A History of Rome, Vol 1 by A H.J. Greenidge

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Jugurtha was for the moment torn by conflicting resolutions. The very
audacity of his acts had been tempered and in part directed by a secret
fear of Rome. Whether in any moments of ambitious imagination he had
dreamed of throwing off the protectorate and asserting the unlimited
independence of the Numidian kingdom, must remain uncertain; but in any
case that consummation must belong to the end, not to the intermediate
stage, of his present enterprise. His immediate plan had been to win or
purchase recognition of an accomplished fact from the somnolence,
caution or corruption of the government; and here was intervention
assuming a more formidable shape while the fact was but half
accomplished and he himself was but playing the part of the rebel, not
of the king. The dignity of the commissioners, and the peremptory nature
of their demand, seemed to show that negotiations with Rome were losing
their character of a conventional game and assuming a more serious
aspect. It is possible that Jugurtha did not know the full extent of the
danger which he was running; it is possible that, like so many other
potentates who had relations with the imperial city, he made the mistake
of imagining that the senate was in the fullest sense the government of
Rome, and had no cognisance of the subtle forces whose equilibrium was
expressed in a formal control by the nobility; but even what he saw was
sufficient to alarm him and to lead him, in a moment of panic or
prudence, to think of the possibility of obeying the commission. At the
next moment the new man, which the deliberate but almost frenzied
pursuit of a single object had made of Jugurtha, was fully
reasserted.[914] But his passion was not blind; his recklessness still
veiled a plan; his one absorbing desire was to see Adherbal in his hands
before he should himself be forced to meet the envoys. He gave orders
for his whole force to encircle the walls of Cirta; a simultaneous
assault was directed against every vulnerable point; the attention of
the defenders was to be distracted by the ubiquitous nature of the
attack; a failure of vigilance at any point might give him the desired
entry by force or fraud. But nothing came of the enterprise; the
assailants were beaten back, and Jugurtha had another moment for cool
reflection. He soon decided that further delay would not strengthen his
position. The name of Scaurus weighed heavily on his mind.[915] He was
an untried element with respect to the details of the Numidian affair;
but all that Jugurtha knew of him--his influence with the senate, his
uncompromising respectability, his earlier attitude on the
question--inspired a feeling of fear. Obedience to the demand which the
commissioners had made for his presence might be the wiser course;
whatever the result of the interview, such obedience might prolong the
period of negotiation and delay armed intervention until his own great
object was fulfilled. With a few of his knights Jugurtha crossed into
the Roman province and presented himself before the commissioners. We
have no record of the discussion which ensued. The senate's message was
almost an ultimatum; it threatened extreme measures if Jugurtha did not
desist from the siege of Cirta; but the peremptory nature of the missive
did not prevent close and lengthy discussions between the envoys and the
king. The plausible personality of Jugurtha may have told in his favour
and may have led to the hopes of a compromise; for it is not probable
that he ventured on a summary rejection of their orders or advice. But
the commissioners could merely threaten or advise; they had no power to
wring promises from the king or to keep him to them when they were made.
Thus when, at the close of the debates, Jugurtha returned to Numidia and
the envoys embarked at Utica, it was felt on all sides that nothing had
been accomplished.[916] The commissioners may have believed that they
had made Jugurtha sensible of his true relations to Rome; they had
perhaps threatened open war as the result of disobedience; but they had
neither checked his progress nor stayed his hand; and the taint with
which all dealings with the wealthy potentate infected his environment,
clung even to this select body of distinguished men.

The immediate effect of the fruitless negotiations was the disaster
which every one must have foreseen. Cirta and her king had been utterly
betrayed by their protectress; and when the news of the departure of the
envoys and the return of Jugurtha penetrated within the walls, despair
of further resistance gave substance to the hope of the possibility of
surrender on tolerable terms. The hope was never present to the mind of
Adherbal; he knew his enemy too well. Nor could it have been entertained
in a very lively form by the king's Numidian councillors and subjects.
But the Numidian was not the strongest element in Cirta. There the
merchant class held sway. In the defence of their property and commerce,
the organised business and the homes which they had established in the
civilised state, they had taken the lead in repelling the hordes of
Western Numidians which Jugurtha led; and amongst the merchant class
those of Italian race had been the most active and efficient in
repelling the assaults of the besiegers. To these men the choice was not
between famine and the sword; but merely between famine and the loss of
property or comfort. For what Roman or Italian could doubt that the most
perfect security for his life and person was still implicit in the magic
name of Rome? Confident in their safety they advised Adherbal to hand
over the town to Jugurtha; the only condition which he needed to make
was the preservation of his own life and that of the besieged; all else
was of less importance, for their future fortunes rested not with
Jugurtha but with the senate.[917] It is questionable whether the
Italians were really inspired with this blind confidence in the senate's
power to restore as well as to save; even their ability to save was more
than doubtful to Adherbal; still more worthless was a promise made by
his enemy. The unhappy king would have preferred the most desperate
resistance to a trust in Jugurtha's honour; but the advice of the
Italians was equivalent to a command; and a gleam of hope, sufficient at
least to prevent him from taking his own life, may have buoyed him up
when he yielded to their wishes and made the formal surrender. The hope,
if it existed, was immediately dispelled. Adherbal was put to death with
cruel tortures.[918] The Italians then had their proof of the present
value of the majesty of the name of Rome. Their calculations had been
vitiated by one fatal blunder. They forgot that they were letting into
their stronghold an exasperated people drawn from the rudest parts of
Numidia--a people to whom the name of Rome was as nothing, to whom the
name of merchant or foreigner was contemptible and hateful. As the
surging crowd of Jugurtha's soldiery swept over the doomed city,
massacring every Numidian of adult age, the claim of nationality made by
the protesting merchants was not unnaturally met by a thrust from the
sword. If even the assailants could distinguish them in the frenzy of
victory, they knew them for men who had occupied the fighting line; and
this fact was alone sufficient to doom them to destruction. Jugurtha may
also have made his blunder. Unless we suppose that his penetrating mind
had been, suddenly clouded by the senseless rage which prompts the
half-savage man to a momentary act of demoniacal folly, he could never
have willed the slaughter of the Roman and Italian merchants.[919] If he
willed it in cold blood, he was consciously making war on Rome and
declaring the independence of Numidia. For, even with his limited
knowledge of the balance of interests in the capital, he must have seen
that the act was inexpiable. His true policy, now as before, was not to
cross swords with Rome, but merely to wring from her indifference a
recognition of a purely national crime. His wits had failed him if he
had ordered a deed which put indifference and recognition out of the
question. It is probable that he did not calculate on the fury of his
troops; it is possible that he had ceased to lead and was a mere unit
swept along in the avalanche which sated its wrath at the prolonged
resistance, and avenged the real or fancied crimes committed by the
merchant class.

The massacre of the merchants caused a complete change in the attitude
with which Numidian events were viewed at Rome. It cut the commercial
classes to the quick, and this third party which moulded the policy of
Rome began closing up its ranks. The balance of power on which the
nobility had rested its presidency since the fall of Caius Gracchus,
began to be disturbed. It was possible again for a leader of the people
to make his voice heard; not, however, because he was the leader of the
people, but because he was the head of a coalition. The man of the hour
was Caius Memmius, who was tribune elect for the following year. He was
an orator, vehement rather than eloquent, of a mordant utterance, and
famed in the courts for his power of attack.[920] His critical
temperament and keen eye for abuses had already led him to join the
sparse ranks of politicians who tried still to keep alive the healthy
flame of discontent, and to utter an occasional protest against the
manner in which the nobility exercised their trust.[921] His influence
must have been increased by the growing suspicion of the last few years
and the scandal that fed on tales of bribery in high places; it was
assured by the latest news which, through the illogical process of
reasoning out of which great causes grow, seemed to make rumour a
certainty and to justify suspicion by the increased numbers and
respectability of the suspecting. A pretext for action was found in the
shifty and dilatory proceedings of the senate. Even the latest phase of
the Numidian affair was not powerful or horrible enough to crush all
attempts at a temporising policy.[922] Men were still found to interrupt
the course of a debate which promised to issue in some strong and speedy
resolution, by raising counter-motions which the great names of the
movers forced on the attention of the house; every artifice which
influence could command was employed to dull the pain of a wounded
self-respect; and when this method failed, idle recrimination took the
place of argument as a means of consuming the time for action and
passing the point at which anger would have cooled into indifference, or
at least into an emotion not stronger than regret. It was plain that the
stimulus must be supplied from without; and Memmius provided it by going
straight to the people and embodying their floating suspicions in a bald
and uncompromising form. He told them[923] that the prolonged
proceedings in the senate meant simply that the crime of Jugurtha was
likely to be condoned through the influence of a few ardent partisans of
the king; and it is probable that he dealt frankly and in the true Roman
manner with the motives for this partisanship. The pressure was
effectual in bringing to a head the deliberations of the senate. The
council as a whole did not need conversion on the main question at
issue, for most of its members must have felt that it had exhausted the
resources of peaceful diplomacy, and it showed its characteristic
aversion to the provocation of a constitutional crisis, which might
easily arise if the people chose to declare war on the motion of a
magistrate without waiting for the advice of the fathers; while the
obstructive minority may have been alarmed by the distant vision of a
trial before the Assembly or before a commission of inquiry composed of
judges taken from the angry Equites. The senate took the lead in a
formal declaration of war; Numidia was named as one of the provinces
which were to be assigned to the future consuls in accordance with the
provisions of the Sempronian law. The choice of the people fell on
Publius Scipio Nasica and Lucius Calpurnius Bestia as consuls for the
following year.[924] The lot assigned the home government and the
guardianship of Italy to Nasica, while Bestia gained the command in the
impending war. Military preparations were pushed on with all haste; an
army was levied for service in Africa; pay and supplies were voted on an
adequate scale.

The news is said to have surprised Jugurtha.[925] Perhaps earlier
messages of a more cheerful import had reached him from Rome during the
days when successful obstruction seemed to be achieving its end, and had
dulled the fears which the massacre of Cirta most have aroused even in a
mind so familiar with the acquiescent policy of the senate. Yet even now
he did not lose heart, nor did his courage take the form, prevalent
amongst the lower types of mind, of a mere reliance on brute force, on
the resources of that Numidia of which he was now the undisputed lord.
With a persistence born of successful experience he still attempted the
methods of diplomacy-methods which prove a lack of insight only in the
sense that Rome was an impossible sphere for their present exercise. The
king had not gauged the situation in the capital; but subsequent events
proved that he still possessed a correct estimate of the real
inclinations of the men who were chiefly responsible for Roman policy.
The Numidian envoy was no less a person than the king's own son, and he
was supported by two trusty counsellors of Jugurtha.[926] As was usual
in the case of a diplomatic mission arriving from a country which had no
treaty relations, or was actually in a state of war, with Rome, the
envoys were not permitted to pass the gates until the will of the senate
was known. An excellent opportunity was given for proving the conversion
of the senate. When the consul Bestia put the question "Is it the
pleasure of the house that the envoys of Jugurtha be received within the
walls?" the firm answer was returned that "Unless these envoys had come
to surrender Numidia and its king to the absolute discretion of the
Roman people, they must cross the borders of Italy within ten
days".[927] The consul had this message conveyed to the prince, and he
and his colleagues returned from their fruitless mission.

Bestia meanwhile was consumed with military zeal. His army was ready,
his staff was chosen, and he was evidently bent on an earnest
prosecution of the war. He was in many respects as fit a man as could
have been selected for the task. His powers of physical endurance and
the vigour of his intellect had already been tested in war; he possessed
the resolution and the foresight of a true general. But the canker of
the age was supposed to have infected Bestia and neutralised his
splendid qualities.[928] The proof that he allowed greed to dominate his
public conduct is indeed lacking; but he would have departed widely from
the spirit of his time if he had allowed no thought of private gain to
add its quota to the joy of the soldier who finds himself for the first
time in the untrammelled conduct of a war. To the commanders of the age
foreign service was as a matter of course a source of profit as well as
a sphere of duty or of glory. To Bestia it was also to be a sphere for
diplomacy; and diplomacy and profit present an awkward combination,
which gives room for much misinterpretation. Although the war was in
some sense a concession to outside influences, the consul did not
represent the spirit to which the senate had yielded. Nine years earlier
he had served the cause of the nobility by effecting the recall of
Popillius from exile, and was now a member of that inner circle of the
government whose cautious manipulation of foreign affairs was veiled in
a secrecy which might easily rouse the suspicion, because it did not
appeal to the intelligence, of the masses. How vital a part diplomacy
was to play in the coming war, was shown by Bestia's selection of his
staff. It was practically a committee of the inner ring of governing
nobles,[929] and the importance attached to the purely political aspect
of the African war was proved by the fact that Scaurus himself deigned
to occupy a position amongst the legates of the commander. It was a
difficult task which Bestia and his assistants had to perform. They were
to carry out the mandate of the people and pursue Jugurtha as a
criminal; they were to follow out their own conviction as to the best
means of saving Rome from a prolonged and burdensome war with a whole
nation-a conviction which might, force them to recognise Jugurtha as a
king. To avenge honour and at the same time to secure peace was, in the
present condition of the public mind, an almost impossible task. Its
gravity was increased by the fact that, through the method of selection
employed for composing the general's council, a certain section of the
nobility, already marked out for suspicion, would be held wholly
responsible for its failure. It was a gravity that was probably
undervalued by the leaders of the expedition, who could scarcely have
looked forward to the day when it might be said that Bestia had selected
his legates with a view of hiding the misdeeds which, he meant to commit
under the authority of their names.[930]

When the time for departure had arrived, the legions were marched
through Italy to Rhegium, were shipped thence to Sicily and from Sicily
were transferred to the African province. This was to be Bestia's basis
of operations; and when he had gathered adequate supplies and organised
his lines of communication, he entered Numidia. His march was from a
superficial point of view a complete success; large numbers of prisoners
were taken and several cities were carried by assault.[931] But the
nature of the war in hand was soon made painfully manifest. It was a war
with a nation, not a mere hunting expedition for the purpose of tracking
down Jugurtha. The latter object could be successfully accomplished only
if some assistance were secured from friendly portions of Numidia or
from neighbouring powers. But there was no friendly portion of Numidia.
The mercantile class had been wiped out, and though the Romans seem to
have regained possession of Cirta at an early period of the war,[932] it
is not likely that it ever resumed the industrial life, which might have
supplied money and provisions, if not men; while the position of the
town rendered it useless as a basis of operations for expeditions into
that western portion of Numidia, from which the chief military strength
of Jugurtha was drawn. In these regions a possible ally was to be found
in Bocchus King of Mauretania; but his recent overtures to Rome had been
deliberately rejected by the senate. Nothing but the name of this great
King of the Moors, who ruled over the territory stretching from the
Muluccha to Tingis, had hitherto been known to the Roman people; even
the proximity of a portion of his kingdom to the coast of Spain had
brought him into no relations, either friendly or hostile, to the
imperial government.[933]

Bocchus had secured peace with his eastern neighbour by giving his
daughter in marriage to Jugurtha; but he never allowed this family
connection to disturb his ideas of political convenience and, as soon as
he heard that war had been declared against Jugurtha, he sent an embassy
to Rome praying for a treaty with the Roman people and a recognition as
one of the friends of the Republic.[934] This conduct may have been due
to the belief that a victory of the Romans over Jugurtha would entail
the destruction of the Numidian monarchy and the reduction of at least a
portion of the territory to the condition of a province. In this case
Mauretania would itself be the frontier kingdom, playing the part now
taken by Numidia; and Bocchus may have wished to have some claim on Rome
before his eastern frontier was bordered, as his northern was commanded,
by a Roman province. He may even have hoped to benefit by the spoils of
war, as Masinissa had once benefited by those which fell from Syphax and
from Carthage, and to increase his territories at the expense of his
son-in-law. There can be no better proof of the real intentions of the
government as regards Numidia, even after war had been declared, than
the senate's rejection of the offer made by Bocchus. His aid would be
invaluable from a strategic point of view, if the aim of the expedition
were to make Numidia a province or even to crush Jugurtha. But the most
constant maxim of senatorial policy was to avoid an extension of the
frontiers, and this principle was accompanied by a strong objection to
enter into close relations with any power that was not a frontier state.
Such relations might involve awkward obligations, and were inconsistent
with the policy which devolved the whole obligation for frontier defence
and frontier relations on a friendly client prince. Whether the
maintenance of the traditional scheme of administration in Africa
demanded the renewed recognition of Jugurtha as King of Numidia, was a
subordinate question; its answer depended entirely on the possibility of
the Numidians being induced to accept any other monarch.

It must have required but a brief experience of the war to convince
Bestia and his council that a Numidian kingdom without the recognition
of Jugurtha as king was almost unthinkable, unless Rome was prepared to
enter on an arduous and harassing war for the piecemeal conquest of the
land or (a task equally difficult) for the purpose of securing the
person of an elusive monarch, who could take every advantage of the
natural difficulties of his country and could find a refuge and ready
assistance in every part of his dominions. The tentative approaches of
Jugurtha, who negotiated while he fought, were therefore admitted both
by the consul and by Scaurus, who inevitably dominated the diplomatic
relations of the war. That Jugurtha sent money as well as proposals at
the hands of his envoys, was a fact subsequently approved by a Roman
court of law, and deserves such credence as can be attached to a verdict
which was the final phase of a political agitation. That Bestia was
blinded by avarice and lost all sense of his own and his country's
honour, that Scaurus's sense of respectability and distrust of Jugurtha
went down before the golden promises of the king,[935] were beliefs
widely held, and perhaps universally, professed, by the democrats who
were soon thundering at the doors of the Curia--by men, that is, who did
not understand, or whose policy led them to profess misunderstanding of,
the problem in statecraft, as dishonouring in some of its aspects as
such problems usually are, which was being faced by a general and a
statesman who were pursuing a narrow and traditional but very
intelligible line of policy. The policy was indeed sufficiently ugly
even had there been no suspicion of personal corruption; its ugliness
could be tested by the fact that even the sanguine and cynical Jugurtha
could hardly credit the extent of the good fortune revealed to him by
the progress of the negotiations. At first his diplomatic manoeuvres had
been adopted simply as a means of staying the progress of hostilities,
of gaining a breathing space while he renewed his efforts at influencing
opinion in the imperial city. But when he saw that the very agents of
war were willing to be missionaries of peace, that the avengers sent out
by an injured people were ready for conciliation before they had
inflicted punishment, he concentrated his efforts on an immediate
settlement of the question.[936] It was necessary for the enemy of the
Roman people to pass through a preliminary stage of humiliation before
he could be recognised as a friend; it was all the more imperative in
this case since a number of angry people in Rome were clamouring for
Jugurtha's punishment. It was also necessary to arrange a plan by which
the humiliation might be effected with the least inconvenience to both
parties. An armistice had already been declared as a necessary
preliminary to effective negotiations for a surrender. This condition of
peace rendered it possible for Jugurtha to be interviewed in person by a
responsible representative of the consul.[937] Both the king and the
consul were in close touch with one another near the north-western part
of the Roman province, and Jugurtha was actually in possession of Vaga,
a town only sixty miles south-west of Utica. The town, in spite of its
geographical position, was an appanage[938] of the Numidian kingdom, and
the pretext under which Bestia sent his quaestor to the spot, was the
acceptance of a supply of corn which had been demanded of the king as a
condition of the truce granted by the consul. The presence of the
quaestor at Vaga was really meant as a guarantee of good faith, and
perhaps he was regarded as a hostage for the personal security of
Jugurtha.[939] Shortly afterwards the king rode into the Roman camp and
was introduced to the consul and his council. He said a few words in
extenuation of the hostile feeling with which his recent course of
action had been received at Rome, and after this brief apology asked
that his surrender should be accepted. The conditions, it appeared, were
not for the full council; they were for the private ear of Bestia and
Scauras alone.[940] With these Jugurtha was soon closeted, and the final
programme was definitely arranged, On the following day the king
appeared again before the council of war; the consul pretended to take
the opinion of his advisers, but no clear issue for debate could
possibly be put before the board; for the gist of the whole proceedings,
the recognition of the right of Jugurtha to retain Numidia, was the
result of a secret understanding, not of a definite admission that could
be blazoned to the world. There was some formal and desultory
discussion, opinions on the question of surrender were elicited without
any differentiation of the many issues that it might involve, and the
consul was able to announce in the end that his council sanctioned the
acceptance of Jugurtha's submission.[941] The council, however, had
deemed it necessary that some visible proof, however slight, should be
given that a surrender had been effected; for it was necessary to convey
to the minds of critics at home the impression that some material
advantage had been won and that Jugurtha had been humiliated. With this
object in view the king was required to hand over something to the Roman
authorities. He kept his army, but solemnly transferred thirty
elephants, some large droves of cattle and horses, and a small sum of
money--the possessions, presumably, which he had ready at hand in his
city of Vaga--to the custody of the quaestor of the Roman army.[942] The
year meanwhile was drawing to a close, and the consul, now that peace
had been restored, quitted his province for Rome to preside at the
magisterial elections.[943] The army still remained in the Roman
province or in Numidia, but the cessation of hostilities reduced it to a
state of inaction which augured ill for its future discipline should it
again be called upon to serve.