Week 2 - Iberia Must be Destroyed

Iberia Must be Destroyed

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Much can be made of any one particular moment in the annals of history. That is, as long as someone is so inclined to look at it with enough time and scrutiny. Any moment can be made out to be the moment with enough effort. The historian can play out a million different scenarios as to how each moment affects every other moment and how changing one can change them all. The pendulum swings this way or that, and an entirely different world is born. It is easy to look at one battle, one leader, or one specific instance and try to ascribe to them more importance than they are truly worth. There, of course, must always be room for a dramatic flair when examining history and it is perfectly natural for there to be an appeal to romanticism which follows perfectly from this style of thinking.

History is not at all like this, and yet, history is precisely this.

There is no telling just how everything impacts everything else and just what the one key element of utmost importance is. It is quite possible that history behaves exactly like we would want it to and that fate and chance and opportunity have conspired to make the exact right outcome occur. It is also possible that luck and accident and inopportune indecision control more than we’ll ever know.

Some enjoy playing the game of “what if?” and wondering what could have happened if not for this or that or “for want of a nail.” Perhaps it is comfort they seek, comfort from a world they hardly understand or perhaps fear. Perhaps it is simple wish fulfillment – the desire to see underdogs win, to see a brighter outcome occur. Or perhaps they are simply wishing that the world had more order, that accidents, epidemics and ignorance didn’t have just as much of an impact as reason, right and might.

Or maybe they themselves understand something more about history and life in general. They see the tides of time and the ebb and flow of chance. Perhaps they see the warnings for the future and the lessons of the past, even if their method is through the imagined and the impossible.

Theirs is the quest for that which is fair. Theirs is the quest for that which is better.

 “Delenda est Iberia!” “Iberia must be destroyed!” That was the battle cry Cato proclaimed during all the speeches he gave to the Roman Senate, but no one ever took his call to arms too seriously. It wasn’t because they didn’t see the threat that he saw. Indeed, Iberia was a problem, a potentially significant problem. But no one else was as reckless as Cato was; no one was willing to endorse a course of action with so much potential for disaster. They saw the problem, they all saw the problem; they were just wise enough to also see there was no immediate fix and a rushed military campaign would prove to be folly.

No one, not the Legionnaires, not the Phalanx, nor the Marauders, the Immortals or Hannibal’s elephants, were going to march into Iberia and make them burn. They had all tried. They had all failed. The Iberians had been under siege for as long as there was recorded history. They knew a thing or two about defending themselves. No one and nothing was going to have an easy go at Iberia. Cato knew that too, but he had his own political agendas to promote and it made for a good speech. So no one took him seriously, perhaps not even Cato himself.

As the stories went, there had been battles for thousands of years with the Iberians. Every culture, every empire, everyone in the known world had come across these men, and they had all failed to push them from Europa. Roma was simply the latest in a long line of empires to fail.

An Iberian wasn’t just a perfect soldier, he was a perfect warrior. It was as though Iberians had been born and bred for this one purpose. But even that didn’t do them justice. The Spartans had been born and bred to become warriors. But they still had to become a warrior. An Iberian simply was. From birth or before, they simply were what they were.

The Iberians were beasts – monstrous amalgamations, half-man, half something entirely different. They were enormous, tall and strong, at least a foot taller than any Roman. Their faces rigid and their features bloated and overgrown. They looked like a nightmare. Their muscles were twice that of a normal man. They were covered in dark, thick hair. They ran faster, moved quicker, and struck harder. They were hardly men at all. They were masterful creatures.

The stories and legends spread across the Empire and were blown to mythical proportions. The people were afraid. The Legions were afraid. The leaders were afraid. Who knew what was true? It could have been legends or stories of the gods – invented myth, made to frighten an enemy before the battle was even waged. How many wars had Iberia won simply by not having to fight them?

Roma didn’t have men to waste trying to find out. Roma had plenty of real and present problems all around them. There were the Northern Berserkers. There were Carthaginians who threatened them at sea. And there were the rumored Seres off somewhere in the Far East. It was said they were as brutish and robust as any Iberian. Roma didn’t have time to fight one war or worry about one enemy; Roma had a world to contend with and was surrounded by constant threat.

After years of struggle and sacrifice, a balance had arisen between Roma and her many enemies. Carthago had been quelled. Persia was at peace. For the moment, the Goth were at bay. There was no reason to start another war.

But that didn’t stop some from trying.

Gaius would later become one of the most prominent leaders in all history, but even he failed to make any inroads into the Iberian Peninsula. Gaius had to settle upon an uneasy balance of power and turned his attentions to the East. Just as the legend Iberia grew, so too did the stories about Scythae and the Seres warriors from the East. It seemed as if Roma would soon enough be surrounded and time was better spent preparing for truces and a strongly defended Limes Arabicus, as opposed to throwing away countless lives on a war that no one could win.

What no Roman at the time realized was what a missed opportunity it really was. Yes, the Iberians were taller and stronger and daunting warriors on the field of individual battle. One-on-one, an Iberian could break a Roman. But what no one knew was just how thin their numbers had really become. Roma had twice the population and was perhaps closer to three times in size in reality. Roma had training, education and military strategy. All they were lacking was the information and the will for prolonged battle.

They gave the Iberians the worst thing possible – time.

The Pyrenees Mountains had made an excellent defense against their eastern aggressors for centuries, perhaps for millennia. Now the Iberians had time to improve that defense and even take things one step further. They launched one of the greatest feats in ancient civic engineering and set out to build a defensive wall that ran along the length of the Pyrenees.

There were rumors of a similar wall on the other side of the world, but at the time Iberia was increasingly isolated and it is unlikely that they would have heard of such a building project. More likely, they were simply wise enough and talented enough builders to appreciate the benefits of a proper defense.

What Roma thought they needed was a way to contain each threat. So while the Romans prepared for a battle that might not come, the Iberians were afforded the time to ensure that if and when they turned their attentions again to the west, that they would indeed be ready to defend their homeland.

Roma, for their part, took an extremely passive approach to counteracting their Iberian dilemma. Their solution consisted of sending the northern barbarians towards the west, and promising them any of the lands in Iberia they could take, if only they agreed to leave Roma alone. It was a poor trick, but it worked at first, using the barbarians to try and force them into fighting Roma’s war for them.

In that way it did take care of two potential enemies, and kept them both busy and weak. But at the same time it make the Iberians constantly aware of the threats from the east and the fact that Roma was their enemy. The Iberians were in a constant state of military awareness. Becoming more aware of their nation’s weaknesses, and watching the growing strength of their enemies, the Iberians realized they must pursue several new tactics.  They needed new and powerful solutions to counteract the growth of power from central Roma.

They were able to strengthen their defenses, and to prepare themselves against a state of constant threat. They realized their population was still relatively small and they would always be in danger of being run off the continent and pushed into the ocean. So they began an aggressive plan and decided to spread – North to Britannia, South to North Africa, and East into Gaul in order to make their own buffer states between them and Roma.

They waged war with the Carthaginians and Numidians. They waged war with the Goth and the Gauls. They waged war with the Celts and conquered Britannia. When they learned of islands and great lands to the north and far northwest they headed there as well. They created colonies. They made an empire. They ensured that they couldn’t be eradicated simply by defeating them in one place and one place only.

For thousands of years they had fought in Europa and had been pushed back, further back, by the constant tide of multiplying aggressors. Their numbers diminished and they were forced towards their own ocean border. For another thousand years they held off the empires to their east. Then, they had finally had enough of simply defending themselves. Iberia had survived and now it was fighting back and growing for the first time in ages.

There were stories about the far west, across the great sea, past the Pillars of Atlas and beyond. There were legendary foreign lands and lost civilizations. Iberia decided they would find out if that was true, and they headed west. They would get there first, and it would be theirs, all theirs. Roma might try to follow, but it would be difficult. Iberia controlled the outlets to the oceans. They controlled Gibraltar and Tingis and the Mons Calpe and the ability to close off the mouth of the Mediterranean from the great Sea of Atlas.

When the Iberians were done with their conquests, they grew bored and decided to return to the lands that had once tried to eradicate them. They were coming back, this time in full force. They had had enough of the new world. They wanted their ancestral homes again. They had scores to settle.

Perhaps Cato had simply been using a rhetorical device in his speeches, or perhaps Cato knew more than even Cato knew that he knew. The world had been warned. “Iberia must be destroyed!” The world had not listened. The world had no idea just how right Cato had been. The world was going to find out.