Vettones in 218 B.C.

Vettones — Spring 218 BC · The People of the Stone Beasts.

The Vettones — a Celtic people of the high western Meseta, herders and horse-breeders of the uplands between the Durius and the Tagus, in the rolling pasture-country that runs from the granite hills about Mirobriga and Bletisama south to the oak-dehesas above the Tagus. They are no kingdom but a scatter of clans and hillfort towns — the castros, walled on their crags and ringed with stone — bound by common speech, common gods and the long transhumant droving of their flocks. Above their pastures and their dead they raise the VERRACOS: the great carved beasts of granite, boars and bulls hewn rough and massive and set to stand watch over grazing-land, water and tomb. Westward and northward lie their kin and rivals the grain-growing Vaccaei of the Douro plain and the fierce Lusitani of the ocean ranges; and only two summers past the Carthaginian came up onto this plateau, storming Vaccaean Helmantica on their very borders. In 218 BC the Vettones remain their own masters, owing fealty to no foreign power.

Far from the wars of the great kings, the Vettones keep to the rhythm of the herd and the season. Theirs is a country of cold uplands and granite outcrops, of oak-pasture and river-meadow, where wealth is counted in cattle, sheep and above all horses, and where the people live not in cities but in castros — hillfort towns walled with stone and guarded, on their approaches, by fields of upright slabs set like teeth against the horseman. They have no king and no single seat; each community holds its own crag and its own grazing, and the bonds between them are those of blood, cult and the great seasonal droving of the flocks between summer hill and winter plain. Over this world stand the verracos, the carved boars and bulls of granite, marking pasture, ford and burial. Their neighbours press close — the Vaccaei farmers north on the Douro, the Lusitani raiders west in the mountains, the Carpetani east on the Tagus — and the Carthaginian war-leader passed not far off in 220 BC; but in 218 the Vettones answer to no outside lord, a free pastoral people on the western roof of Iberia.