Numantia

Numantia was a Celtiberian town on a hill above the upper Duero, in what is now the province of Soria. In 133 BC Scipio Aemilianus ringed it with some nine kilometres of wall, ditch and camps and set out to starve it rather than storm it. By the ancient accounts the last defenders fired the town and killed themselves rather than be taken alive. That is the moment Vera painted.

He did the work in Rome, in his third year on a Spanish state pension, and signed it in the lower left corner, A. Vera. Roma. 1881. The armour and equipment of his Romans are generally traced to Trajan's Column, the carved campaign monument standing in the city where he was working. The canvas went to the National Exhibition in Madrid that year, took the first medal, and the state bought it from him.

It is five metres wide and it does not hang in Madrid. The Prado owns it and keeps it on long-term deposit with the provincial council of Soria, a few kilometres from the hill at Garray where the ruins are.