Hispania

In the three-way split, at least in its initial format, Antony will take the Cisalpine Gaul he so covets.

Lepidus is thrown southern Gaul and Hispania.

Octavian will get North Africa, in addition to overseeing things on the home front.

It's the foundation of what is known as the Second Triumvirate.

Over the previous century, the Roman Republic had experienced a very paradoxical set of events.

On the one hand, the Republic had expanded at breathtaking speed, conquering huge swathes of territory across the eastern Mediterranean and north into Gaul, while also solidifying its control over regions such as the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa.

But this rampant growth was matched by a speedy breakdown of the Republic's politics, as numerous Roman generals effectively became too powerful for the institutions of the Republic to control.

Several civil wars had occurred as rival generals and politicians sought preeminence at Rome.

In two AD, one of the most significant figures in the line of succession died.

This was Lucius, the second son of Julia and Marcus Agrippa.

That year, Lucius had been appointed by Augustus to undertake a military command suppressing a local revolt in Hispania.

On his way to Iberia, he took ill in Southern Gaul and died within days.

So, as we discussed in past episodes...

After the Second Punic War, Carthage is completely expelled from Hispania and essentially left to a mix of Roman control and local native rule.

The Romans quickly realized that the peninsula was an economic goldmine and determined to subdue the entire peninsula and exploit its wealth of gold and silver.

The natives, as you would imagine, did not likely consent to Roman rule, so they fought back.

murdered and was avenged and his avengers all fought each other, we all know one man was left standing, Octavian, known to us today as Augustus.

With the Civil War settled, Augustus determined to settle the rest of the empire.

He prosecuted a brutal bloody Tenia war against the Cantabria and Asturias, who were the last two independent Celtic tribes in Hispania, essentially sent 50,000 Roman soldiers to completely subjugate these tribes.

When the fighting was through, the Romans either enslaved or executed most fighting men age of the tribes and resettled the survivors from their mountain forts into valleys.

That turbulence set the stage for Rome's final retreat.

After the loss of Britain, Rome tried to keep its influence elsewhere, especially in Gaul and Hispania.

Honorius sent an army under Sarus, and then a commander named Gerontius raised a revolt in 409.

The civil war fractured authority further and left local forces adrift.

One of them has a carnox, which is the sort of dragon-like war trumpet associated with Celtic and Gallic peoples.

And so they've been variously interpreted as Gallia and Hispania or potentially Dalmatia.

However we choose to interpret them, I think thinking about them as provinces that Augustus has pacified and brought to peace is the way to think about this.

So surrounding the central scene, we have the heavenly bodies, solar movement, Mother Earth, the support of Apollo and Diana linking into the Lude secularis, and we have the provinces that Augustus has brought to peace.

She will find it hard to say no a second time.

For in a follow-up mission to crush the last pockets of resistance, Caesar must now venture to Spain, Hispania.

There, Pompey's two sons, Gnaeus and Sextus, have holed up, hoping to raise an army to retake Rome.

This time, the 16-year-old Octavian gets permission.

They do so at a frightening pace.

According to Suetonius, they reach the Spanish border in just 24 days.

The Hispania campaign is notable for one of Caesar's most savage victories, the Battle of Munda, fought in modern-day Andalusia.

But Octavian will be nowhere near the action.

Carthage was a Phoenician colony that had been founded on the northeastern coast of what is now Tunisia by settlers from Tyre in the Levant back in the 9th century BC.

It subsequently emerged as one of the great trading and naval powers of the western Mediterranean securing control over large parts of North Africa, southern Hispania and the Balearic Islands in the 6th, 5th and 4th centuries BC.

It had also set its sights on conquering wealthy Sicily.

The Carthaginians had succeeded in doing so to some extent, claiming the western half of the island in the 4th century BC, but Syracuse, particularly during the long reign of Agathocles, had offered strong resistance to the Carthaginians and remained the pre-eminent power in the west of the island.

Diodorus claims that while he was in Egypt, Archimedes invented a device for drawing water out of rivers and other bodies of water now commonly known as the Archimedes screw.

The device consists of a spiral thread wrapped around a pole, which when inserted into a tube, allows the user to lift water by turning a handle.

According to Diodorus, The Archimedes screw was used in silver mines in Hispania, the ancient name for Spain, to remove water from underground streams to the surface to create a dry environment and facilitate mining operations.

A version of the device continues to be used in the Nile Delta to this day for irrigation purposes.

Um, the, the Romans directed, um, all kinds of Visigothic groups, the Suebis, the, um...

And brought them in as foederati to, to govern Hispania, right? Um, and also to get them out of the areas where they were causing trouble.

Um, so by kind of the, the collapse of, um, you know, the Western Roman Empire, um, there, there were, uh, there was a Suebian r- region, there was the Basque region in the north, there was a big Visigothic region that, uh, there was a huge sweep of, like, the central part of the country from east, uh, from west to east.

And then down in the southern areas, which was, like, Cadiz and Malaga and Cartagena and out into the, um, Balearic Islands, um, that remained, um, part of the east...