neglected the more barbarous northern and western provinces. It was for this reason that the Romans found far more difficulty in subduing these latter provinces than they had in taking possession of the former, which the Carthaginians had already conquered. The Romans were at first satisfied with these provinces, which were ceded to them after the conclusion of the second Punic war, but eventually they began to spread over the hitherto neglected districts; and in 189 B.C. Lucius Æmilius Paullus defeated the Lusitanians, and in 185 B.C. Gaius Calpurnius forced his way across the Tagus. There is no need here to discuss the gradual conquest by the Romans of that part of the peninsula which includes the modern kingdom of Portugal, but it is necessary to speak of the gallant shepherd Viriathus, who sustained a stubborn war against the Romans from 149 B.C. until he was assassinated in 139 B.C. because he has been generally claimed as the first national hero of Portugal. This claim has been based upon the assumed identification of the modern Portugal with the ancient Lusitania, an identification which has spread its roots deep into Portuguese literature, and has until recently been generally accepted. The first Portuguese writer who assumed the identity of Portugal with Lusitania was Dom Garcia de Meneses, Bishop of Evora, who wrote in the reign of John II. at the close of the fifteenth century, though the two terms had been used distinctively by early chroniclers, such as Lucas de Tuy in his “Chronicon Mundi,” and Matthew de Pisano in his “Guerra de Ceuta.” The mistaken notion was further developed in the days of the Renaissance and of the Revival of Learning, and became generally accepted by the close of the sixteenth century, and exaggerated by the very title of such books as the “Monarchia Lusitana” of Bernardo de Brito and the “De Antiquitatibus Lusitaniæ” of the great antiquary Andrea de Resende. In fact, the Portuguese writers of that epoch delighted in calling Portugal by the classical name of Lusitania, and Camoens, the very greatest of them all, has, by the title of his famous epic, “Os Lusiadas” or “The Lusiads,” stamped the mistake permanently on Portuguese literature.