Vascones in 218 B.C.

Vascones — Spring 218 BC · A People of the Western Passes.

The Vascones — the people of the western Pyrenees and the middle Ebro, an ancient nation older than any kingdom that borders them. They hold the upland country where the great mountain wall comes down to the river-plain: a land of steep wooded valleys, fortified hill-towns and the grain-fields of the Iberus, astride the passes by which men cross between Iberia and Gaul. They are no Iberian and no Celt, but a breed apart, speaking a tongue like nothing their neighbours speak — neither the Iberian of the coast nor the Celtic of the meseta, a language unto itself. In 218 BC they answer to no foreign master: not to Carthage, whose armies move far to the south below the Iberus, nor to any king. They are a people of free valleys, each town its own master, bound together by blood and tongue and the keeping of the high roads through the mountains.

While Carthage gathers Iberia south of the Iberus and Rome stirs across the sea, the Vascones keep their own ancient country and their own ancient tongue, untouched by either. Their land is the hinge of the north-west: the middle Ebro on the south, the foothills and high passes of the Pyrenees on the north, the road between the two seas of mountains and the routes that cross into Aquitania beyond. Theirs is not a realm but a weave of free valleys — herdsmen and tillers in the highlands, grain-growers on the river plain, each fortified town governing itself, the whole held together by kinship and a speech no neighbour shares. They war on foot and lightly, scorning heavy armour, and the very ruggedness of their hills is their wall. No conqueror has yet come up into the passes; in 218 BC the Vascones are simply, and entirely, their own.