lls of their cities or under
the leadership of Hannibal, but even when left to themselves and in
the open field of battle, no contemptible opponents; with their short
two-edged sword which the Romans subsequently adopted from them, and
their formidable assaulting columns, they not unfrequently made even
the Roman legions waver. Had they been able to submit to military
discipline and to political combination, they might perhaps have
shaken off the foreign yoke imposed on them. But their valour was
rather that of the guerilla than of the soldier, and they were utterly
void of political judgment. Thus in Spain there was no serious war,
but as little was there any real peace; the Spaniards, as Caesar
afterwards very justly pointed out to them, never showed themselves
quiet in peace or strenuous in war. Easy as it was for a Roman
general to scatter a host of insurgents, it was difficult for the
Roman statesman to devise any suitable means of really pacifying and
civilizing Spain. In fact, he could only deal with it by palliative
measures; because the only really adequate expedient, a comprehensive
Latin colonization, was not accordant with the general aim of Roman
policy at this period.

The Romans Maintain a Standing Army in Spain
Cato
Gracchus

The territory which the Romans acquired in Spain in the course of the
second Punic war was from the beginning divided into two masses--the
province formerly Carthaginian, which embraced in the first instance
the present districts of Andalusia, Granada, Murcia, and Valencia, and
the province of the Ebro, or the modern Arragon and Catalonia, the
fixed quarters of the Roman army during the last war. Out of these
territories were formed the two Roman provinces of Further and Hither
Spain. The Romans sought gradually to reduce to subjection the
interior corresponding nearly to the two Castiles, which they
comprehended under the general name of Celtiberia, while they were
content with checking the incursions of the inhabitants of the western
provinces, more especially those of the Lusitanians in the modern
Portugal and the Spanish Estremadura, into the Roman territory;
with the tribes on the north coast, the Callaecians, Asturians,
and Cantabrians, they did not as yet come into contact at all.
The territories thus won, however, could not be maintained and secured
without a standing garrison, for the governor of Hither Spain had no
small trouble every year with the chastisement