Laietani in 218 B.C.

Laietani — Spring 218 BC · A Free People of the Iberian Shore.

The Laietani — an Iberian people of the central coastal plain, dwelling along the well-watered littoral and the seaward hills between the river Rubricatum and the foothills of the Pyrenees, north of the great river Iberus. Theirs is a land of small fortified hill-settlements, oppida ringed with rough stone walls in the Iberian manner, set on commanding spurs above terraced fields of vine and grain. They are no kingdom but a people governed by a tribal aristocracy, their scattered communities knit together by kinship, custom and the refuge-strongholds of the heights. They live by the plough and by the sea: their grain and wine pass along the shore-road and the sea-lanes, and they have learned to mint their own Iberian coinage for the traffic that brings Greek wares up from Punic harbours and down from the Greek emporion to the north. In 218 BC they are still their own masters — Carthaginian power is spreading along the coast, and the distant Romans are about to land, but the country of the Laietani is not yet conquered by anyone.

While Hannibal gathers his host in the south and the Romans look to the seas, the Laietani keep to the rhythms of their own coast: the terracing of the hillsides, the tending of vine and grain, the trade of the shore-road and the harbours. They are a free Iberian people, ruled by no king and submitting to no foreign garrison — their oppida watch the lowlands from the spurs, their warriors stand ready to resist encroachment, and their own struck coin passes from hand to hand. But theirs is contested ground. The power of Carthage is consolidating its grip on the peninsula and creeping northward along the coast; beyond the Pyrenees the road runs to Italy, and beyond the sea lies Rome. The country of the Laietani lies squarely in the path that the war between the two great powers will soon take. For this season, though, they remain what they have long been: a settled, prosperous coastal people, masters of their own hills, looking out across a sea grown busy with strangers.