but the Spanish freedman of Augustus, Gaius Julius Hyginus, had been
made the chief keeper of the Palatine Library, and Ballus, another
Spaniard, had reached the consulship, and had been accorded the honour
of a public triumph. Hadrian, again, was a Spaniard, and Marcus Aurelius
a son of Córdoba. No wonder that Spain is proud to remember that, of the
"eighty perfect golden years" which Gibbon declares to have been the
happiest epoch in mankind's history, no less than sixty were passed
beneath the sceptre of her Cæsars.

The conquered had become conquerors; the intermarriage of Roman soldiers
and settlers with Spanish women modified the original race; the Iberians
invaded the politics and the literature of their conquerors. St.
Augustine mourned the _odiosa cantio_ of Spanish children learning
Latin, but the language of Rome itself was altered by its Iberian
emperors and literati; the races, in fact, amalgamated, and the Spaniard
of to-day, to those who know him well, bears a strange resemblance to
the Roman citizens with whom the letters of the Younger Pliny so
charmingly make us familiar. The dismemberment of the Roman Empire left
Spain exposed to the inroads of the Northern barbarians, and led
indirectly to the subsequent Moorish inrush; for the Jews, harassed by a
severe penal code, hailed the Arabs as a kindred race; and with their
slaves made common cause with the conquering hordes.

The Goths seem to have been little more than armed settlers in the
country. Marriage between them and the Iberians was forbidden by their
laws, and the traces of their occupation are singularly few: not a
single inscription or book of Gothic origin remains, and it seems
doubtful if any trace of the language can be found in Castilian or any
of its dialects. It is strange, if this be true, that there should be so
strong a belief in the influence of Gothic blood in the race.