Cessetani in 218 B.C.

Cessetani — Autumn 218 BC · The First Battlefield in Iberia.

The Cessetani — also called Cossetani — an Iberian people of the north-east coast, settled about their native town of Kissa (Cissis) in the rich, sea-facing plain that lies behind the lower Ebro shore. They are a people of the Iberian fashion: walled hill-towns of dressed stone, painted pottery turned on the wheel, the curved falcata at the warrior’s side, and a script of their own scratched on lead and stone. Their country is among the kindest in Iberia — a warm coastal lowland of grain, vines and olives, opening onto fine anchorages — and it sits squarely on the seam where the two great powers now meet, just south of the Iber that the treaty of 226 BC fixed as the bound between Carthaginian arms and the Roman sphere. In the autumn of this very year their land becomes the first battlefield of the war in Iberia: under the walls of their own Kissa, Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio overthrows the Carthaginian general Hanno, and the whole baggage of Hannibal’s army marching on Italy falls into Roman hands.

For years the Cessetani have lived on the very edge of the Carthaginian advance — their country lies just south of the Iber, the river that the treaty of 226 BC set as the limit of Punic arms, and so on the threshold between the two worlds now closing for war. This year the war finds them. Hannibal has marched north over the Pyrenees toward Italy, leaving the general Hanno to hold the country between the mountains and the Iber. Then, late in the season, a Roman fleet stands in to the coast at Emporion to the north: Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, brother of the consul, lands his army, wins over the seaboard towns, gathers Iberian allies, and pushes inland. Hanno entrenches to bar him under the walls of the Cessetani’s own town of Kissa — and there, on their farmland, is fought the opening battle of the long struggle for Iberia.