not only became an established fact from the Pillars of Hercules to
the mouths of the Nile and the Orontes, but, as if it were the final
decree of fate, it weighed on the nations with all the pressure of
an inevitable necessity, and seemed to leave them merely the choice
of perishing in hopeless resistance or in hopeless endurance.
If history were not entitled to insist that the earnest reader
should accompany her through good and evil days, through landscapes
of winter as well as of spring, the historian might be tempted to shun
the cheerless task of tracing the manifold and yet monotonous turns
of this struggle between superior power and utter weakness, both in
the Spanish provinces already annexed to the Roman empire and in the
African, Hellenic, and Asiatic territories which were still treated
as clients of Rome. But, however unimportant and subordinate the
individual conflicts may appear, they have collectively a deep
historical significance; and, in particular, the state of things
in Italy at this period only becomes intelligible in the light of
the reaction which the provinces exercised over the mother-country.

Spain

Except in the territories which may be regarded as natural appendages
of Italy--in which, however, the natives were still far from being
completely subdued, and, not greatly to the credit of Rome, Ligurians,
Sardinians, and Corsicans were continually furnishing occasion for
"village triumphs"--the formal sovereignty of Rome at the commencement
of this period was established only in the two Spanish provinces,
which embraced the larger eastern and southern portions of the
peninsula beyond the Pyrenees. We have already(1) attempted to
describe the state of matters in the peninsula. Iberians and Celts,
Phoenicians, Hellenes, and Romans were there confusedly intermingled.