ran much deeper in Spain than in other parts of the Latin West. At the heart of that impact lay the cities and the political geography they created. The emperor Augustus con-sciously shaped the Spanish provinces around urban territories. Most Spanish civitates were not, as in Gaul, old tribal territories under a new administrative mask; they were small administrative units whose ur-ban centers, within seventy years of Augustus’s death, had gained priv-ileged status under Roman law, as municipia. They were also the en-gine that drove the process by which Spain became Roman. For that reason, Spain’s urban geography survived the disappearance of the em-pire that had brought it into being.

Between three hundred and four hundred cities dotted the Spanish landscape of the high empire. Apart from a few parts of the Gallaecian

northwest, the Spanish provinces looked very similar to Italy after the Social War and the enfranchisement of Cisalpina. The unit that defined political, administrative, and social geography was the autonomous urban center and its dependent territory. Very few substantial centers of population lacked autonomy or were administered from some other city. The vast civitates of the Tres Galliae, within which several large towns might exist along with the administrative civitas-capital, simply did not exist in Spain, where the terms civitas and municipium were functionally interchangeable by the second century. It was, in conse-quence, the municipalities that knitted the peninsula together and that controlled it on behalf of the imperial government in which they par-ticipated. Most of these cities did not fall off the map in late antiquity, although they leave fewer traces in the historical record. Instead, they remained the essential units of control, not just for the imperial gov-ernment and its various would-be successors, but also for local elites who maintained the Roman ideal of a political life based on the city until the days of the Córdoban caliphate.

Roman Conquest and Romanization

The Roman conquest of Spain took more than two hundred years, and by the time it was complete, Rome itself had undergone the profound change from republic to empire. The Roman Republic was drawn into the peninsula on account of its wars with Carthage, and so far as the Roman state and its leaders were concerned, Spain remained of purely military interest until the time of Augustus.²The wars against Hanni-bal began in Spain, when in 218 B.C. Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio landed with an army at the Greek city of Emporion, modern Ampurias in Cat-alonia. Their peninsular phase lasted until 206, when the younger Publius Cornelius Scipio, later called Africanus after his victory over Hannibal at Zama, expelled the Carthaginians from Spain. Scipio’s vic-torious campaigns had driven deep into the Spanish interior, and in the valley of the Guadalquivir river, close to modern Seville, Scipio founded Italica as a settlement for his wounded veterans. Tarragona, a hundred miles down the coast from Ampurias and the Roman base after 217, would become one of Roman Spain’s greatest cities. The years of fighting had brought with them not just the legions, but also

the train of civilians—camp followers and supply contractors—that trailed all Roman armies. The Spanish campaigns had also led to nu-merous encounters with indigenous peoples who had entered the Punic war as allies of either Rome or Carthage. Obligations to both nascent Roman communities and different peninsular groups soon made it impossible for the Roman state to withdraw from Spain even had it wanted to.

There is no reason to think that it did, given the competitive nature of Roman imperialism.³Roman politicians needed military successes abroad to enhance their status at home; Spain, with its numberless tribal units, proved an ideal environment for generals seeking glory.

Moreover, the ongoing social struggles at Rome meant that at least some poorer citizens were happy to escape the city and seek opportu-nity abroad, whether in the ranks of the legions or in the civilian in-dustries that followed them. The presence of these Roman civilians in turn perpetuated the military presence, since the protection of Roman citizens, either as necessity or pretext, required further wars. The nexus of these interests explains the ongoing Roman commitment to a Spanish conquest that carried on interminably after the younger Scipio’s final victory over the Carthaginians in 206.

We need not trace in detail the phases of the Republican occupa-tion of Spain—aptly described as “a random hunt for peoples to fight and booty to take home”—but it was through just such fighting that the Spanish provinces grew.⁴Rome acquired a Spanish empire that it barely administered, one that existed for the benefit of Romans in Italy.

Spain was governed as occupied territory, no attempt was made to cre-ate a Roman environment, and local organizations could persist so long as local power was subservient to Rome. Already in 197 the Ro-man Senate had laid the foundations around which the future territo-rial organization of the peninsula would take shape, sending two prae-tors to Spain, each with his own provincia, the exact boundaries between which they were to determine for themselves.⁵ The new provinces of Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior, so-called on the basis of their distance from Rome, were centered on Tarragona and Córdoba, respectively, the former provided with the massive fortifica-tions that defined the city right through the Middle Ages.⁶Despite vast territorial expansion and the introduction of a rudimentary taxation

system circa 179, little thought was given to the administrative shape of the Spanish provinces until the reign of Augustus. Rome’s Spanish experience had profound effects on developments at Rome, and the Roman appetite for tribute certainly generated an important expan-sion in peninsular agriculture.⁷Yet Spanish integration into the Ro-man world was demonstrated in a more melancholy fashion, as the civil wars of the late Republic were fought on Spanish soil and local inhabitants suffered the grim consequences of picking the wrong side.

The Roman attitude is made clear by the aftermath of Sertorius’s re-volt, which had been sustained in part with the help of Spanish allies:

when Pompey celebrated his Spanish triumph in 71, he did so as con-queror of foreign peoples, the indigenous supporters of Sertorius, who remained aliens in the eyes of the Roman state. Again, only the reign of Augustus brought change.

In the years after Sertorius’s defeat, the history of the Romans in Spain is entirely subsumed into the history of the Roman civil wars.

Yet in a peculiar sense it was the civil wars between Pompeians and Caesarians that made Spain a normal part of the Roman world: the great traumas of the day convulsed its soil as they did other provinces, and Spaniards of every stripe were forced to take sides and reaped the harvest of their choice.⁸By the time Augustus won his victory at Ac-tium there could be no doubt that the peninsula had become a part of the Roman world. In the north, among the Astures and Cantabri, there remained indigenous peoples unreconciled to Roman rule. But else-where the peninsula was at peace, and Augustus made it his first task to bring the far north into conformity with the rest. The emperor him-self campaigned in the peninsula in 26 and 25 B.C., making it for a brief time the center of the Roman world. In the latter year, he declared a victory over the Cantabri that allowed him to close the doors to the temple of Janus at Rome.⁹This was no more than a propaganda vic-tory, for campaigns continued in the Spanish north until Agrippa ended them decisively in 19 B.C. by massacring the Cantabrian war-riors and resettling the survivors in the valleys where they would be easier to control. In this way the Augustan peace was extended to Spain and hostilities between Spanish natives and Roman armies ceased forever.¹⁰With the war won, Augustus imposed on Spain the new juridical and political shape that it would retain until the reign of

Caracalla at the beginning of the third century. Within this Augustan framework, Spain became Roman.¹¹

The Augustan Reorganization of Spain

Augustus’s policy recognized how diverse the peninsula remained af-ter two hundred years of Roman presence in it. In those regions where a Roman model existed or where the native culture was already heav-ily urbanized, Spaniards had started to assimilate the Roman way of life. Caesar’s victory over Pompey had reinforced these existing pat-terns, by planting prominent coloniae of Roman citizens on Spanish soil, carving out territories for these autonomous settlements from the ager publicus of which the provinces were composed. Some of these, like the new colonia at Córdoba, were imposed as punishment for hav-ing picked the wrong side in the civil wars, others were a reward for having backed the winner.¹²Either way, along with centuriation and citizens, these colonies brought Roman law and Roman juridical mod-els into the heart of Spanish regions that had long known Romans as soldiers, traders, and publicans, though not perhaps as resident landowners. In the lower Ebro valley, the Mediterranean coast, and the great valley of the Guadalquivir, the population was accustomed to a Roman presence and open to a Roman way of life that it had already begun to adopt: according to Strabo, the inhabitants of the Guadal-quivir valley had lost their own tongue and embraced Latin.¹³

Beyond this first Spain, however, there was another one where Ro-mans were known only as soldiers on campaign or as tribute collec-tors.¹⁴Much of the west and southwest were like this, but so too was the Meseta and indeed even the hills and mountains that flanked the centers of Roman settlement along the coasts and river valleys. In these regions, the impress of Rome was hardly visible despite a century or more of subjection to the Roman empire, while the distant northwest had only just been subdued by force of arms and still operated ac-cording to a different, more or less tribal, set of rules. Augustus rebuilt the administrative shape of Spain to accommodate this diversity, while also creating a framework within which it could grow less pro-nounced.

The two existing provinciae of Citerior and Ulterior were remolded.

Beyond the Ebro valley and the Catalonian and Levantine coasts, Ci-terior remained largely devoid of cities and more or less without Ro-man settlement. To the old province, administered as it long had been from Tarragona, Augustus attached the strategically important area around the headwaters of the Guadalquivir in the Sierra Morena. Parts of the Gallaecian northwest, which had first come to the attention of the governors of Ulterior and had therefore been included in their provincia, were likewise attached to Citerior. In this way, a vast new Hispania Citerior was formed, soon to become more generally known as Tarraconensis after its capital. The old Hispania Ulterior, by con-trast, was divided into two provinces, Baetica and Lusitania. The new division between Baetica and Lusitania ran roughly along the course of the Guadiana river, the Roman Anas, and marked the very real cul-tural boundary between the urban Spain of the Guadalquivir valley and the tribal Spain of present-day Extremadura and the Portuguese Alentejo.¹⁵

The Augustan administrative reorganization of Spain represented a rational assessment of regional differences within the peninsula, but it also served the more immediate political needs of the princeps. In the new Baetica, Augustus had a demilitarized province that could be safely entrusted to the Senate, thereby lending substance to his claim to have restored the Republic. From the time of the Augustan reorga-nization, which had certainly taken place before 13 B.C., Baetica was administered by a senatorial proconsul, while Lusitania and Citerior remained military provinces administered by the emperor through propraetorian and proconsular legates, respectively. The formal sub-division of Spain into different conventus was another product of the Augustan era. In Spain, as in some other Roman provinces, particu-larly in the East, conventus had developed around the communities of Roman citizens, who formed unofficial juridical groupings with which the provincial governor could deal and to whom he could dispense justice under Roman law.¹⁶The juridical component of the conventus was retained by Augustus, under whom the conventus of Spain were regularized as administrative districts of the Roman state. By the Fla-vian era, the fourteen Spanish conventus were fixed subdivisions of the provinces, centered on a city at which the provincial governor or his deputy could deal with the legal needs of Roman citizens.¹⁷The seven

conventus in Tarraconensis, three in Lusitania, and four in Baetica not only integrated their territories by providing them with an economic and judicial focus, they also forced remote populations to travel into more developed areas in order to have their needs serviced, knitting the whole of the peninsula much more closely together.¹⁸In time, this fostered a communal spirit and we find both conventual councils and dedications to the genii of the different conventus.¹⁹In fact, the con-ventus were a successful enough means of organizing territory that we still find them in the fifth century after the provincial superstructure had disappeared.

Nevertheless, even with the new, smaller provinces and the new conventus within them, the Spanish land mass remained an enormous area to administer. Augustus seems to have decided quite consciously that the best way of providing for Roman control—and for conduct-ing the census of the empire, which he made one of his foremost goals as princeps—was through a network of urban centers and assigned de-pendent territories, the civitates, which were everywhere the basic units of Roman administration.²⁰The peninsula already sported many towns, both indigenous and Roman, but where these did not exist, Au-gustus hastened their creation. These towns were of very diverse ori-gin and of very diverse status under Roman law. The coloniae, never more than thirty or so across the whole peninsula, were the deliberate creations of Roman governments, settled with Roman or Latin citizens, their territories carved from existing provincial territories. Coloniae shared the privilege of autonomous government over themselves and their dependent territories with another group of cities, the municipia.

These were generally preexistent urban centers, some settled by Ro-man or Latin citizens, others old indigenous sites, which were granted privileged status by Rome and autonomous control over their territo-ries. Apart from the privileged coloniae and municipia, the cities of the peninsula were stipendiary, which is to say tribute paying, and their inhabitants peregrini, foreigners in Roman law. Such stipendiary civi-tates, whether centered on a real urban settlement or not, were none-theless an effective means of dividing and administering peninsular land, since they provided a focus with which the Roman state could interact. The Augustan era witnessed the foundation of many such peregrine cities, as well as more coloniae and municipia than had been

created in the whole previous history of Roman rule in Spain. Some were created de novo, like the colonia of Augusta Emerita, modern Mérida, founded in 25 B.C. for veterans of the Cantabrian wars, or Barcelona, created on a virgin site in 9 or 8 B.C. The very name of Caesaraugusta, modern Zaragoza, testifies to the era of its foundation, while in the far northwest a string of stipendiary cities like Lucus Au-gusti, Bracara Augusta, and Asturica Augusta were founded to act as new urban centers for the recently conquered mountain tribes. At the same time, many existing towns were promoted to colonial or munic-ipal status.

Within this Augustan system of provinces, conventus, and civitates, Spain became Roman; its inhabitants were transformed from the sub-jects of Romans into Roman provincials and participants in the Roman empire. This was hardly a conscious goal. Augustus, like Roman im-perialists before him, had no special desire to turn his provincial sub-jects into Romans. However much Roman writers might conceive of Roman rule as bringing civilization to the conquered, the provinces existed to pay for the Roman state and an untaxed Roman Italy. If they could be administered cheaply and with a minimum of Italian man-power, so much the better. The co-optation of local elites was the eas-iest way to accomplish this end and one that bore rapid fruit in Spain.

The three provinces required only a little over two hundred imperial officials to administer them in the centuries after Augustus, just gov-ernors and their small staffs, two subordinate legates in the vast prov-ince of Tarraconensis, and quaestors (in Baetica) or equestrian procu-rators (elsewhere) to oversee the collection of taxes and manage the income of imperial properties.²¹The rest of the work was done by the Spanish elites, who turned themselves into Romans as rapidly as they could.

They did so in order to secure their place within the new frame-work of society. All across the Roman world, the emperors could rely upon local elites to act as the basic units of government because those elites saw in Roman rule an advantage for themselves.²²In Spain as elsewhere, the indisputable hegemony of Roman arms meant that the best way for local elites to maintain the power that they were accus-tomed to wielding locally was to become Roman. Doing so meant be-ing able to exercise the old authority within the framework of the new

system.²³The first step to becoming Roman was adopting a Roman way of life. In some cities, like Sagunto, local elites had adopted Ro-man titulature for local offices as early as the second century B.C.²⁴ Everywhere, the Latin language and Roman culture were necessary tools for the maintenance of power. This explains the spread of a

system.²³The first step to becoming Roman was adopting a Roman way of life. In some cities, like Sagunto, local elites had adopted Ro-man titulature for local offices as early as the second century B.C.²⁴ Everywhere, the Latin language and Roman culture were necessary tools for the maintenance of power. This explains the spread of a

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