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Portugal Romanization
After the conquest was completed, the Romans gathered
the
indigenous peoples into jurisdictions, each with a Roman
center
of administration and justice. Olissipo (present-day
Lisbon--
Lisboa in Portuguese), served as the administrative center
of
Roman Portugal until the founding of Emerita (present-day
Mérida,
Spain) in A.D. 25. By the beginning of the first century
A.D.,
Romanization was well underway in southern Portugal. A
senate was
established at Ebora (present-day Évora); schools of Greek
and
Latin were opened; industries such as brick making, tile
making,
and iron smelting were developed; military roads and
bridges were
built to connect administrative centers; and monuments,
such as
the Temple of Diana in Évora, were erected. Gradually,
Roman
civilization was extended to northern Portugal, as well.
The
Lusitanians were forced out of their hilltop
fortifications and
settled in bottom lands in Roman towns (citânias).
The citânias were one of the most important
institutions imposed on Lusitania during the Roman
occupation. It
was in the citânias that the Lusitanians acquired
Roman
civilization: they learned Latin, the lingua franca of the
peninsula and the basis of modern Portuguese; they were
introduced to Roman administration and religion; and in
the third
century, when Rome converted to Christianity, so did the
Lusitanians. All in all, the Roman occupation left a
profound
cultural, economic, and administrative imprint on the
entire
Iberian Peninsula that remains to the present day.
Data as of January 1993
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