CHAPTER III.

VIRIATHUS.

B.C. 147—145.

AFTER Galba left Spain, we find nothing about the war in those parts. The Romans were busy with the third war against Carthage from B.c. 149 to the middle of the year B.C. 146. In B.C. 147 probably C. Vetilius, or Vitellius, for his name is uncertain, was sent as propraetor from Rome with an army to which he added Iberian auxiliaries. He found the Lusitani in Turdetania plundering as usual. Vetilius fell on the Lusitani and drove them to a place from which they could not retreat without danger, nor could they remain without being starved. The Lusitani proposed to surrender, and they asked for lands to settle on. Vetilius was ready to accept the terms, when Viriathus, who was among the Lusitani, reminded them of the treachery of the Romans, and told them that they might escape if they would obey him. The Lusitani accepted Viriathus as their commander. He drew them all out, as if they were going to fight the Romans; but instead of fighting, the Lusitani, according to their general's plan, as soon as they saw him mount his horse broke up, ran in all directions, and made for the city Tribola, where they were ordered to wait. Viriathus with a thousand picked horsemen kept his ground. Vetilius could not pursue an army which was dispersed, and he advanced against the thousand horsemen. Viriathus, at one time moving forward, then retreating, and moving forward again kept the Romans busy in the plain all that day and the next. When he supposed that his men were safe,

he went off at nightfall by a route in which the Romans could not follow, and he reached Tribola. The site of this place is unknown. This successful retreat established the influence of Viriathus, and the barbarians flocked to join a man who had proved his fitness to command.

Viriathus was a Lusitanian from the parts bordering on the Atlantic Ocean. From his boyhood he had been a shepherd and familiar with life in the mountains. In strength and nimbleness of foot and dexterity he surpassed all his countrymen. Like many of the spare and hardy men of the peninsula he was used to scanty food and much exercise, and he took little sleep. He was accustomed to arms and trained by fighting with wild beasts and robbers. When he became the leader of his countrymen, he commanded their admiration and obedience both by his bravery and his talent. He gained their affection too by his justice in the division of the spoil and his readiness to reward merit. If he began by being a robber, as his enemies called him, he ended by making himself a chieftain and a formidable. enemy to the Romans, whom he often defeated.

Vetilius advanced upon Tribola. The wily Lusitanian met the Roman, and made a feint of flying before him; but he had laid an ambuscade on the way, and as soon as the enemy had passed it, he turned round, and Vetilius was attacked both in front and rear. Many of the Romans were killed and others made prisoners. The Roman commander was among those who were taken. The man who seized Vetilius, seeing that he had only caught a very fat old fellow, killed him, not thinking his prisoner worth the trouble of keeping. Out of ten thousand Romans hardly six thousand made their escape to a city on the coast, which in the authorities followed by Appian was named Carpessus. Appian conjectures that this was the place which the Greeks of old named Tartessus, where King Arganthonius once reigned and attained, as it was said, the age of one hundred and fifty years; but Cicero reduces his years to the more moderate number of one hundred and twenty, and though he calls him King of the Tartessians, he says that he lived at Gades. The name Tartessus occurs often in the antient

writers, and we suppose that the place was somewhere in the south-west part of Spain. If Carpessus is Carteia or Calpe, the place, to which the Romans fled, was near the rock of Gibraltar, and at the head of the small bay of Algeciras, which the Romans named Portus Albus. It seems singular that Appian did not identify Carpessus with Carteia instead of the vague name Tartessus, but Appian was ill acquainted with the geography of western Europe. Carteia had been settled by the Romans in B.c. 171 with four thousand men the children of Roman soldiers by Spanish women. As there could be no Roman marriage between a Roman citizen and a Peregrina or alien woman, all these four thousand men were aliens. They asked for a town to dwell in. The Senate declared that they must give in their names to L. Canuleius, and those who were manumitted should be sent to colonize Carteia; from which we must conclude that they were the sons of slave women, and according to Roman law would be slaves themselves, for otherwise no manumission would have been necessary. Such of the inhabitants of Carteia as chose to stay were to be reckoned among the colonists and to have lands assigned to them. Carteia was made a Latin colony, and was named a colony of Libertini or freedmen. This explanation makes it nearly certain that Carpessus to which the Romans fled was the colony Carteia, now El Rocadillo, on rising ground at the mouth of a small river, about four miles from Gibraltar. The name Carteia denotes a Phoenician origin, which is a more satisfactory explanation of the word than an assumed Iberian derivation. The circuit of the Roman walls can be traced, and there are remains of the amphitheatre.

The quaestor of Vetilius was with the troops which fled to Carpessus. Appian says that he applied to the Belli and Titthi for five thousand men, that he received them and sent them forward against Viriathus, who killed them all The quaestor himself kept quiet within his walls waiting for help from Rome. We cannot understand how a man shut up in a town on the south coast could communicate with people in the centre of Spain, and receive troops from them. If the Belli and Titthi fought with Viriathus, it may have been in

their own country and in self-defence. Appian's narrative is here unintelligible, as abridgments of historical narratives often are.

It appears likely that Viriathus had been in the country of the Belli, for we read of him plundering the Carpetani on the Tagus at the time when C. Plautius (B.c. 146) arrived from Rome with ten thousand foot and thirteen hundred horse. The Lusitani pretended to fly before Plautius, who sent four thousand men after them; but Viriathus as usual turned on his pursuers, killed most of them, and escaped across the Tagus. The Roman commander coming up found Viriathus posted on a hill planted with olives, and wishing to retrieve his loss he attacked the Lusitani. But he was completely beaten and his troops fled in disorder to seek refuge in the towns. It was still the middle of summer when the Roman general retired from the campaign into his quarters from which he did not venture to stir, and Viriathus was left to plunder the country as he pleased. He made the farmers ransom their crops by payments of money, and he wasted the lands of those who did not or could not pay. We may collect from the scattered notices that the ravages of Viriathus extended far into the territories which acknowledged the supremacy of Rome. Frontinus in his book on stratagems speaks of Viriathus surprising Segobriga, but without any indication as to the time when this happened or the locality. It is however probable that Segobriga was the Celtiberian town of that name. But when Orosius and Florus speak of Viriathus crossing both the Iberus and the Tagus, they mix truth with falsehood. The field of Viriathus' plunderings was certainly often upon and near the Tagus, but there is no evidence that he ever crossed the Iberus, except in two inferior writers, one of whom would never scruple to add any thing to embellish a sentence.

It was now necessary to conduct the Spanish war in a different way, or the Romans might be driven out of Spain. The consuls for the year B.c. 145 were Q. Fabius Maximus Aemilianus and L. Hostilius Mancinus. Fabius was appointed to conduct the war against Viriathus. He was the son of L. Aemilius Paulus the conqueror of Macedonia, and

the elder brother of P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Minor. Q. Fabius had been adopted by Q. Fabius Maximus, and P. Scipio by the son of P. Scipio Africanus Major.

Orosius and Florus speak of another praetor, Claudius Unimanus, being defeated by Viriathus; and the Auctor de Viris Illustribus adds C. Nigidius to the list of defeated praetors. Claudius lost all his men, with his fasces and his standards, which Viriathus set up as trophies in his mountain fastnesses. It is not said whether Claudius escaped after losing all his men. Orosius quotes a story from the historian Claudius, Quadrigarius we must suppose, who included the war with Viriathus in his history, and we may accept the anecdote in the absence of better materials as an incident in the Lusitanian war. Three hundred Lusitani had a fight with a thousand Romans in a defile. Seventy of the Lusitani fell and three hundred and twenty Romans. The victorious Lusitani were retreating without any order and thinking of no danger, when one of them, who was a long way from the rest of his comrades, was surrounded by some Roman horseThe man was on foot and he could only save himself by his courage. He pierced the horse of one of the Romans with his spear, and cut off the head of the rider with a single stroke of his sword. The rest were so terrified that the Lusitanian walked off slowly in sight of all the horsemen, thus showing his contempt of his enemies.

men.

By comparing Appian, who wrote a continuous narrative of the Lusitanian war, with the brief notices found elsewhere, we see that he has omitted some things, which we only learn from the compilers and writers of Epitomes. These writers agree so far in the facts and sometimes in the words that it is plain that they drew from one source, and perhaps from the historian Claudius Quadrigarius. Florus is one of the most wretched of Epitomators, hardly surpassed by any who do the same kind of work now. His text is corrupt also, and he ought never to be quoted as an authority for any fact, when there is no other evidence for it; and when there is other testimony, his evidence is not wanted, for it is no confirmation. Orosius wrote his work for a particular purpose, and he only mentions facts which were suited to his purpose;

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