The Unexpected Road to Lleida
Some journeys begin exactly as planned. Others begin with rain.
Our recent journey to Spain belonged firmly to the second category. The intention had been simple enough: a few days of golf, a little sun, and the pleasant illusion that weather forecasts become less important once one has crossed the Pyrenees. Spain, however, had other ideas. The fairways were wet, the skies uncooperative, and after a while even optimism begins to look foolish when standing under a grey sky with golf clubs in the boot.
So we changed our plans. Instead of chasing the weather, we drove north through Catalonia and spent several days in Lleida. Strangely enough, there we even found a little sunshine, which is not a sentence one expects to write after a golfing holiday in Spain.
Yet the detour proved more rewarding than the original plan. Lleida is one of those places where history does not present itself loudly, but waits patiently beneath the surface. It does not overwhelm the visitor in the way Rome or Tarragona can. It invites questions more quietly. And while walking through the city and its surroundings, one question kept returning to me.
Where was Sertorius?
Not literally, of course. Quintus Sertorius has been dead for more than two thousand years. What I was looking for was his place in public memory. Considering how long he remained in Hispania, and how remarkable his achievements were, I expected to find more than the occasional street name. A monument perhaps. A museum display. Some visible sign that this extraordinary Roman, who for years ruled and fought in Spain as something more than a mere rebel general, had not entirely vanished from local memory.
Instead, I found very little.
A Fair Objection
That absence reminded me of a discussion I had some time ago in a Spanish newspaper forum. I had suggested that Sertorius deserved far greater recognition. Another participant disagreed. In his view, I was exaggerating the importance of one man. Spain, he argued, had not been Romanised by Sertorius. Roman influence had begun long before him and reached its true strength much later, especially under Augustus. Sertorius was interesting, yes, but not a founder of Roman Spain and certainly not the heroic figure I seemed to imagine.
It was not a foolish argument.
Indeed, if my case were that Sertorius single-handedly created Roman Spain, the argument would collapse at once. Romanisation was never the work of one man, one decade, or one policy. Roman armies had been active in Hispania since the Second Punic War. Tarraco had already become one of the great Roman centres of the peninsula. In the south, long before Sertorius, trade and Roman influence had begun to reshape coastal life.
Baelo Claudia, near Tarifa, is an excellent reminder of this older and wider process. Its ruins still speak of a Roman urban world built around trade, fishing, and the production of garum, the famous fish sauce that travelled through the Mediterranean economy. Although the town bears the name of the emperor Claudius because of its later municipal status, its origins reach back into the late Republican world. It is therefore a useful warning against easy claims. Hispania was already being drawn into Roman habits, Roman markets and Roman forms of urban life before Sertorius appeared on the stage.
Nor can one ignore Tarragona. The National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona rightly presents Tarraco as one of the great keys to the Romanisation of the Iberian Peninsula. A visitor who walks through Tarragona needs no persuasion that Roman Spain was far older and broader than the career of Sertorius.
So my opponent had a point. Romanisation did not begin with Sertorius. In many regions it was already underway. Nor did it end with him. Under Augustus, Hispania was reorganised more thoroughly, roads and colonies multiplied, and provincial life became increasingly integrated into the Roman world.
What Sertorius Actually Did
And yet this does not answer the question.
For the real question is not whether Sertorius invented Roman Spain. He did not. The question is whether he saw, earlier than most Roman commanders, that Hispania could be governed not merely as conquered territory, but as a political community capable of sharing in Roman forms of life.
That is where Sertorius becomes fascinating.
He arrived in Hispania not as Spain's friend, but as a Roman political exile and commander caught in the brutal civil wars of the late Republic. He was fighting Rome, but he was also Roman to the bone. There is no need to turn him into a sentimental hero. He used power. He fought a hard war. He could be ruthless. But over time he developed a relationship with the peoples of Hispania that was unusual, perhaps unique, for a Roman commander of his age.
He did not merely command local forces. He allied with them. He relied on them. He treated their aristocracy not simply as useful hostages or auxiliaries, but as future participants in a Roman-style political order. His famous school at Osca, where the sons of Iberian elites were educated in Roman learning and customs, was more than an educational experiment. It was a political statement. These boys were being prepared not merely to obey Rome, but to understand Rome.
He also created a senate in Hispania, modelled on the Roman one. Ancient accounts describe him building a government in exile, surrounding himself with Roman institutions while drawing strength from Iberian support. The old Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Sertorius put the matter memorably when it described his attempt to establish a stable government with the consent and cooperation of the people, after the Roman model.
That phrase matters: consent and cooperation.
Of course, we must not exaggerate. Sertorius was no modern democrat. He was no humanitarian reformer. He was a Roman aristocrat conducting a Roman civil war with Iberian allies. Yet even within those limits, his policy was striking. He governed with local elites rather than simply over them. He offered them status, education, and participation in a Roman political world. That may not be the same as founding Roman Spain. But it is certainly more than a footnote.
Romanisation and Identity
It also helps us think more carefully about Romanisation itself. Modern readers often imagine Rome simply as an occupying force, crushing the identities of conquered peoples beneath roads, taxes and legions. There is truth in the brutality. Rome could be merciless when resisted. Carthage and Corinth remind us of that. So do the proscriptions of the late Republic and the destruction that followed failed revolts.
But Rome did not usually aim to erase every local identity. Its genius, if one may use that word about so often violent a power, lay in absorption. Local gods were not always destroyed; they were often identified with Roman gods. Local elites were not always removed; they were frequently drawn into the Roman system. Languages, customs and traditions could survive for generations, even while law, citizenship, architecture, military service and political ambition became increasingly Roman.
Romanisation was therefore not simply a hammer blow. It was a long negotiation, sometimes brutal, sometimes attractive, often unequal, but rarely simple. The conquered peoples changed. Rome changed too.
Sertorius belongs precisely in that complicated space. He did not bring Romanisation to an untouched land. Nor did he complete it. What he did was reveal one possible path: a Roman political order in Hispania that depended not only on conquest, but on alliance, education and shared institutions.
Founders, Monuments and Memory
That is why his absence from public memory surprised me.
Not because every town in Spain should have a statue of Sertorius. Monuments cannot be distributed according to a historian's sense of justice. But one cannot help noticing the contrast. In Cartagena, ancient Carthago Nova still feels, in places, as though Rome has never entirely left it. Yet the city also remembers Hasdrubal the Fair, the Carthaginian founder traditionally associated with its creation.
Hasdrubal did not come as a liberator of Spain. The Carthaginians were traders, colonisers and imperial competitors. They came because Iberia offered wealth, harbours, metals, manpower and strategic advantage. Yet memory has found room for him. Cartagena remembers its founder, even if that founder belonged to a power that came to benefit from the riches of the peninsula.
There are other examples. In Teba, a small memorial recalls Sir James Douglas, the Black Douglas, the Scottish knight who died in 1330 while assisting Alfonso XI of Castile. The memorial described by Málaga's provincial authority is modest, but its very existence is telling. A Scottish knight, the heart of Robert Bruce, Andalusia, the Reconquista: the story is vivid enough to attach itself to a place.
Why them, and not Sertorius?
The answer, I suspect, has little to do with objective historical importance. Hasdrubal is remembered because founders are memorable. The Black Douglas is remembered because his story is romantic, local and easily retold. Such stories become part of a community's emotional landscape.
Sertorius is more difficult.
A Man Too Difficult for Memory
He was a Roman fighting Romans with Iberian allies. He belongs neither wholly to Spain nor wholly to Rome. To Romans loyal to Sulla, he was a rebel. To later Roman historians, he was admirable but inconvenient. To modern Spain, he is perhaps too Roman to be a native hero and too sympathetic to the Iberians to fit neatly into the story of conquest. He does not stand still long enough to become a simple symbol.
That may be the deeper reason he has faded. Public memory prefers clarity. History rarely provides it.
The newspaper discussion eventually reached the point many online discussions reach when arguments begin to tire. My anonymous opponent announced that he was, in fact, a historian. This may well be true. I have no reason to doubt him. On the other hand, the supporting evidence for this impressive qualification has not yet arrived, and so, for the time being, I remain forced to judge his argument by the old-fashioned method of considering whether it is convincing.
In fairness, parts of it were.
He was right that Romanisation was larger than Sertorius. He was right that southern Hispania had already been deeply affected by Mediterranean trade, Punic influence and Roman power. He was right that Augustus and later imperial structures did more to shape the Spain we recognise in archaeology than Sertorius ever could.
But he was wrong, I think, to confuse completion with invention.
History often remembers those who finish a process more clearly than those who first reveal its possibility. Augustus made imperial Hispania visible in stone, law and administration. Sertorius did something less permanent but perhaps more imaginative. He showed that Roman power in Hispania could be built through cooperation with local elites, through education, and through a political language that offered more than submission.
That does not make him the founder of Roman Spain. But it may make him one of the forgotten founders of a Roman Spain that would later become possible.
Who Remembers?
As I left Lleida, I realised that perhaps I had been asking the wrong question. The puzzle was not simply why Spain had forgotten Sertorius. All nations forget. Britain forgets. Germany forgets. Italy forgets. Every country fills its squares with some names and leaves others to the footnotes. Memory is not an archive. It is a selection.
The Museu de Lleida and the monuments of Tarragona preserve many layers of the past. They cannot preserve everything. No city can. The question is not whether the past survives, but which parts of it become useful, beloved, visible, or easy enough to explain to a child in a square.
Historical importance and historical memory are not the same thing.
Monuments are not raised by history. They are raised by people: councils, communities, governments, benefactors, patriots, tourists, descendants, enthusiasts. They reflect pride, identity, romance, politics, convenience and sometimes pure accident. A statue tells us that someone was remembered, but not necessarily that he was more important than those who were forgotten.
The historian's task is different. It is not to obey memory, but to examine it. To ask why one figure remains visible while another disappears. To look again at those who slipped between categories, who belonged to more than one world, or to none comfortably enough to become a symbol.
Sertorius was such a man.
He was Roman and anti-Roman, conqueror and ally, exile and ruler, general and statesman. He did not fit easily into the stories later generations preferred to tell. Perhaps that is why he survives more clearly in books than in stone.
The rain that spoiled our golfing holiday led us to Lleida. Lleida led me back to Sertorius. Sertorius led me, rather unexpectedly, to a question larger than himself: how do civilisations choose whom they remember?
I still do not know whether Sertorius deserves a monument.
But I am increasingly convinced that he deserves a conversation.