The Celtiberi were those brave and powerful people of ancient Spain to whom we have already alluded. At the time of the Carthaginian expulsion from the peninsula the Romans had not conquered the whole of Spain, for the Celtiberians held all the vast interior region, where they were firmly intrenched; and besides these there were yet unknown and unsubjugated peoples in the northwest. Scipio’s rule, though brief, was on the whole salutary, and at this time the Roman soldiery began to look upon Spain as a desirable country to settle in after their terms of service had expired. Many of them married Spanish women, proconsuls were appointed from Rome, cities were built, colonies planted, military roads constructed, and through these means the Latin language gradually took the place of native dialects. In this manner was the Iberian peninsula Romanized—which in those days meant civilized. It became a province of the Roman Empire, and was divided into Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior, or Hither and Farther Spain. Still, Spain yet required prætors who were invested with consular power, and some twenty thousand Roman legionaries, to keep it in order, as the turbulent Celtiberians, intrenched in their mountain fastnesses, were constantly threatening an outbreak. The elder Gracchus, and after him his two more famous sons, served as governors of Hither Spain, and captured more than one hundred Celtiberian towns. They were eminently successful, but in or about 154 the Romans under Mummius suffered a defeat, and many were massacred by the Lusitanians. These defeats were avenged and Roman supremacy restored by a grandson of the great Marcellus Claudius, who had met and checked Hannibal after the disaster of Cannæ, when the Romans lost sixty thousand men. He founded the city of Cordoba as a Roman colony, and it soon became a seat of learning and the home of men eminent in literature and in the arts of peace. Rome was now mistress of the Mediterranean, which from Spain to Syria was “hardly more than a Roman lake.” During the years 147 to 140 B.C. the Lusitanians were in revolt, led by the gallant Viriathus, a simple herdsman, who, having seen his people treacherously massacred, vowed vengeance against the emissaries of Rome. He cut to pieces army after army, and at last penned a famous Roman general and his entire command in a deep defile, and exacted terms by which Lusitanian independence was recognised. For that alone had Viriathus been fighting, and he was content with that; but the treaty was repudiated by the Roman senate, and once more he took the field, only to fall a victim to treachery and assassination.