SAGUNTUS or SAGUNTUM (both forms are supported by authority), was situated to the north of Valentia. It is well-known that this place was the occasion of the second Punic war, and Polybius in speaking of it makes a beautiful and correct observation respecting the difference between the immediate occasion and the cause of a war. Saguntum was the occasion, but certainly not the cause of the war. It is very singular that not only Appian, whose geographical ignorance of Spain surpasses everything, but even Roman authors almost universally assume Saguntum to have been situated on the left side of the Ebro; this, however, is a mistake, for it was situated on its right side, and at a considerable distance from it to the south. According to one tradition, it was a colony of Ardea, that is, a Tyrrhenian settlement and it is very probable that there may have been a Tyrrhenian admixture; but according to others it was an Achaean colony of Zacynthos: the resemblance of the name was too tempting not to suggest the derivation. The Tyrrhenians are often called Achivi, and as Zacynthos was Achivan, both things were mixed together in this manner. It is much more credible that Saguntum was a colony of Ardea, founded at a time when the Ardeatans were great and powerful. Taraco, on the opposite side of the river, is likewise said to have been a Tyrrhenian town. But admitting that the Saguntines were originally Tyrrhenians, they certainly, in the course of time, became complete Spaniards, as many other colonists identified themselves with the natives; and the Saguntines, against whom Hannibal fought, were Spaniards. It would lead too far here to speak of the fate of Saguntum, and of the uncritical treatment of its history by Livy, and his strange misconceptions. Livy, in this part of his work, probably followed Caelius Antipater, and thereby spoiled the beginning of his third decad, which is otherwise so excellent: his account of Saguntum is a childish exaggeration, and well suited to a rhetorician like Caelius. Saguntum was restored by the Romans, and remained a considerable town under the empire; large ruins of an amphitheatre still exist near Murviedro.