Comparative Resistance in Iberia: the Turdetanians and the Lusitanians

As the Roman Empire spread through Western Europe at the end of the third century B.C.E., each new province presented a panoply of indigenous peoples. Naturally, such diverse groups of people had diverse responses to Roman rule. In the case of the Iberian Peninsula, there were possibly hundreds of pre-Roman tribes, and two in particular are the focus of this study: the Turdetanians and the Lusitanians. This paper evaluates the sources we have about each tribe, what we know about them before Roman presence in Iberia, how they each reacted to Roman hegemony, and finally why the Turdetanians and the Lusitanians reacted differently. I will show that a number of factors contributed to Lusitanian and Turdetanian responses to Roman rule, including cultural history, geographic situation, and economic motivation. PROBLEMS OF STUDY The foremost challenge of this study is the scarcity of primary sources. No written or oral histories from the pre-Roman Iberian Peninsula survive. The Greco-Roman tradition is our only source of literary evidence, but these historians can only offer the Greek and Roman perceptions of foreign cultures. For the purposes of this investigation, Strabo’s Geography proved an invaluable resource. Strabo, a Roman citizen of Greek descent dealing in philosophy, geograph