Indigetes in 218 B.C.

Indigetes — Spring 218 BC · An Iberian People by the Greek Port.

The Indigetes — the Indiketes — are the Iberian people of the far north-eastern corner of the peninsula, the well-watered coastland below the eastern foot of the Pyrenees that men will one day call the Empordà. Theirs is an Iberian-culture people of fortified hill-towns and coastal oppida, ploughmen and herders of a fertile littoral, but above all a people made by the sea: for in their land, set upon the shore, stands Emporion, the great Greek "trading-place" of Phocaean-Massaliote stock, and beside it lies their own chief town, Indika. Through Emporion’s harbour the wine, oil and worked goods of the Hellenic world pass inland, and Iberian silver, grain and slaves flow seaward, and the Indigetes have grown half-Greek in their manners by the long mingling. In 218 BC they are independent, an Iberian people of their own laws, neither subject to Carthage beyond the Ebro nor yet to Rome — but it is here, in their corner of the world, that the war for Iberia is about to break: at Emporion in this very year Gnaeus Scipio will land his legions, and from that beachhead in the land of the Indigetes the Roman conquest of the peninsula begins.

While Hannibal marches for Italy and his lieutenants hold Iberia down to the Ebro, the far north-eastern corner of the peninsula keeps to its own life — the life of an Iberian people of the coast, tilling the plain of the Empordà between the mountains and the sea, and trading at the Greek quays of Emporion. The Indigetes are not a kingdom but a people of towns: walled oppida on the hills, the double city by the shore where Greek colonists and native Iberians dwell wall against wall, and the small harbours of a coast long open to Massaliote and Phokaian ships. Yet this quiet corner is about to become the hinge of the western war. Beyond the Ebro lies the Carthaginian sphere; north over the passes lies Gaul, through which Hannibal has already gone; and into the very land of the Indigetes, at Emporion, a Roman fleet is coming. When Gnaeus Scipio steps ashore here this year, the conquest of all Iberia will have its beginning on Indiketan ground.