If preparation was anywhere made by the republic for the great all-significant work of the imperial period--the Romanising of the West--it was in Spain. Peaceful intercourse carried forward what the sword had begun; Roman silver money was paramount in Spain long before it circulated elsewhere outside of Italy; and the mines, the culture of the vine and olive, and the relations of traffic produced a constant influx of Italian elements to the coast, particularly in the south-west. New Carthage, the creation of the Barcides, and from its origin down to the Augustan age the capital of the Hither province and the first trading port of Spain, embraced already in the seventh century a numerous Roman population; Carteia, opposite to the present Gibraltar, founded a generation before the age of the Gracchi, was the first transmarine civic community with a population of Roman origin (iii. 4) {iii. 4.}; the old and renowned sister-town of Carthage, Gades, the modern Cadiz, was the first foreign town out of Italy, that adopted Roman law and Roman language (iv. 573) {iv. 543.}. While thus along the greatest part of the coast of the Mediterranean the old indigenous as well as the Phoenician civilisation had already, under the republic, conformed to the ways and habits of the ruling people, in no province under the imperial period was Romanising so energetically promoted on the part of the ruling power as in Spain. First of all the southern half of Baetica, between the Baetis and the Mediterranean, obtained, partly already under the republic or through Caesar, partly in the years 739 and 740 {15 and 14.} through Augustus, a stately series of communities with full Roman citizenship, which here occupy not the coast especially, but above all the interior, headed by Hispalis (Seville) and Corduba (Cordova) with colonial rights, Italica (near Seville) and Gades (Cadiz) with municipal rights. In southern Lusitania, too, we meet with a series of equally privileged towns, particularly Olisipo (Lisbon), Pax Julia (Beja), and the colony of veterans founded by Augustus during his abode in Spain and made the capital of this province, Emerita (Merida). In the Tarraconensis the burgess-towns are found predominantly on the coast--Carthago Nova, Ilici (Elche), Valentia, Dertosa (Tortosa), Tarraco, Barcino (Barcelona); in the interior only the colony in the Ebro valley, Caesaraugusta (Saragossa), is conspicuous. In all Spain under Augustus there were numbered fifty communities with full citizenship; nearly fifty others had up to this time received Latin rights, and stood as to inward organisation on a par with the burgess-communities. Among the rest the emperor Vespasian likewise introduced the Latin municipal organisation on occasion of the general imperial census instituted by him in the year 74. The bestowal of burgess-rights was neither then, nor generally in the better imperial period, extended much further than