Galba came to the first group and asked them to lay down their arms in a gesture of good faith. Each group was then led out of sight of the other two. The Romans divided them into three parts, telling them they would thus be settled on their new lands. But I will give my poor friends good land, and settle them in a fertile country, in three divisions.” Galba seemed a man of honor who understood the Lusitani’s plight … or so many villagers hoped.Īlongside Viriathus, 30,000 Lusitanians-men, women, and children-came down from their villages in the hills to gather at the place appointed by Galba. “Poorness of the soil and penury force you to do these things. Sympathetically, Galba answered that he understood why the Lusitani had made war. Word came to the villages that Lusitani envoys had gone to Galba and asked him to renew an earlier peace treaty. Tired of the constant war, the burning of their homes, the slaughter and enslavement of their people, the Lusitani desired peace. Together, the two then came up with a plan to deal with the elusive Lusitani. The same year, Lucullus, governor of Hispania Citerior, hungry for loot, massacred the inhabitants of the Vaccaei town of Cauca, even though this Celt-Iberian tribe thus far had stayed out of the war.
Two years later, they humbled the army of Hispania Ulterior’s governor, Servius Sulpicius Galba. In 153 some of them even crossed the Pillars of Hercules and struck into Africa. But not so the Lusitanians, who fought on. The Celt-Iberians doggedly defied the Romans, although over the years some made their peace with Rome. Lusitani’s Plight Servus Sulpicius Galba at first seemed like a man of his word, but he was not. Spain, as Edward Gibbon put it, was to Rome as Peru and Mexico would become to the Old World. Only 10 years after the Roman occupation, 59,000 kilograms of silver and 1,800 kilograms of gold were shipped to Rome. Soon 40,000 slaves toiled under the Roman whip at the silver mines of Carthago Nova (Cartagena).
Spanish gold and silver once funded the Punic war machine and now would do the same for Rome. Two new Roman provinces, Hispania Citerior (“Nearer Spain”) and Hispania Ulterior (“Farther Spain”) set out to drain the country of its vast riches. Straddling the Mediterranean Sea, Punic Spain became Roman Spain. Viriathus’s people began fighting the Romans in the aftermath of Carthage’s defeat in the Second Punic War (218-201 bc). They were part of the Celt-Iberian peoples that had come into being after 900 bc, when Celts drifted into the northern two-thirds of Spain and mixed with the local pre-Indo-European Iberians. Their home bordered the Atlantic coast, between the mouths of the rivers Durius and Tagus. His name was Viriathus and his people were part of the Lusitani, one of the large Spanish tribal groups. In 150 BC a young shepherd wandered down from the hills to surrender with others of his kind to the Romans.
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