ABSTRACT
In Spain the natives must be driven back to render the Roman occupation safe; having wrested the Peninsula from Carthage, the Romans no more thought of giving it back to the natives than the Allies after the First World War thought of letting German colonial possessions revert to a native administration. The Romans then addressed themselves to the problem of the tribes on either side of Cisalpine Gaul: the Ligurians and the Istri. The Ligurians who dwelt in the Apennines from the Arno to Savoy were a hardier race than the Gauls of the northern plain. Scipio Africanus had conquered Spain, not as a regular magistrate, but merely as a privatus on whom the Roman people had conferred proconsular Imperium. L. Licinius Lucullus then withdrew to Further Spain to help the equally unscrupulous Galba against the Lusitanians. But if Roman ambassadors saw hoards of munitions in Carthage, these were being prepared to settle accounts with Masinissa, not with Rome.
