The Provinces of the Roman Empire (Illustrated Edition) - Theodor Mommsen

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of Latin rights by Vespasian must have made this conversion general or very nearly so.34 In reality there were among the 293 Augustan communities of the province of Tarraco 114, and among the 275 of the second century only twenty–seven, that were not urban communities.

      Levy.

      Of the position of Spain in the imperial administration little is to be said. In the levy the Spanish provinces played a prominent part. The legions doing garrison–duty there were probably from the beginning of the principate raised chiefly in the country itself; when afterwards on the one hand the occupying force was diminished, and on the other hand the levy was more and more restricted to the garrison–district proper, Baetica, sharing in this respect the lot of Italy, enjoyed the dubious blessing of being totally excluded from military service. The auxiliary levy, to which especially the districts that lagged behind as regards urban development were subjected, was carried out on a great scale in Lusitania, Callaecia, Asturia, and not less in the whole of northern and inland Spain; Augustus, whose father had formed even his bodyguard of Spaniards, recruited in none of the territories subject to him (setting aside Belgica) so largely as in Spain.

      For the finances of the state this rich country was beyond doubt one of the most secure and most productive sources; but we have no detailed information transmitted to us.

      Trade and commerce.

      The importance of the traffic of these provinces admits of being inferred in some measure from the careful provision of the government for the Spanish roads. Between the Pyrenees and Tarraco there have been found Roman milestones even from the last times of the republic, such as no other province of the West exhibits. We have already remarked that Augustus and Tiberius promoted road–making in Spain mainly for military reasons; but the road formed by Augustus at Carthago Nova can only have been constructed on account of traffic, and it was traffic mainly that was served by the imperial highway named after him, and partly regulated, partly constructed anew by him. This road, continuing the Italo–Gallic coast–road and crossing the Pyrenees at the Pass of Puycerda, went thence to Tarraco, then pretty closely followed the coast by way of Valentia as far as the mouth of the Jucar, but thence made right across the interior for the valley of the Baetis,35 then ran from the arch of Augustus—which marked the boundary of the two provinces, and with which a new numbering of the miles began—through the province Baetica to the mouth of the river, and thus connected Rome with the ocean. This was certainly the only imperial highway in Spain. Afterwards the government did not do much for the roads of Spain; the communes, to which these were soon in the main entrusted, appear, so far as we see, to have provided everywhere—apart from the tableland of the interior—communications to such an extent as was required by the state of culture in the province. For, mountainous as Spain is and not without steppes and waste land, it is yet one of the most productive countries of the earth, both through the abundance of the fruits of the soil and through its riches of wine and oil and metals. To this were early added manufactures, especially in iron wares and in woollen and linen fabrics. In the valuations under Augustus no Roman burgess–community, Patavium excepted, had such a number of rich people to show as the Spanish Gades with its great merchants spread throughout the world; and in keeping with this was the refined luxury of manners, the castanet–players who were here at home, and the Gaditanian songs, which circulated, like those of Alexandria, among the elegant Romans. The nearness of Italy, and the easy and cheap intercourse by sea, gave at this epoch, especially to the Spanish south and east coasts, the opportunity of bringing their rich produce to the first market of the world, and probably with no country in the world did Rome pursue so extensive and constant a traffic on a great scale as with Spain.

      That Roman civilisation pervaded Spain earlier and more powerfully than any other province, is confirmed by evidence on various sides, especially in respect to religion and to literature.

      Religious rites.

      It is true that in the territory that was still at a later period Iberian, and remained tolerably free from immigration—in Lusitania, Callaecia, Asturia—the native gods, with their singular names, ending mostly in –icus and –ecus, such as Endovellicus, Eaecus, Vagodonnaegus, and the like, maintained their ground still even under the principate at the old seats. But not a single votive stone has been found in all Baetica, which might not quite as well have been set up in Italy. And the same holds true of Tarraconensis proper, only that isolated traces are met with on the upper Douro of the worship of Celtic gods.36 No other province shows an equally energetic Romanising in matters of ritual.

      The Spaniards in Latin literature.

      Cicero mentions the Latin poets at Corduba only to censure them; and the Augustan age of literature was still in the main the work of Italians, though individual provincials helped in it, and among others the learned librarian of the emperor, the philologue Hyginus, was born as a bondsman in Spain. But thenceforward the Spaniards undertook in it almost the part, if not of leader, at any rate of schoolmaster. The natives of Corduba, Marcus Porcius Latro, the teacher and the model of Ovid, and his countryman and friend in youth, Annaeus Seneca,—both only about a decade younger than Horace, but for a considerable time employed in their native town as teachers of eloquence, before they transferred their activity in that character to Rome—were the true and proper representatives of the school–rhetoric that took the place of the republican freedom and sauciness of speech. Once, when the former could not avoid appearing in a real process, he came to a stand–still in his address, and only recovered his fluency when, to please the famous man, the court was transferred from the tribunal to the school–hall. Seneca’s son, the minister of Nero and the fashionable philosopher of the epoch, and his grandson, the poet of the sentimental opposition to the principate, Lucanus, have an importance, as doubtful in literature as it is indisputable in history, which may in a certain sense be put to the account of Spain. In the early times of the empire, likewise, two other provincials from Baetica, Mela under Claudius, Columella under Nero, gained a place among the recognised didactic authors who cultivated style—the former by his short description of the earth, the latter by a thorough, in part poetical, picture of agriculture. If, in the time of Domitian, the poet Canius Rufus from Gades, the philosopher Decianus from Emerita, and the orator Valerius Licinianus from Bilbilis (Calatayud not far from Saragossa) are celebrated as literary notabilities by the side of Virgil and Catullus and by the side of the three stars of Corduba, this is certainly the fortune also of one likewise a native of Bilbilis, Valerius Martialis,37 who himself yields to none among the poets of this epoch in elegance and plastic power, or yet in venality and emptiness, and we are justified in taking into account withal the fact of their being fellow–countrymen; yet the mere possibility of weaving such a garland of poets shows the importance of the Spanish element in the literature of the time. But the pearl of Spanish–Latin authorship is Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35–95) from Calagurris on the Ebro. His father had already acted as a teacher of eloquence in Rome; he himself was brought to Rome by Galba, and occupied, especially under Domitian, a distinguished position as tutor of the emperor’s nephews. His textbook of rhetoric and, in some degree, of the history of Roman literature, is one of the most excellent which we possess from Roman antiquity, pervaded by fine taste and sure judgment, simple in feeling as in presentation, instructive without weariness, pleasing without effort, contrasting sharply and designedly with the fashionable literature that was so rich in phrases and so empty of ideas. It was in no small degree due to him that the tendency became changed at any rate, if not improved. Subsequently, amidst the general emptiness the influence of the Spaniards comes no further into prominence. What is, historically, of special moment in their Latin authorship is the complete clinging of these provincials to the literary development of the mother–country. Cicero, indeed, scoffs at the clumsiness and the provincialisms of the Spanish votaries of poetry; and even Latro’s Latin did not meet the approval of the equally genteel and correct Roman by birth, Messalla Corvinus. But after the Augustan age nothing similar is again heard of. The Gallic rhetors, the great African ecclesiastical authors have, as Latin writers, retained in some measure a foreign complexion; no one would recognise the Senecas and Martial by their manner and style as belonging to one or to another land; in hearty love to his own literature and in subtle understanding of it never has any Italian surpassed the teacher of languages from Calagurris.

      Chapter III.

      

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