Lusitani

The Lusitani occupied the country between the Douro and the Tagus, most of modern Portugal and western Spain, and gave Rome the hardest and longest guerrilla war it fought in the peninsula. They were a pastoral and raiding society of the western uplands, poor in the settled sense and organised for mobility, and their raids into the rich Roman-held south were the immediate cause of the wars. The decisive episode came in 150 BC, when the Roman governor Servius Galba offered peace and land to Lusitanian bands, persuaded them to disarm and gather in three groups for resettlement, and then had them surrounded and massacred - perhaps nine thousand killed and twenty thousand sold into slavery. He was prosecuted in Rome and acquitted by bribing the jury, which Roman writers themselves record with disgust. One survivor was Viriathus. From 147 BC he led a war of ambush and withdrawal that destroyed several Roman armies, forced a treaty recognising him as a friend of Rome, and held together an alliance no Lusitanian had managed before. Rome ended it in 139 BC by bribing three of his own envoys to murder him in his sleep; when they returned for payment the consul told them Rome did not reward men who killed their commander. Resistance collapsed within two years. Lusitania became a Roman province under Augustus, and Viriathus was later adopted as a national hero by Portugal, which takes its name from a different root entirely. Their language is attested in a handful of inscriptions and is Indo-European but probably not Celtic, which is unusual for the peninsula. Roman writers agreed that Viriathus was never defeated in the field. The province of Lusitania covered rather less than the territory the Lusitani had actually held.

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