Cervantes and His Sources: On Virtue and Infamy in La Numancia

Celtiberian Numantia is remembered in ancient to early modern writings for its fierce resistance to Imperial Rome and the terrible nature of its fall under siege in 133 bce, although details and emphases change between the sources. While some classical Roman histories disparage insurgent Numantia as savage or insolent, others tell a story of virtues better modeled in foreign rustics than Roman conquerors. Meanwhile, in varied accounts of the resistance, siege, and destruction of Numantia from late medieval to early modern Spain, similar messages remain. Authorial perspectives alternatively celebrate an exemplary conqueror; or highlight the bravery and just cause of Numantia, in contrast to cruel injustices of the Romans in Hispaniae. Yet this second corpus shares a common point of difference from the classical sources on Roman wars in Spain. In these later peninsular works, Iberian Numantia is no longer wholly foreign. It remains ethnically and culturally exotic but is now geographically familiar. The ancient history of Hispaniae becomes local history;¹ and even those works of pre-modern Spain that sympathize with the conquering Romans identify in the story of Numantia a patrimony of quintessentially Iberian traits.

In La destruycion de Numancia, of the early-to-mid 1580s, Cervantes generates a new rendering of this history, drawing heavily upon an evolving cultural narrative that is comprised of prior accounts and representations. No single text stands out as a primary source for La Numancia. Instead, Cervantes interpolates details from a range of Iberian sources and some of the classical histories upon which they are based. He also interweaves references to other ancient sieges, as scholars including Carroll Johnson, Angela Belli, Frederick de Armas, and Barbara Simerka note, although these references are light in comparison to content that derives directly from the textual tradition on the siege of Numantia. Importantly, La Numancia reproduces a selection of both pro-imperial and pro-Numantian messages that characterize prior sources. The Roman conqueror becomes an antecedent figure and symbol of the expansionist trajectory of Hapsburg Spain. At the same time, the conquered Numantians are familiar ancients, "proto-Christians" (de Armas 68) and figurative "ancestors" (Lupher 203). Their valiant spirit, Cervantes suggests, remains the legacy of his people. He therefore positions adversarial protagonists—the Romans, led by the Consul Scipio the Younger and a defiant Numantia, as embodied by a range of sympathetic characters—to represent conflicted aspects of his own Christian patria in its age of imperial expansionism.

My analysis here centers on the nature of La Numancia as both a performance of patriotism—or "una manifestación poderosa del heroismo nacional," as Ramón León Máinez has asserted (qtd. in Hermenegildo 19)—and a critique of Spanish imperial endeavors. Because of the seemingly oppositional nature of its messages, many have commented on La Numancia's profound ambiguity. For example, Johnson asserts that "La Numancia can be either a glorification of the Spanish Empire and its virtues or an attack on them" (78). Margaret Greer sees in this piece "the tragic ambiguity of a Spain both imperial victim and victimizer" (292). Similarly, Shifra Armon refers to its "vexing ideological indeterminacy" (11). Willard King also sustains that this drama presents a conflict of "the primitive, idealized Spain waging a just war in defense of liberty against Cervantes' contemporary imperial Spain [… that is] fighting less easily justifiable wars" (216).² As I explore the different threads of discourse in La Numancia, I will show that these binary themes correspond to a unified message. As Cervantes leads his audience to identify with both the conqueror and the conquered, he positions the contradictory messages commonly affiliated with this cultural narrative to celebrate the spirit and strength of Spain, even as he correctively signals the virtues that it has come to neglect.

Ancient Roman histories establish a general storyline of the events at Numantia, with some variation. Antedating conflict at Numantia, the Lusitanian hero Viriathus led a protracted resistance to the Roman occupation of Celtiberia (Appianus 91; Florus 343-44; Paterculus 444-45, 516; Orosius 179-81). Rome also waged two unsuccessful campaigns against Numantia...