Introduction

This chapter talks about Appian's Wars of the Romans in Iberia or the Iberike, which is an ambitious attempt to chronicle the whole of the Roman Empire. It points out how Appian has been treated as a source of historical information and as a means of access to the lost works of earlier historians. It also explores Iberike as one of Appian's twenty-four books that provides the only continuous narrative of important sections of Roman history. The chapter details Appian's coherent account of the Roman wars in Spain and Portugal from their arrival at the beginning of the Hannibalic wars in 218 BC down to the capture of the Celtiberian city of Numantia in 133 BC. It examines Appian as a man of his own times, whose ideas provided a distinctive way for the history of Rome and its empire to be written.

Commentary

1 The Pyrenean range of mountains: Appian -begins with a geographic and ethnographic note, with enough early history to set the scene for the arrivaI of the Romans. There is a similar introduction to his books on the wars in Illyria (Illyr. 1.1-3.7) and in Libya ...