ees (Williams, 1990, p. 44). These formal dates understate the reality, however, by some five hundred years. The first Roman presence in Spain dates from the Second Punic War in 218 BC. It was in Spain that Roman commanders first faced Hannibal, and from Spain that Hannibal launched his invasion across the Alps into Italy, where he would deal Rome the worst of all its defeats at Cannae, would hold Rome at bay for seventeen years, but fail in the end to conquer it (William, 1990, p. 28).
The native peoples of Spain would hold Rome at bay for very much longer, nearly 200 years, but eventually the Romans crushed active opposition and established their authority in the peninsula. Roman cultural influence must have spread during this long period of resistance, because within a few generations of the Roman conquest, Hispania came to be considered the most Romanized of all the provinces beyond Italy. This contrasts sharply to the situation in Gaul, most of which was conquered by Julius Caesar in a mere ten years, but which remained on the whole a rather backwards region.
The difference in the respective degrees of Romanization in Hispania and in Gaul has left dramatic evidence to the present day in the French and Spanish languages (Pei, 1976, pp. 115-23). Both are Romance languages, with their grammatical forms and the greater part of their word-stocks derived from Latin. But in spelling and pronunciation, French has deviated far more from its origins, whereas Spanish remains nearly as cl
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