Ilercavones in 218 B.C.

Ilercavones — Spring 218 BC · An Iberian People of the Lower Ebro.

The Ilercavones — also called the Ilergavones — an Iberian people of the lower Ebro, the great river of the north-eastern coast, and of the marsh-and-channel country where it spreads into its delta and meets the sea. Their lands lie along the river’s last reaches and the shore to the south of its mouth, between the Edetani below them and the Cessetani above, a march where the Ebro plain runs down to the salt lagoons and the beaches. They are no kingdom and no confederate league, but a scatter of fortified hill-towns and river communities of Iberian culture — folk who set their walled settlements on the ridges and spurs above the alluvial bottomlands, watch the river-traffic and the coast roads from those heights, and live by the trade of the Ebro and the goods of the sea. In 218 BC they are still their own masters; but the river before them is the very line that Carthage and Rome have sworn to keep, and when the Scipios come ashore in the war’s first year the Ilercavones will be among the first of the northern peoples to come over to Rome.

The Ilercavones hold the most fateful ground in Iberia and do not yet know it. Their country sits on the lower Ebro — the river that the treaty between Carthage and Rome has made the boundary of two ambitions, the line the Punic arms have sworn not to cross in war. South of that line, in the Barcid sphere built up these last years out of New Carthage, the people live as an independent Iberian folk: walled towns on the ridges above the floodplain, fishers and traders of the delta, herders and grain-growers of the river bottoms, bound to no master but their own headmen and the old ties of town to town. They have watched Hannibal gather the peoples of the south and storm the towns of the interior; now they wait on the Ebro to see which way the war will run. When the brothers Scipio land with a Roman fleet and army on this coast in the autumn of the year, the Ilercavones will be among the river-peoples who give themselves up to Rome — the first turning of the north against Carthage.