Turduli Oppidani in 218 B.C.

Turduli Oppidani — Spring 218 BC · The Town-Dwellers of the West.

The Turduli Oppidani — "the town-dwelling Turduli" — a small, urbane people of Iberian stock planted far to the west, in the ocean-facing country of the lower Tagus, about the native hill-town of Collippo. They are an offshoot of the cultured southern Turdetani of the great river of the silver-south, carried west and settled among the warlike herding peoples of the Atlantic edge — the Celtici of the south-west and, up about the Tagus, the cattle-driving Vettones. Where their wild neighbours live by the spear and the herd, the Turduli Oppidani keep to their towns and their tilled fields, a literate, trading folk who carry the manners of the lettered south into the rough ocean corner of Iberia. In 218 BC they answer to no king and no foreign power: a free people of farmers and townsmen, distinct in tongue and custom from the Lusitanian tribes about them.

Far from the silver-rich valleys of their southern kin, the Turduli Oppidani hold a strip of the Atlantic west: the country of the lower Tagus and the hills behind it, about the town of Collippo. They are reckoned a branch of the Turdetani — the most cultured of all the Iberians, who keep written records, laws and ancient verse — and they bring that town-bred temper into a land of herders and raiders. Their neighbours are the Celtici of the south-western ocean corner, emigrant kin of the Celtiberians, and the horse- and cattle-breeding Vettones up along the Tagus; beyond them stretch the warlike Lusitanian peoples of the mountains. Among such folk the Turduli Oppidani are the men of the walled town and the ploughed field — living by grain, oil, cattle and trade rather than by the spear — and in 218 they stand free, owing allegiance to no power, Punic or other, that has reached this far into the west.