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 famine.
Lira, the heroine, answers her ardent lover Mirando in high-flown
Spanish phrase, which, when summed up in plain English prose, means
that she cannot listen to his wooing, because she is so hungry--which,
in view of the fact that she has not tasted food for weeks, seems to
us not surprising!
Sertorius, whose story is told by Plutarch, affords another
picturesque subject for Corneille in one of his most famous tragedies.
This Roman was an adherent of Marius in the long struggle with Sylla,
and while upholding his cause in Spain he won to his side the people
of Lusitania (Portugal), who made him their ruler, and helped him to
fight the great army of the opposing Roman faction, part of which was
led by Pompey.
Mithridates, in Asia Minor, was also in conflict with Sylla, and sent
an embassy to Sertorius which led to a league between the two for
mutual aid, and for the defense of the cause of Marius. But senators
of his own party became jealous of the great elevation of Sertorius,
and conspired to assassinate him at a feast to which he was invited.
So ended (72 B.C.) one of the most picturesque characters and
interesting episodes in the difficult march of barbarous Spain toward
enlightenment and civilization.
Sertorius seems to have been a great administrator as well as fighter,
and must also be counted one of the civilizers of Spain. He founded a
school at Osca,--now Huesca,--where he had Roman and Greek masters for
the Spanish youth. And it is interesting to learn that there is
to-day at that city a university which bears the title "University of
Sertorius."
But it is not the valor nor the sagacity of Sertorius which made him
the favorite of poets; but the story of the White Hind, which he made
to serve him so ingeniously in establishing his authority with the
Lusitanians.
A milk-white fawn, on account of its rarity, was given him by
a peasant. He tamed her, and she became his constant companion,
unaffrighted even in the tumult of battle. He saw that the people
began to invest the little animal with supernatural qualities; so,
finally, he confided to them that she was sent to him by the Goddess
Diana, who spoke to him through her, and revealed important secrets.
Such is the story which Corneille and writers in other lands have
found so fascinating, and which an English author has made the subject
of his poem "The White Hind of Sertorius."
Another Roman civil war, more pregnant of great results, was to be
fought out in Spain. Julius Caesar's conspiracy against the Roman
Republic, and his desperate fight with Pompey for the dictatorship,
long drenched Spanish soil with blood, and had its final culmination
(after Pompey's tragic death in Egypt) in Caesar's victory over
Pompey's sons at Munda, in Spain, 45 B.C.
With this event, the military triumphs and the intrigues of Caesar
had accomplished his purpose. He was declared _Imperator_, perpetual
Dictator of Rome, and religious sacrifices were decreed to him as if
he were a god. Unconscious of the chasm which was yawning at his feet
he haughtily accepted the honors and adulation of men who were at that
very moment conspiring for his death. On the fatal "Ides of March"
(44 B.C.) he was stricken in the Senate Chamber by the hands of his
friends, and the great Caesar lay dead at the feet of Pompey's statue.
The world had reached a supreme crisis in its existence. Two
events--the most momentous it has ever known--were at hand: the birth
of a Roman Empire, which was to perish in a few centuries, after a
life of amazing splendor; and the birth of a spiritual kingdom, which
would never die!
Caesar's nephew, Octavius Augustus, by gradual approaches reached
the goal toward which no doubt his greater uncle was moving. After
defeating Brutus and Cassius at Philippi (42 B.C.) and then after
destroying his only competitor, Antony, at Actium (31 B.C.) he assumed
the imperial purple under the name of Augustus. The title sounded
harmless, but its wearer had founded the "Roman Empire."
At last there was peace. Spain was pacified, and only here and there
did she struggle in the grasp of the Romans. Augustus, to make sure of
the permanence of this pacification, himself went to the Peninsula.
He built cities in the plains, where he compelled the stubborn
mountaineers to reside, and established military colonies in the
places they had occupied.
Saragossa was one of these cities in the plains, and its name was
"Caesar Augusta," and many others have wandered quite as far from their
original names, which may, however, still be traced.
It is said that "the annals of the happy are brief." Let us hope
that poor Spain, so long harried by fate, was happy in the next four
hundred years, for her story can be briefly told. She seemed to have
settled into a state of eternal peace. It was a period not of external
events, but of a process--an internal process of assimilation. Spain,
in every department of its life, was becoming Latinized.
A people of rare intellectual activity had been united to the life
of Rome at the moment of her greatest intellectual elevation. Was
it strange that no Roman province ever produced so long a list of
historians, poets, philosophers, as did Southern Spain after the
Augustan conquest? When we read the list of great Roman authors who
were born in Spain--the three Senecas, one of whom, the author and
wit, opened his veins at the command of Nero (65 A.D.), and another,
the Gallio of the book of Acts; also Lucan, Martial, and Quintilian,
when we read these names native to Spain, it seems as if the source
of inspiration had removed from the banks of the Tiber to the banks of
the Guadalquivir.
Nowhere can the student of Roman antiquities find a richer field
than in Spain. And not only that, there is to-day in the manners and
customs, and in the habits of the peasantry, a pervading atmosphere of
the classic land which adopted them, which all that has occurred since
has been powerless to efface, while the language of Spain is Latin
to its core. Nor is this strange when we reflect that they were under
this powerful influence for a period as long as from Christopher
Columbus to the Spanish-American War!