The praetorian commanders 193–155

Cato claimed that, by the end of his tenure of the provincia of Hispania Citerior, the area was at peace. The senate, in recognition of this, voted him a three-day supplicatio in thanksgiving to the gods and, on his return, a triumph. They also decided that the army which Cato had commanded in Spain, consisting of two legions with the usual complement of auxiliary infantry and cavalry, should be withdrawn. Although the wisdom of this action has been questioned, it was an inevitable concomitant of the senate's acceptance of Cato's account of his own successes, and the award of a triumph. However, as the following years demonstrated, the senate was undoubtedly wrong to believe Cato.

Both the praetors sent out to Spain in 194 had connections with the peninsula. P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica, who was sent to Ulterior, was the son of Cn. Scipio who had been killed with his brother Publius in the disasters of 211. Sex. Digitius was present with Publius' son, the younger P. Scipio, at New Carthage in 209, where, as a socius navalis, he won the distinction of a mural crown, and in all probability gained the citizenship. In 194, in the second consulship of P. Scipio, Nasica's cousin and Digitius' former commander, these two men were faced with the aftermath of Cato's victories. Digitius succeeded Cato, and, with forces less than half those at his predecessor's disposal, had to deal with a rash of small-scale rebellions.

Between 218 and 206 there was neither need nor occasion for the Romans, either in Spain or in the senate, to question the value of a Roman presence in the peninsula. The only moment at which the matter might have been raised, when after the deaths of the Scipio brothers in 211 their replacement was a live issue in Rome, was one when the value of Spain to the Carthaginians, and the disastrous consequences of abandoning the struggle there, must have been self-evident to every senator. The same was not true in 206. As the younger P. Scipio reminded the senate, meeting in the Temple of Bellona just outside the sacred boundary of the pomerium to hear his request for a triumph in the latter part of 206, he had been sent out to Spain to face four enemy commanders and four victorious armies; he had left not one Carthaginian there on his departure.

Although the reason which had first attracted Roman attention to Spain, and had detained, in the later stages, some four legions there, no longer pertained, there seems to have been no move to end Roman involvement. Indeed already before Scipio reached Rome, two men, L. Cornelius Lentulus and L. Manlius Acidinus, had been chosen to replace him. The decision to sustain the military action in Spain was of course a decision of the senate, which must have allocated the area as a provincia.

The Spain from which C. Valerius Flaccus returned to Rome in 81, at the end of his protracted term in Hispania Citerior and Transalpine Gaul, was from the Roman viewpoint a very different area from that to which P. Scipio had been sent in 218. Scipio went to his provincia to fight the Carthaginians and it is likely that most members of the senate at that time had rather less interest in Spain as such than the average member of the British House of Commons had in the Sahara desert in 1942, at the time of the battle of El Alamein. By the 80s BC the two provinciae contained substantial numbers of Romans and Italians, both military and civilian, and many of the indigenous communities had developed close links with these representatives of the Roman power.

Apart from the army itself, this Roman presence must have been most obvious in the settlements of Roman origin, both those such as Valentia (modern Valencia) which appear to have been founded on previously unoccupied sites, and those in which an already existing indigenous population was either replaced or absorbed. Most of these settlements seem to belong to this second category, and it is possible that at Italica and Corduba, two separate communities, Iberian and Italian, lived in distinct quarters. Of the archaeological remains discovered so far, there is little to suggest that these towns would have displayed very much ‘Romanness’ in the grandeur of their buildings, but by the early years of the first century the influence of Hellenised Roman architecture was already being seen in at least some indigenous communities.

The Roman senate first assigned Spain as a provincia in 218 BC. According to Livy, the meeting, held probably in March, ordered that Hispania should be one of the two areas named for the consuls of the year, the other being ‘Africa with Sicily’. Thereafter Spain appeared on the annual list of provinciae throughout the period of the republic, usually, after 197 BC, in the form of two areas, Hispania citerior and Hispania ulterior, nearer and further Spain; and indeed remained under the control of Roman forces and Roman governors at least until the Vandal invasions in the fifth century AD.

The early part of this prolonged involvement of Rome in Spain coincided with the growth of Roman power throughout the Mediterranean basin, beginning in the third century with the wars against Carthage and reaching a climax in the middle of the first century in the wars of the imperial republic in East and West under the command of Pompey and Caesar. It is not surprising therefore that it is on this period in particular that attention has been focussed in the attempt to determine the nature of Roman imperialism. Imperialism is not a static phenomenon, but a process of aggressive acquisition leading to the establishment of some type of domination by one national group over others. None would doubt that by the end of the republic Rome had acquired such domination over most of the peoples of the Mediterranean, and of some, notably in Spain, Gaul and the East, who lived a considerable distance from it.

To understand the actions of the Romans in Spain in the 140 years which followed the declaration of war against Hannibal in 218 it is essential to be aware of the context in which those actions took place. The peoples they found there and, perhaps even more importantly, the structure of the land in which they fought were more than a mere back-drop to the events of the period. They, more than anything else, determined what it was possible for a Roman commander to do, and so shaped the activity and policy of the men who were to create Roman Spain.

The land

In no part of the Roman world is the connection between physical geography and political and military control closer or more important for the understanding of their methods and ideas than in Spain. The dominant feature of the geography of the peninsula is the great central tablelands, the mesetas, which cover about one-half of the total land area. To the north these are bounded by the range of the Cantabrian mountains, which extends eastwards to form the Pyrenees; before this, however, the edge of the meseta has turned south-eastwards along the line of the Sierra de la Demanda, which, after a gap created by the valley of the River Jalón, continues in a broadening cluster of sierras to reach the sea just north of Sagunto, at the northern end of the coastal plain of Valencia.

The account in Livy of the Spanish provinces for the years 197 to 195 is confusedin its allocation of magistrates to provinces, and the confusion is worse compounded by uncertainties in the geographical location of the activities which he ascribes to these men. Various attempts have been made recently to clarify the position, particularly by G. V. Sumner and by Robert Develin, but, given the importance of these years in the development of the senate's attitude to the Spanish provinces, Livy's evidence will be examined first before considering either of these solutions.

Roman involvement in Spain: the original motives

To the Roman senate immediately before the outbreak of the war with Hannibal in 218, Spain was an area of Carthaginian activity, and thus of Roman interest when war was declared. Hispania had already been decided upon by the senators as one of the two regions in which the war was to be fought; according to Livy, their first action on hearing of the sack of Saguntum was to assign that provincia to the consul P. Cornelius Scipio. The context of this assignment and the normal usage of the period make the senate's intention clear. Spain, along with Africawith-Sicily, the other provincia named at this time, were to be the places within which the consuls were meant to exercise their imperium. The naming of these provinciae was an essential step in the prosecution of the war, not a territorial claim.

It is not difficult to see why Spain seemed important to the senate. First, and most importantly, it was where Hannibal and his army were, and therefore where it was expected that the war would actually take place, when the embassy bearing the final ultimatum left for Carthage once the consular commands had been assigned. In the event, the delay to Scipio's recruitment plans (caused by the need to divert at least a part of his troops to deal with the attack by Gauls in the north of Italy on the newly planted Latin colonies of Placentia and Cremona), and still more the speed of Hannibal's advance across the Pyrenees and through southern France thwarted the senate's expectation.

The next series of events in Spain which have left any substantial mark on the literary sources is the concatenation of wars waged against the Lusitanians and the Celtiberians from the mid-150s to the late 130s. For these events our only continuous account is that given by Appian in his Ibērikē, for that of Livy, whose comments on Roman activity in Spain provide most of the evidence for the late third and early second centuries, survives for this period only in the two epitomes, one known from manuscripts and one from fragments discovered among the papyri from Oxyrhyncus. Although there is considerable doubt about Appian's own sources and the historical value of his work, his narrative is coherent, and free from the excesses which from time to time mar the annalistic account given by Livy, most obviously when recording the campaigns of the Scipio brothers during the first half of the Hannibalic war. Appian arranges his material province by province rather than year by year, but a reasonably secure chronology can be extracted from it.

The first Spanish governors whom Appian mentions are the two praetors, Manilius and Calpurnius Piso, who were in Ulterior, probably in 155 and 154 respectively. These men were faced with a revolt by the so-called ‘autonomous’ Lusitanians, which was eventually put down by the ruthless and discreditable policies of Ser. Sulpicius Galba, praetor in 151, who held Ulterior in 151 and 150. The first bout of fighting in Hispania Citerior began in 153 when, after a disagreement between the senate and the town of Segeda, the consul Q.

The collection of the material on which this book is based began as part of the preparation of an Oxford D. Phil, thesis in 1968. The completion of that thesis four years later was, as it turned out, only a stage in a prolonged process of investigation and interpretation, whose results are presented here. In 1968 I proposed to look at all the overseas development of the Roman empire in the second century BC, and it was Sir Ronald Syme, as Camden Professor in Oxford, who suggested that I should begin with Spain, as that might prove the most fruitful area for my purpose. Seventeen years later, I have no reason to contest the wisdom of that advice, and to him and to Martin Frederiksen, who supervised my research with characteristic care and sustaining enthusiasm, I owe even more than I realised at the time.

The extended production of this book could never have been achieved without the help, encouragement and critical good sense of a host of friends, colleagues and pupils too numerous to mention; but I particularly wish to thank Michel Austin, Jill Harries and Geoffrey Rickman, my colleagues in St Andrews; Michael Crawford and Andrew Lintott in England; Professor P. G. Walsh of Glasgow, whose reading of one draft removed many errors; Amanda Pugh, who struggled with a hideous manuscript to produce a legible typescript; and above all my wife, Patricia Richardson, who has lived with Roman Spain for as long as I have. My thanks are also due to the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy, whose generosity made possible extended visits to Italy and Spain in 1979 and 1983 respectively.

Magic and miracle in Roman sources

Lucius Apuleius, like his mid-second century contemporary, Aelius Aristides, reported an experience of epiphany and mystical transformation, although the divinity in the case of Apuleius was Isis rather than Asklepios. The career to which he devoted his later life was that of a lawyer, but this seems to have been a means of providing money so that he could spend as much time as possible on his major interest: as priest in the shrine of his beloved Isis. While his story in the Metamorphoses – which is almost certainly in large part autobiographical – has no significant link with medical tradition, it makes contact at several crucial points with magic. Indeed, the story line is launched with the narrative of Apuleius' dabbling in magic, which results in his being transformed into an ass. The symbolic import of that experience is clear: Apuleius is pictured as a braying, clomping fool, scorned by his contemporaries until he encounters the goddess, who delivers him from his condition, and transforms him into a fully human being, in communion with her and dedicated to her beneficent purpose for the world.

In a later work, the Apology, Apuleius develops a defence against the charge brought against him before the Roman authorities that he has been practising magic.

In every age and in every social setting, a primary concern of human beings is health. This concern manifests itself in two distinct modes: (1) the eagerness to maintain the health of the body, and the negative corollary, which is the overcoming of sickness; (2) the basic human need to discern some framework of meaning by which the cause of sickness, suffering, and disability can be understood, and by which these universal experiences of frailty and vulnerability can be incorporated into a view of the world and humanity's place within it. The importance of these issues for the New Testament is broad and deep, as is apparent from the gospels, the Acts, and the various letters. Of the approximately 250 literary units into which the first three gospels are divided in a typical synopsis, one fifth either describe or allude to the healing and exorcistic activities of Jesus and the disciples. Of the seven “signs” reported in John to have been done by Jesus, four involve healing or restoration. Of the seventy literary units in John, twelve either describe his healing activity or refer to the signs which he performed.

Often overlooked is the importance Paul attached to healing. He lists healing and working miracles among the charismatic gifts (I Cor 12:9–10).

Jewish Magical Documents

Mordecai Margalioth's reconstruction of magical texts from the early centuries C.E., published in 1966 under the title, Sepher-ha-Razim, have been translated nd annotated by Michael A. Morgan, with the sub-title, The Book of Mysteries (Society of Biblical Literature, Scholars Press, 1983). What follows here is a series of excerpts from the Morgan translation, including the complete preface, and portions from six of the seven sections, which Morgan has designated as the Seven Firmaments. There are indications of the numbers of the lines which Morgan has taken over from Margalioth.

Sepher ha-Razim

(Preface)

This is a book, from the Books of the Mysteries, which was given to Noah, the son of Lamech, the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mehallalel, the son of Kenan, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, by Raziel the angel in the year when he came into the ark (but) before his entrance.

After the completion of my study, Miracle in the Early Christian World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), my continued interest in the phenomenon of healing in the New Testament led me to an investigation of another mode of healing from this period: medicine. It quickly became clear to me that this aspect of Graeco-Roman culture did not fall into a simple, neat category, but was as subject to change as I had discovered miracle to be. The result of these preliminary explorations was the determination to investigate in their inter-relationships to each other the three approaches to healing from this period: medicine, miracle and magic.

With the encouragement of my colleagues at Boston University, I applied for and was granted a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. My research was carried out in the superbly equipped and staffed library of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine in London in the summer of 1984. Conversations with colleagues at the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas at its annual meeting later that summer in Basel led me to undertake converting my research notes into a monograph on the subject. It was my hope that the assembling of this evidence and the analytical framework in which it was placed might help to enrich our understanding of the context in which the New Testament was written and in which the early Christian movement spread so rapidly.