Sardinian Natives in 218 B.C.

Sardinian Natives — Spring 218 BC · The Unconquered Highlands.

The indigenous peoples of the mountainous interior of Sardinia — the Ilienses (whom the Greeks called Iolaei) and the Balari — heirs of the great Nuragic civilization that raised the thousands of nuraghi, the drystone towers that still crown the island’s hills. They are a people of stone strongholds, of shepherds and warriors, dwelling among crags and high pastures behind the lowlands. The coasts and plains have passed through many hands — Phoenician traders, then Carthage, and since 237 BC Rome, which seized the island in the years of the Mercenary War — but the wild highland tribes have never been mastered. From their towers they raid down upon the settled country and withdraw again into the mountains, an unconquered nation of the interior defying the newest lord of the shore.

Rome wrested Sardinia from Carthage nineteen years ago, in 237 BC, in the bitter aftermath of the Mercenary War, and her praetors now sit in the coastal towns and gather the grain of the lowland plains. But the conquest stops where the mountains begin. The highland peoples of the interior — the Ilienses and the Balari — owe no obedience to any master of the shore; they keep their own herds, their own chiefs, and the ancestral towers of stone from which their forebears watched earlier invaders come and go. The same crags that once defied Carthage now defy Rome: the tribesmen descend to raid the settled country and melt back into the heights, and no army has yet followed them home. On the eve of Hannibal’s march on Italy, the interior of the island remains a world apart — pastoral, fortified, and free.