10 SPANISH FRONT
markable military efficiency soon established themselves, and
virtually obliterated Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians
—though not their racial influence—and began in the usual
Roman manner to make their deep mark, and impose by
force their dominating influence upon the native in-
habitants.
Roman writers have left records of the people they
found in the Peninsula, but it is to Strabo, the careful Greek
geographer who lived in the first century B.C., that we must
go for fuller information. He speaks of the remarkable
courage, the ecstatic ferocity, and the inherent pride of the
Iberians. He informs us of the difference in behaviour of
the people in different parts of the country : of the agility
and frugality and sombre nature of some of them ; of the
gaiety and carefree nature of others. Curiously enough,
Strabo records that a tribe in the south was much the most
civilized, and perhaps this may refer to prehistoric people
in the neighbourhood of Ahamira, where traces of a
comparatively sophisticated art have been found. It would
appear that a tradition of these civilized people went back
for about six thousand years before Strabo's time ; and, in-
deed, there seems little reason to doubt it. That solemn, and,
on the whole, accurate Roman historian Livy (born 59 B.C.)
recorded that the Romans found the Iberians to be a " stub-
born, restless, and rebellious race "—which reminds us of
that rather similar race the Irish. He refers also to their
impassive dignity, to the nobility of their demeanour, and
to the intensity of religious feeling to be found amongst
them. Conventional historians since that time, and down
to our own days, have been strangely insistent in pointing
out that the Romans obliterated the native characteristics
of the Iberians, but it would be interesting to know the
opinion of biologists in regard to the possible obliteration