Cervantes's play, La destruición de Numancia probably dates from 1583 and draws on Ambrosio de Morales's continuation of Florián de Ocampo's Crónica general de España (1574–86) and Alonso de Guevara's Epístolas familiares (1539) to depict the fall of the last indigenous stronghold in the Celtiberian Wars (154–133 BC). The opening scene of the play centres on the character and tactics of the Roman Consul Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (185–129 BC), who has been sent by the Roman Senate to pacify the fortified hilltop town of Numantia, whose inhabitants have risen in revolt against Roman rule. Scipio's decision to take the city by siege drives the Numantians to the most desperate actions and ultimately they resort to the destruction of their city and to self-annihilation.

Throughout Cervantes's play, the Numantians are repeatedly identified by the Romans, not only as hispanos but also as españoles, and the allegorical figures of España, El Río Duero, Guerra and Fama also support the idea of an intrinsic connection between the Numantians and the inhabitants of sixteenth-century Iberia. Nevertheless, several studies of the play have justly observed that the Spaniards of Cervantes's day were more often the besiegers than the besieged and have drawn interesting parallels between the campaign waged against the Numantians by Cervantes's Scipio and those of Don Juan de Austria in the Alpujarras (Hermenegildo), García Hurtado de Mendoza in Chile (King), and the Duke of Alba in the Netherlands, specifically in relation to the sieges of Galera, and Haarlem. In addition, Spaniards figure as besiegers in a number other comedias, among them Lope's El asalto de Mastrique and Calderón's El sitio de Bredá, yet as far as I am aware, only in La Numancia are they portrayed as the besieged.

In Lope and Calderón's plays one is made aware of the existence of two distinct approaches to warfare, one of which is characterized by fuerza and the other by prudencia, though both claim to possess the virtue of valor. Clearly informed by Lipsian neo-stoicism on the one hand and by Machiavelli's Art of War on the other, both plays indicate that fuerza is only effective when governed by prudencia and emphasize the importance of rationality, discipline, military engineering, and artillery at least as much as they seek to reaffirm fuerza and valor as aspects of the Spanish national character.