INTRODUCTION 3them out of Italy into southern Gaul. Established in Aquitaine by
treaty in 418 with a now more flexible imperial regime, the future
masters of the Iberian peninsula were, within half a century, drawn
by events over the Pyrenees into what was to be their final home.
Spain, however, had other tribulations to undergo in the early fifth
century before the Visigoths made themselves masters there, but before
considering those it will be necessary to turn back to an earlier and
more tranquil period of the peninsula's history.
Roman Spain is surprisingly little known to modern scholarship. Of
all the major provinces of the western half of the Roman Empire
those of Hispania, five in number after reorganisation by the em-
peror Diocletian (284-305), are amongst the least studied and un-
derstood.^4 This is largely due to the limitations of the available
evidence, especially the archaeological. Much that will aid the future
study of Roman Spain still remains hidden in the ground. But in the
last few years important work has been done, principally by Spanish
scholars, on such questions as the success or failure of the imposition
of Roman civilisation on the different regions of the peninsula, and
the activities of the Roman army in Spain. Answers to these and other
problems are clearly of great importance for the better understand-
ing of the society that was to develop in the late Roman period and
to influence so many features of what was to follow.
That Roman Spain is still fairly obscure does not imply that it was
unimportant. To take the most obvious example, in the literature of
the Empire the Spanish provinces produced more than their fair
share of the writers of the 'Silver Latin' age of the late first and early
second centuries AD. Thus the two Senecas and Lucan came from
Cordoba, Martial from Bilbilis and Quintilian from Calahorra. Equally,
in the late Empire, we find a flourishing tradition of Christian Latin
poetry in the peninsula, that reached its culmination in the writings
of Prudentius (fl. c. 400), but also includes those of Iuvencus (fl.
c. 330), author of a metrical version of the Gospels, and of the
panegyricist Flavius Merobaudes (fl. c. 440), testimony to the literary
culture of the provinces even in the troubled times of the fifth
century.
Spain also produced its quota of emperors for the Roman world:
Trajan (98-117) and Hadrian (117-138) in the early Empire,
Theodosius I (378-395), founder of a dynasty that lasted until 455,
and Magnus Maximus (383-388) in the late.^5 The rise of emperors
from Spain often led to the prominence of some of their fellow