Ausetani in 218 B.C.

Ausetani — Winter 218/217 BC · An Iberian People of the Inland Plain.

The Ausetani — an Iberian people of the high inland plain in the north-east of the peninsula, dwelling in the open country about their chief town of Ausa where the streams gather before they break down toward the sea. Theirs is a land of walled hill-towns and grain-fields ringed by mountains, set between the Ilergetes of the Ebro plain to the west, the coastal Indigetes to the east, the Lacetani to the south, and the half-wild peoples of the Pyrenean foothills to the north. Like their Iberian neighbours they live by no single king but by the council of each town, raise the short curved falcata and the caetra shield, and strike their own silver coin in the Iberian script. In 218 BC they are their own masters, drawn loosely into the Carthaginian sphere that Hannibal’s house has spread across Iberia; but when Gnaeus Scipio lands and pushes inland that first winter of the war, he marches against the Ausetani and brings them to terms — the opening of a struggle for the interior that will outlast the generation now living.

While Hannibal drives over the Alps into Italy, the war he left behind opens on his own Iberian ground. His brother Hasdrubal holds the south for Carthage; against him the Romans have landed at Emporion under Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, who pushes up the coast and then inland to break the native peoples loosely bound to the Punic cause. The Ausetani sit squarely in his path — an inland people of the plain, allies of the Carthaginians, holding strong walled towns behind their ring of hills. In the first winter Scipio comes against them and lays siege to their chief town; their neighbours the Lacetani, stealing up by night to relieve them, are cut to pieces in an ambush, and the Ausetani, blockaded in the deep snow until their leader Amusicus flees to Hasdrubal, at last surrender for twenty talents of silver. So a free Iberian people is drawn, town by town, into the great war between Carthage and Rome — the first reckoning of a conquest of the interior still far from finished.