Pliny might be considered the more creditable, as he was for a time procurator of the official Hispania Tarraconensis, a province of the Roman Empire encompassing all the north and all the east of the Iberian Peninsula (the chief part of the future nation of Spain).

The implied distribution was multilingual and therefore multiethnic: 14% Iberian, 3% Punic, 35% Indo-European, including 19% Greek and 18% Latin, the rest uncertain.

Livy, historian living in the Augustan period, writes in a fragment of Book 91 describing the revolt of the Iberian people under Quintus Sertorius against Rome under Sulla, calls Ilercavonia and Contestania both gentes, "peoples" (a well-known word in Spanish).

Similarly the Oretani might be mountain (Greek ore) men, and the Lacetani some sort of Lacedaemonian, while the Indigetes stand in place of the Indigenes (natives).

At a loss for any other explanation, the scholars fall back on the theory that the Roman soldiers invented these words to imitate the foreign language that they heard there.

Recent research attempts to unravel the meaning of these terms, which often, as in the present case, have only very late literary documentation, at a time when the country was completely Romanized.

In a word, to try to identify a homogeneous and reasonable territory that could serve as the basis for the concept of the ancient administrative division.The real name, if any, of the people was not known.

Other important towns were Setabi (Xàtiva), Lucenti or Lucentum (La Albufereta in Alicante), Alonis (Villajoyosa), Ilici (Elche), Menlaria, Valentia and Iaspis.