The Numantine War — Scipio Aemilianus and the Last Spanish Holdout
A Celtiberian town of some 8,000 people held out against Rome for twenty years and ended by burning itself. Numantia sat on a hill above the Douro in what is now Soria, and the war around it is the last phase of a Roman conquest of Spain that had been running since 218 BC. The Romans lost repeatedly and badly. In 137 BC the consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus was surrounded with some 20,000 men and negotiated a treaty to get them out, which the senate then repudiated — and, on the argument that a broken oath belongs to the man who swore it, sent Mancinus back to Numantia naked and in chains to be handed over. The Numantines declined to accept him and left him standing outside the walls all day. The war became so unpopular that Rome had difficulty raising troops for it. Scipio Aemilianus, who had destroyed Carthage, was given the command in 134 BC and restored an army that the sources describe as full of camp followers, prostitutes and soothsayers. He then refused to fight at all. He built a wall of some nine kilometres around the town with seven camps, a boom across the river, and towers with catapults, and starved it for eight months. The survivors killed each other and fired the town rather than be enslaved. Some fifty were kept for the triumph. The Spanish national memory of it dates from the sixteenth century, and Cervantes wrote a play about it. The war also gave the Roman political system a shock it did not absorb. Tiberius Gracchus served as quaestor with Mancinus, negotiated the treaty the senate repudiated, and drew from it a view of the senate's honesty that shaped his tribunate five years later.
- Year: 143 BCE
- Category: Military
