The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition). Theodor Mommsen
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his danger and his destruction. His own countrymen, especially his own clan, accused him of going the way of Maroboduus and of desiring to be not merely the first, but also the lord and the king of the Germans—whether with reason or not, and whether, if he wished this, he did not perhaps wish what was right, who can say? The result was a civil war between him and these representatives of popular freedom; two years after the banishment of Maroboduus he too, like Caesar, fell by the dagger of nobles of republican sentiments near to his person. His wife Thusnelda and his son born in captivity, Thumelicus, on whom he had never set eyes, marched at the triumph of Germanicus (26th May, 17) among the other Germans of rank, in chains to the Capitol; the old Segestes was for his fidelity to the Romans provided with a place of honour, whence he might look on at the public entry of his daughter and his grandson. They all died within the Roman empire; with Maroboduus the wife and son of his antagonist met in the exile of Ravenna. When Tiberius remarked at the recall of Germanicus that there was no need to wage war against the Germans, and that they would of themselves take care to do what was requisite for Rome, he knew his adversaries; in this, at all events, history has pronounced him right. But to the high–spirited man who, at the age of six–and–twenty, had released his Saxon home from the Italian foreign rule, who thereafter had been general as well as soldier in a seven years’ struggle for that freedom regained, who had staked not merely person and life, but also wife and child for his nation, to fall at the age of thirty–seven by an assassin’s hand—to this man his people gave, what it was in their power to give, an eternal monument in heroic song.
Chapter II.
Spain
Conclusion of the conquest.
The accidents of external policy caused the Romans to establish themselves on the Pyrenaean peninsula earlier than in any other part of the transmarine mainland, and to institute there two standing commands. There, too, the republic had not, as in Gaul and Illyricum, confined itself to subduing the coasts of the Italian sea, but had rather from the outset, after the precedent of the Barcides, contemplated the conquest of the whole peninsula. With the Lusitanians (in Portugal and Estremadura) the Romans had fought from the time that they called themselves masters of Spain; the “more remote province” had been instituted, strictly speaking, against these tribes and simultaneously with the “nearer” one; the Callaeci (Gallicia) became subject to the Romans a century before the battle of Actium; shortly before that battle the subsequent dictator Caesar had, in his first campaign, carried the Roman arms as far as Brigantium (Corunna), and consolidated afresh the annexation of this region to the more remote province. Then, in the years between the death of Caesar and the sole rule of Augustus, there was unceasing warfare in the north of Spain; no fewer than six governors in this short time won triumphs there, and perhaps the subjugation of the northern slope of the Pyrenees was effected chiefly in this epoch.24 The wars with the cognate Aquitanians on the north side of the mountains, which fall within the same epoch, and the last of which was victoriously ended in the year 727[27.], must stand in connection with these events. On the reorganising of the administrative arrangements in 727[27.] the peninsula went to Augustus, because there was a prospect of extensive military operations there, and it needed a permanent garrison. Although the southern third of the more remote province, thenceforth named from the river Baetis (Guadalquivir) was soon given back to the government of the senate,25 by far the greater portion of the peninsula remained constantly under imperial administration, including the greater part of the more remote province, Lusitania and Callaecia,26 and the whole of the large nearer one. Immediately after the institution of the new supreme control Augustus resorted in person to Spain, with a view, in his two years’ stay (728, 729)[26, 25.], to organise the new administration, and to direct the occupation of the portions of the country not yet subject. This he did from Tarraco as his headquarters, and it was at that time that the seat of government of the nearer province was transferred from New Carthage to Tarraco, after which town this province is thenceforth usually named. While it appeared necessary on the one hand not to remove the seat of administration from the coast, the new capital on the other hand commanded the region of the Ebro and the communications with the north–west and the Pyrenees. Against the Astures (in the provinces of Asturias and Leon), and above all, the Cantabri (in the Basque country and the province of Santander), who obstinately held out in these mountains and overran the neighbouring cantons, a warfare attended by difficulties and heavy losses was prolonged—with interruptions, which the Romans called victories—for eight years, till at length Agrippa succeeded in breaking down the open resistance by destroying the mountain towns and transplanting their inhabitants to the valleys.
Military organisation in the North–west.
If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted. Matters were still apparently far from having reached a proper pacification in north–western Spain. There is still mention in Nero’s time of war–expeditions against the Asturians. A still clearer tale is told by the occupation of the country, as Augustus arranged it. Callaecia was separated from Lusitania and united with the Tarraconensian province, to concentrate in one hand the chief command in northern Spain. Not merely was this province then the only one which, without bordering on an enemy’s country, obtained a legionary military command, but no fewer than three legions27 were directed thither by Augustus—two to Asturia, one to Cantabria; and, in spite of the military pressure in Germany and in Illyricum, this occupying force was not diminished. The headquarters were established between the old metropolis of Asturia, Lancia, and the new Asturica Augusta (Astorga) in Leon that still at present bears its name. With this strong occupation of the north–west is probably connected the construction of roads undertaken there to a considerable extent in the earlier imperial period, although we are not able to demonstrate the connection in detail, seeing that the allocation of these troops in the Augustan age is unknown to us. Thus there was established by Augustus and Tiberius for the capital of Collaecia, Bracara (Braga), a connection with Asturica, that is, with the great headquarters, and not less with the neighbouring towns to the north, north–east, and south. Tiberius made similar constructions in the territory of the Vascones and in Cantabria.28 Gradually the occupying force could be diminished, and under Claudius one legion, under Nero a second, could be employed elsewhere. But these were regarded only as drafted off, and still at the beginning of the reign of Vespasian the Spanish garrison had resumed its earlier strength; it was reduced, in the strict sense, only by the Flavian emperors, by Vespasian to two, by Domitian to one legion. From thence down to the time of Diocletian a single legion, the Seventh Gemina, and a certain number of auxiliary contingents garrisoned Leon.
No province under the monarchy was less affected by outward or by inward wars than this land of the far west. While at this epoch the commanderships of the troops assumed, as it were, the positions of competing parties, the Spanish army played throughout a secondary part in that respect; it was only as helper of his colleague that Galba entered into the civil war, and mere accident carried him to the first place. The force holding the north–west of the Peninsula, which even after its reduction still strikes us as comparatively strong, leads us to infer that this region had not been completely obedient even in the second and third centuries; but we are unable to state anything definite as to the employment of the Spanish legion within the province which it held in occupation. The struggle against the Cantabrians had been waged with the help of vessels of war; subsequently the Romans had no occasion to institute a permanent naval station there. It is not till the period after Diocletian that we find the Pyrenaean peninsula, like the Italian and the Graeco–Macedonian, without a standing garrison.
Incursions of the Moors.
That the province of Baetica was, at least after the beginning of the second century, visited on various occasions from the opposite coast by the Moors—the pirates of Rîf—we shall have to set forth in detail when we survey the affairs of Africa. We may presume that this serves to explain why, although in the senatorial provinces elsewhere imperial troops were not wont to be stationed, by way of exception Italica (near Seville) was provided with a division of the legion of Leon.29 But it chiefly devolved