The peninsula had proved a hard nut to crack in terms of both time and losses of men. The 178 years for its conquest is in striking contrast to the decade required by Caesar to subjugate Gaul, an area of equivalent land-mass.
Spain is famously a country where “large armies starve and small armies are swallowed up,” and the terrain and climate of the peninsula certainly hampered Roman military efforts at conquest, which were also often hamstrung by a political system which rewarded short-term opportunism and encouraged self-seeking rather than any long-term strategy. Roman setbacks included eleven years of war fighting Viriathus (150-139 Bc), a Lusitanian leader who was finally only defeated by treachery (Pastor 2004), a ten-year-long, and initially disastrous, war against the Celtiberians of Numantia (143-133 Bc), and another ten-year war (82-72 Bc) against the Roman renegade Sertorius (Spann 1987 and Garcia Mora 1991), who, after rallying many natives to his cause, used them to continue in Spain his own private political war against the establishment in Rome. The conquest of Cantabria and the Asturias, which Augustus had hoped would give a swift boost to his weak military reputation, also went badly wrong. The emperor was forced to retreat in frustration and with severe ill health in 24 BC, leaving the campaigns to be finished off by his subordinates. This was eventually done by Agrippa in 19 Bc, but not without severe difficulties. Legio I Augusta was stripped of its titles after mutinying, and the area experienced several further uprisings. After the conquest of Cantabria, three legions were stationed in the peninsula until the civil wars of ad 69-70, which began with a coup launched by Galba, the governor of Hispania Citerior. But after these wars, only one legion, the VII Gemina which had been raised by Galba for his coup, was retained, being stationed at Leon. Acts of low-level violence were ever present, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the governor of Hispania Citerior, was murdered by bandits in ad 25 (Tac. Ann. 4.45), and a major raid from Mauretania in the mid-second century caused disruption in the south of the peninsula, but the peaceful state of the region can be seen in a comparison with the province of Britain, which was only one quarter of Iberia’s size, but required a permanent garrison of three legions.
This extended fighting produced important repercussions at Rome. In 153 bc, the official beginning of the year was changed from March to January in order to allow the new consul, Quintus Fulvius Nobilior, to take up his post immediately. This change remained permanent. The Roman army, too, was changed by the prolonged fighting. Several Roman weapons, including the gladius (sword) and the pilum (javelin), appear to have been derived from weapons encountered in the Iberian campaigns, and the transition from the maniple to the cohort as the basic division of the legion may also have begun here.
World History
