Between 218 and 206 there was neither need nor occasion for the Romans, either in Spain or in the senate, to question the value of a Roman presence in the peninsula. The only moment at which the matter might have been raised, when after the deaths of the Scipio brothers in 211 their replacement was a live issue in Rome, was one when the value of Spain to the Carthaginians, and the disastrous consequences of abandoning the struggle there, must have been self-evident to every senator. The same was not true in 206. As the younger P. Scipio reminded the senate, meeting in the Temple of Bellona just outside the sacred boundary of the pomerium to hear his request for a triumph in the latter part of 206, he had been sent out to Spain to face four enemy commanders and four victorious armies; he had left not one Carthaginian there on his departure.

Although the reason which had first attracted Roman attention to Spain, and had detained, in the later stages, some four legions there, no longer pertained, there seems to have been no move to end Roman involvement. Indeed already before Scipio reached Rome, two men, L. Cornelius Lentulus and L. Manlius Acidinus, had been chosen to replace him. The decision to sustain the military action in Spain was of course a decision of the senate, which must have allocated the area as a provincia.