in history, not as _Iberia_, nor yet _Hispania_; but _Spain_,
and its people as _Spaniards_.

At the end of the third Punic war (149-146 B.C.), the ruin of the
Carthaginians was complete. Hannibal had died a fugitive and a
suicide. His nation had not a single ship upon the seas, nor a foot
of territory upon the earth, and the great city of Carthage was plowed
and sowed with salt. Rome had been used by Fate to fulfill her stern
decree--"_Delenda est Carthago_."

It was really only a limited portion of the Peninsula; a fringe
of provinces upon the south and east coast, which had been under
Carthaginian and now acknowledged Roman dominion. Beyond these the
Keltiberian tribes in the center formed a sort of confederation, and
consented to certain alliances with the Romans; while beyond them,
intrenched in their own impregnable mountain fastnesses, were brave,
warlike, independent tribes, which had never known anything but
freedom, whose names even, Rome had not yet heard. The stern virtue
and nobility of Scipio proved a delusive promise. Rome had not an easy
task, and other and brutal methods were to be employed in subduing
stubborn tribes and making of the whole a Latin nation. In one of
the defiles of the Pyrenees there may now be seen the ruins of
fortifications built by Cato the Elder, not long after Scipio, which
show how early those free people in the north were made to feel the
iron heel of the master and to learn their lesson of submission.

The century which followed Scipio's conquest was one of dire
experience for Spain. A Roman army was trampling out every vestige of
freedom in provinces which had known nothing else; and more than that,
Roman diplomacy was making of their new possession a fighting ground
for the civil war which was then raging at Rome; and partisans of
Marius and of Sylla were using and slaughtering the native tribes in
their own desperate struggle. Roman rule was arrogant and oppressive,
Roman governors cruel, arbitrary, and rapacious, and the boasted
"Roman virtue" seemed to have been left in Rome, when treaties were
made only to be violated at pleasure.

CHAPTER IV.

As nature delights in adorning the crevices of crumbling ruins with
mosses and graceful lichens, so literature has busied itself with
these historic ruins; and Cervantes has made the siege of Numantia
(134 B.C.)--more terrible even than that of Saguntum--the subject of a
poem, in which he depicts the horrors of the fa