Initially, large areas of Spain had been regarded as too remote and dangerous to exploit, the haunt of tribesmen so irredeemably savage that they believed banditry to be an honorable profession and used urine to brush their teeth.* By the last years of the second century BC, however, all except the north of the peninsula had been opened up for business.† Huge new mines were sunk across central and southwestern Spain. Measurements of lead in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers, which show a staggering increase in concentration during this period, bear witness to the volumes of poisonous smoke the
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