Emporion in 218 B.C.

Emporion — Late summer 218 BC · Scipio Lands at the Trading-Place.

Emporion — "the Trading-place" — the great Greek merchant-city on the wave-beaten coast below the eastern foot of the Pyrenees, a colony of Phocaean Massalia and the chief Hellenic emporion of the whole western Iberian trade. It is a dipolis, a double town: the Greek colonists dwell beside the walled enclosure of the native Indigetes, two peoples living side by side behind a shared circuit of walls, each with its own gate and its own coinage, trading and mingling and yet guarding their separate quarters. Through its harbours pass the wine, oil and worked goods of the Greek world inland and the silver, flax and grain of Iberia seaward, and it has long been the loyal friend of both Massalia, its mother, and of Rome. In this very year that friendship makes it the hinge of the war: it is here, on the Emporitan strand, that the Roman Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio disembarks his legions and raises the city into the forward base from which Rome will contest Iberia and sever Hannibal from his Spanish supplies. The little town of Rhoda along the coast is its dependency.

Where the long coast of fine harbours runs north from Tarraco toward the Pyrenees, Emporion holds the gateway between the Greek world and the Iberian peoples of the hinterland. It is the daughter of Phocaean Massalia and the foremost emporion of the western trade — a town grown rich as the meeting-place where Hellenic wine, oil and craft are exchanged for Iberian silver, grain and flax. But Emporion is no mere market this year. With Carthage and Hannibal’s lieutenants holding the country down to the Ebro and Hannibal himself marching on Italy, the friend of Rome and Massalia becomes the door through which Rome strikes back: Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, sent on with the fleet his brother turned over to him, comes to land here with his whole squadron and, from this town, begins the war for Spain — landing along the seaboard, winning over the coast as far as the Ebro, and making the Trading-place the base of all that follows. The quarrel of the two great western powers has broken over the Emporitan quays.