Latin letters had an early, if undistinguished, start in the peninsula - Cicero sees fit to sneer at the “dull” poetasters of Cordoba (Arch. 10, 26). But perhaps Cicero underestimated the vibrancy of cultural life in the peninsula, as one of the leading orators of Augustan Rome was the Hispaniensis, Marcus Porcius Latro (Sen. Con. I, praef. 16).
The most well-known literary group are the Seneca family who formed part of Hispaniensis population of Cordoba. However, only the Elder Seneca, an author of works on a rhetorical theory and a lost history of Rome, spent any amount of time in his home town (Griffin 1972). Both his son, the Younger Seneca, poet, essayist, philosopher, and sometime confident of Nero, and his nephew, the epic poet Lucan, left Cordoba in their early youth, never, as far as can be ascertained, to return. Another notable Hispaniensis was the rhetorical theorist Quintilian of Calatayud, who was given the first imperial endowed chair of rhetoric at Rome by the emperor Vespasian. Other literary figures from the peninsula included the agricultural writer Columella, a native of Cadiz, and the geographer Pomponius Mela from Tingentera near Gibraltar.
Mela was proud of his Iberian background (2.6.86), and this pride was shared by the poet Martial, a Hispanus, i. e. native Iberian born in Calatayud. He was happy to boast about the ferocious reputation of his people and their local toponyms which the elder Pliny had complained were unpronounceable (Mart. 1.49, 10.65, 12.18; Pliny HN 3.1.8). A favorite of the emperor Domitian, Martial was happy to retire to Calatayud after leaving Rome, perhaps under a cloud, on the accession of Trajan.
Iberia also provided important literary figures in the late empire. Most produced devotional writing, reflecting the peninsula’s enthusiastic embrace of Christianity. Juvencus composed a verse version of the gospels in the mid-fourth century, while the retired civil servant Prudentius produced an output of Christian apologia in sophisticated verse. Egeria, perhaps a nun, wrote an account of her travels in the Holy Land, and the priest Paulus Orosius, probably a native of Corunna, wrote the first Christian secular history, his Seven Books of History against Pagans, which was destined to become a major historical text in the middle ages. Secular writing was not entirely absent: the De Re MUitari of Vegetius was to remain influential until the early modern period.
World History
