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Updated: May 31, 2025
In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities Emporiae, Gades, Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus, Alexandria now became Italian or Helleno-Italian communities, the centres of an Italian civilization even in the Greek east, the fundamental pillars of the future national and political levelling of the empire.
After Hannibal's passage of the Rhone Scipio had sailed for Emporiae, and had made himself master first of the coast between the Pyrenees and the Ebro, and then, after conquering Hanno, of the interior also . In the following year he had completely defeated the Carthaginian fleet at the mouth of the Ebro, and after his brother Publius, the brave defender of the valley of the Po, had joined him with a reinforcement of 8000 men, he had even crossed the Ebro, and advanced as far as Saguntum.
At that time, as at present, Emporiae consisted of two towns, separated by a wall. One was inhabited by Greeks from Phocaea, whence the Massilians also derive their origin; the other by Spaniards.
In Spain the Greek and Phoenician towns along the coast, such as Emporiae, Saguntum, New Carthage, Malaca, and Gades, submitted to the Roman rule the more readily, that, left to their own resources, they would hardly have been able to protect themselves from the natives; as for similar reasons Massilia, although far more important and more capable of self-defence than those towns, did not omit to secure a powerful support in case of need by closely attaching itself to the Romans, to whom it was in return very serviceable as an intermediate station between Italy and Spain.
And Scipio, having quickly brought up his army on the report of fresh enemies, after punishing a few captains of ships and leaving a moderate garrison at Tarraco, returned with his fleet to Emporiae.
Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil.-hist. Kl., viii. , p. 61, plan 2; the evidence seems adequate though not wholly decisive. The Roman town Emporiae, now Ampurias, in the extreme north-east of Spain, seems to have had a rectangular street-plan, though its Greek predecessor was irregular, Institut d'estudis catalans, anuari 1908, p. 185.
While these things are transacting in Italy, Cneius Cornelius Scipio having been sent into Spain with a fleet and army, when, setting out from the mouth of the Rhone, and sailing past the Pyrenaean mountains, he had moored his fleet at Emporiae, having there landed his army, and beginning with the Lacetani, he brought the whole coast, as far as the river Iberus, under the Roman dominion, partly by renewing the old, and partly by forming new alliances.
They are still more clearly shown by the singular relations subsisting between the Greeks and their Spanish neighbours in the Graeco-Spanish double city of Emporiae, at the eastern extremity of the Pyrenees.
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