The reign of Augustus, and especially his two years' sojourn in Spain (26 and 25 B.C.) brought quiet to the peninsula, and thereafter no part of the Empire enjoyed such unbroken peace. Of all lands outside of Italy, with the possible exception of Provincia, Spain became most completely Roman in its institutions, and most unequivocally Latin in its culture. It was the most populous of the European provinces;[1] and no other held so many Roman citizens, or so many cities early endowed with Roman civic rights.[2] The great Augustan literature was the work of natives of Italy.[3] But in the Silver Age that followed, many of the chief Latin authors—the elder and younger Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian—were Spaniards. They were unquestioned representatives of Latin literature, with no provincial twang in their writings. Then, of Rome's emperors, Trajan was born in Spain, and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius were of Spanish blood.
Perhaps even more completely Latinized was Narbonensis, commonly called Provincia. Its official name was drawn from the ancient town of Narbo (Narbonne), which in 118 B.C. was refounded as a Roman colony in partial accomplishment of the plans of Caius Gracchus. The boundaries of this colony touched those of the Greek city-state Massilia (Marseilles), whose rights were respected until it sided against Caesar in the Civil War. Save for the Massilian territory, which it later included, Provincia stretched from the eastern Pyrenees by the way of Nemausus (Nîmes) and the Arelate (Arles) north-easterly through the Rhone Valley, taking in Vienne and Valence in the country of the Allobroges, and then onward to the edge of Lake Geneva; thence southerly along the Maritime Alps to the sea. Many of its towns owed their prosperity to Caesar. In his time the country west of the Rhone was already half Latin, and was filling
- ↑ See Beloch, Bevölkerung der griechisch-romischen Welt, p. 507 (Leipzig, 1886).
- ↑ Mommsen says that in Augustus's time fifty Spanish cities had the full privileges of Roman citizenship and fifty others the rights of Italian towns (Roman Provinces, i. 75, Eng. trans.). But this seems a mistake; as the enumeration of Beloch, Bevölkerung, etc., p. 330, gives fifty in all, following the account of Pliny.
- ↑ Cicero, Pro Archia, 10, speaks slightingly of poets born at Cordova, but, later, Latro of Cordova was Ovid's teacher.
