Lacetani in 218 B.C.

Lacetani — Spring 218 BC · A People of the Inland Hills.

The Lacetani — an Iberian people of the rugged inland country behind the Catalan coast, in the broken pre-Pyrenean uplands between the seaward plain and the high mountains. Theirs is a land of fortified hill towns set on commanding heights, of upland tracks threading the valleys, of herders and grain-growers who owe nothing to the Greek ports of the shore or the great powers wrestling over the Iberus. Their chief seat is native Iesso, among the rolling country south of the great range; about it lie the walled enclosures of a people who keep to their own hills. They are kin and neighbour to the other peoples of the north-east — the Ilergetae of the Iberus plain, the Ausetani, the Iacetani of the mountain foot, with whom the sources so often confuse them — and in 218 BC they answer to no outside master, standing apart in the interior while the war of the great powers gathers on the coast and the river below.

While Carthage and Rome reach for the north-eastern corner of Iberia — Hannibal mustering at New Carthage for his march on Italy, and the river Iberus standing as the agreed bound between the two powers — the Lacetani keep to the rough inland country where neither yet holds sway. Theirs is the broken upland behind the seaward plain: the rolling pre-Pyrenean hills about native Iesso, and the higher Solsona country climbing toward the mountains. It is a land that offers little to a passing army and is the harder to subdue for it — fortified towns on their heights, tracks that wind between valleys, a people who reckon with the strength of their neighbours but bow to none. They are an inland folk on the margin of greater events, independent in 218 BC, with the first Roman raids on their country still in the years to come.