Berones in 218 B.C.

Berones — Spring 218 BC · A Celtic People of the Upper Ebro.

The Berones — a small Celtic people of the upper Ebro, holding the fertile terraces of the river-country that later ages will call the Rioja. They are reckoned of Celtic stock, come down into Iberia with the old Celtic migrations and settled where the great river runs broad and easy between hills, among the vine-and-grain lands of its banks. Around them press their neighbours: the Vardulli and Vascones of the mountains to the north, the Autrigones to the west, and the warlike Celtiberi of the highlands to the south, with whom they share much of their tongue and temper. Their chief place is native Vareia, a town set on the Ebro at a crossing of the river, the gathering-point of their farming country. In 218 BC they are their own masters — a quiet people of the terraces, untouched as yet by the Punic war gathering far to the east, and far indeed from the reach of Rome.

While Carthage and Rome drift toward war over the lands by the lower Ebro, the upper river runs on untroubled through the country of the Berones. Theirs is a land of plenty by the standards of the interior: broad terraces of vine and grain along the great river, watered by the streams that come down from the northern mountains, and the easy bottomlands that make the upper Ebro a corridor between the Celtiberian highlands and the sea. They are a Celtic island in a mixed country — kin in speech and custom to the Celtiberi who border them on the south, yet set apart, neighbours to the un-Celtic Vascones and the loose hill-confederacies of the north. No king rules them; they keep to their towns and farms under their own people, and in 218 BC the great quarrel of the Mediterranean has not yet come to their valley.