A series of wars fought between The Roman Republic and the Celtiberian tribes of the Iberian Peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal). What started as a Roman attempt to pacify their territories in Hispania, gained at the Second Punic War, turned into years of bloodshed when the native tribes would not let themselves be subjugated and started one revolution after another. The conflict also brought to light the Arevaci city of Numantia, which became the trope codifier of Undefeatable Little Village in history and for many years fed every Hispanic city's hopes to resist the invaders. Although not as famous as the contemporaneous Lusitanian Wars, those wars marked the first post-Carthage instance in which the Roman armies were repeatedly unable to suffocate a rebellion focused on a single city.
Rome had been campaigning in Hispania since the Second Punic War, in which Rome and Carthage had struggled for the control of Hispania. Local tribes often opposed the Romans out of the allegiance of many of them to Hannibal, which actively divided the peninsula between those who supported the Roman rule and those who preferred the Carthaginians and/or just wanted to be left alone. After Carthage lost the war, Roman got a hold of Hispania and founded two large provinces in 197 BC, Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior, as part of an effort to turn the peninsula into a productive Roman territory. However, this naturally clashed with the interests of the Celtiberian tribes that inhabited the center and north of the Hispania, as thet didn't like the Roman attempts to conquer them and carried a grudge with them since their own participation on the war. A string of rebellions against the Citerior province started the same year, and despite the efforts by Roman generals Cato the Elder and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior to smother the revolts, it culminated in big time fashion with the First Celtiberian War in 181 BC.
At the beginning of this first war, the advance of a massive army of angry Celtiberians knocked the Romans into emergency mode, but the Roman warfare machine, led by Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, overcame the odds and beat the natives in several urban and field encounters. His replacement by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus proved to be instrumental to fix the situation, as the latter decided to solve it by using the brain instead of brawn. He managed to get his hands on the children of Thurrus, a Carpetanian chieftain who was considered the most powerful man in Celtiberia, and used them to negotiate with him into becoming allies. After defeating decisively the rest of rebel tribes, Gracchus understood revolts would restart again after he departed if Rome continued acting tough on the territory, so he took all the time he needed to befriend the defeated leaders and write fair treaties in which they appeared as autonomous vassals instead of subjugated slaves. With everybody satisfied, it seemed Gracchus had managed to ensure peace in Hispania Citerior. Or had he?
In 154 BC, war broke again when the Celtiberian tribe of the Belli used a Loophole Abuse to violate the Roman prohibition of building fortifications. Why did this happen is not known: some say Roman governors had fallen into their usual custom to squeeze the natives with heavy taxes and the Belli were planning a revolt (possibly inspired by several Lusitanian victories against Rome the same year), while other say it was all a genuine misunderstanding. In any case, Rome felt challenged and send Quintus Fulvius Nobilior (nephew to Marcus, mentioned above) with an army in order to punish them. Upon hearing it, the Belli ran to their Arevaci allies and took refuge in their great mountainous city, Numantia, from which they called for war. Although Nobilior struggled to reach Numantia, it would be in front of its gates that the Arevaci proved their legendary resilience for the first and not last time: despite bringing War Elephants and whatnot, the Romans failed utterly in all of their attempts to conquer the city and were forced to return to their camp, where they were broken down by winter, ambushes and low morale. Next year, Nobilior's rival Marcus Claudius Marcellus grabbed the baton and continued the campaign, albeit now openly avoiding Numantia and trying to get the Celtiberian tribes to surrender via pressure and diplomacy. Although the Numantines initially refused, the menace of a new Roman army commanded by Lucius Licinius Lucullus led their leader Litenno to accept and pay money and hostages for peace.
It seemed the Second Celtiberian War had ended without heavy conflict, but in reality a new round was to begin, as Lucullus was hungry for fame and money, and upon arriving he waged what was literally a private, illegal war against the Celtiberian tribes. He unveiled the infallible city-conquering strategy of feigning a peace accord, making them open the doors, and then killing everybody inside. However, although this worked wonders in Cauca, it failed the next time he tried it in Intercatia and Pallantia, as natives had wised up; things got so bad for him at the siege that a young Scipio Aemilianus had to negotiate to get them out of the situation. Chased away by Pallantian forces, Lucullus put a premature end to his exploits in Celtiberia, ending up with his hands almost empty. However, his role in history didn't end there, as he now went south into Hispania Ulterior and allied himself with Servius Sulpicious Galba, who was struggling with the Lusitanian tribe. Lucullus taught Gabla his main technique and they used them against their enemies, gaining a huge loot with the Massacre of the Lusitanians. However, the stunt ended up provoking the rebellion of Viriathus, which in turn led to the third and final Celtiberian revolution, also known as the Numantine War.
In 144 BC, it was known in all Hispania that a Lusitanian chieftain named Viriathus was scoring victory after victory over the Romans, and that not even a large army led by Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus had managed to capture him. Viriathus personally persuaded the Celtiberian tribes into revolting, and so they did, forcing Rome to send the great Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus to stop them. As usual, the Romans wreaked havoc everywhere but Numantia and offered friendship to the latter, but the Numantines just told them to get lost. If the Roman senate wasn't angry enough at this, they surely became when Metellus's successor Quintus Pompeius received such a blow trying to besiege Numantia that he had to negotiate to get out alive. The situation only worsened for Rome: every following attempt to defeat the Celtiberians, first by Marcus Popilius Laenas and then by Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, failed worse than the previous. Mancinus in particular was spectacularly punished by the Senate, which offered him to the Numantines nude and chained. By this point Viriathus was dead, murdered by three traitors, but the Numantines were fired up by their own victories, and the three next Roman praetors in Hispania Ulterior refused to face them.
The Roman senators entered 134 BC frothing at the mouth for those failures, and as such they decided to send their most powerful general, the man who had leveled Carthage at the Third Punic War, who was none other than an older Scipio Aemilianus. Smarter and more resourceful than his predecessors, Aemilianus trained the hell out of his armies and surrounded the entire Numantia with a gigantic, ring-shaped walled camp, hoping to get the victory through hunger instead of confronting them face to face. The Numantines tried all tricks to break the siege, but those were all unsuccessful, and at the end they just accepted their fate and decided to resist until the end. When Aemilianus broke the gates after fifteen incredible months of siege, all he found was a city of ashes, corpses and half-dead people, so he grabbed what he could and destroyed the rest. Numantia had been erased, and the last faction of Spanish resistance was gone, and so it would be for more than a century, until Cantabrians and Astures grabbed temporarily the baton at Augustus's time.
In fiction:
- Spanish TV series Imperium, a short-lived spinoff of Hispania, mentions the siege of Numantia as part of its background.
- João Aguiar's novel A Voz dos Deuses mentiones it Numantia and its late conflict when visited by Viriathus.
- Spanish Folk Metal band Salduie has several songs about Numantia and the Celtiberian Wars.
- The Imperivm videogame franchise features the siege of Numantia in the second and third installments, where the player controls the Numantines and the Romans respectively.
