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

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While the election of Marius, his appointment to Numidia, and his
preparations for the campaign were in progress, the war had been passing
through its usual phases of skirmishes and sieges. For a time no certain
news could be had of the king; he was reported at one moment to be near
the Roman lines, at another to be buried in the solitude of the
desert;[1095] the annoyance caused by his baffling changes of plan was
avenged by the interpretation that they were symptoms of a disordered
mind; his old counsellors were said to have been dispersed, his new ones
to be distrusted; it was believed that he changed his route and his
officers from day to day, and that he retreated or retraced his steps as
the terrors of suspicion and despair alternated with the faintly
surviving hope that a stand might yet be made. Only once did he come
into conflict with Metellus.[1096] The site of the skirmish is unknown,
and its result was indecisive. The Numidian army is said to have been
surprised and to have formed hastily for battle. The division led by the
king offered a brief resistance; the rest of the line yielded at once to
the Roman onset. A few standards and arms, a handful of prisoners, were
all that the victors had to show for their triumph. The nimble enemy had
disappeared beyond all hope of capture or pursuit.

After a time news was brought that the king had made for the southern
desert with a fraction of his mounted troops and the Roman deserters,
whose despair ensured their loyalty. He had shut himself up in
Thala,[1097] a large and wealthy town to which his treasures and his
children had already been transferred. This city lay some thirteen miles
east of the oasis of Capsa, and a dismal and waterless desert stretched
between the Romans and the refuge of the king. No Roman army had at any
part of the campaign attempted to penetrate such trackless regions, and
the court at Thala may have believed even this foretaste of the desert
to be an adequate protection against an enemy which clung to towns and
cultivated lands and relied, in the cumbrous manner of civilised
warfare, on organised lines of communication. But the news that Jugurtha
had at last occupied a position, the strength of which, together with
the presence of his family and treasures within its walls, might supply
a motive for a lengthy residence within the town and even suggest the
resolution of holding it against every hazard, fired Metellus with a
hope which the awkward political situation at Rome must have made more
real than it deserved to be. The end of the war might be in sight, if he
could only cross that belt of burning land. His plan was rapidly formed.
The burden of the baggage animals was reduced to ten days' supply of
corn; skins of water were laid upon their backs; the domestic cattle
from the fields were driven in, and they were laden with every kind of
vessel that could be gathered from the Numidian homesteads. The
villagers in the neighbourhood of the recent victory, whom the flight of
the king had made for the moment the humble servants of Rome, were
bidden to bring water to a certain spot, and the day was named on which
this mission was to be fulfilled. Metellus's own vessels were filled
from the river, and the rapid march to Thala was begun. The resting
place was reached and the camp was entrenched; water was there in
greater abundance than had been asked or hoped, for a sharp downpour of
rain made the plethoric skins presented by the punctual Numidians almost
a superfluous luxury and, as a happy omen, cheered the souls of the
soldiers as much as it refreshed their bodies.[1098] The devoted
villagers had also brought an unexpectedly large supply of corn, so
eager were they to give emphatic proof of their newly acquired loyalty.
But one day more and the walls of Thala came in sight. Its citizens were
surprised but not dismayed; they made preparations for the siege, while
their king vanished into the desert with his children and a large
portion of his hoarded wealth. It was too much to hope that Jugurtha
would be caught in such a trap. The alternative prospects at Thala were
immediate capture or a siege as protracted as the nature of the
territory would permit. In the latter case a cordon would be drawn round
the town and a price would probably be put upon the rebel's head. It is
strange that the desperate band of deserters did not accompany the king
in his flight. There may have been no time for the retreat of so large a
force, or the strength and desolation of the site may have filled them
with confidence of success. But, if things came to the worst, they had a
surprise in store for their former comrades who were now battering
against the walls.

Metellus, in spite of the fact that he had lightened his baggage animals
of all the superfluities of the camp, must have brought his siege train
with him; it would, indeed, have been madness to attempt an assault on a
fortified town without the necessary instruments of attack. He seems in
his lines round Thala to have had all that he needed for a blockade;
even the planks for the great moving turrets were ready to his
hand.[1099] The engines were soon in place on an artificial mound raised
by the labour of the troops, the soldiers advanced under cover of the
mantlets, and the rams began to batter against the walls. For forty days
the courage of the besieged tried the patience of assailants already
wearied with the toils of a long forced march. Had human endurance been
the deciding factor, Metellus might have been forced to retire. But the
wall of Thala was weaker than the spirit of its defenders; a portion of
the rampart crumbled beneath the blows of the ram, and the victorious
Romans rushed in to seize the plunder of the treasure-city. They found
instead a holocaust of wealth and human victims. The royal palace had
been invaded by the deserters from the Roman army whom Jugurtha had left
behind. Thither they had borne the gold, the silver and the precious
stuffs which formed the glory of the town. A feast was spread and
continued until the banqueters were heavy with meat and wine. The palace
was then fired, and when the plundering mob of Romans had made their way
to the centre of the city's wealth, they found but the smouldering
traces of a baffled vengeance and a disappointed greed.

The capture of Thala was one of those successes which might have been
important, had it been possible to limit the area of the war or to check
the disaffection which was now spreading throughout almost the whole of
Northern Africa. The fringe of the desert had but been reached; the king
had fled beyond it; the south and west were soon to be in a blaze; we
shall soon see Metellus forced to take up his position in the north; and
a slight incident which occurred while Metellus was at Thala showed that
even cities of the distant east, which had never been under the
immediate sway of the Numidian power, were wavering in their attachment
to Rome. The Greater Leptis, situate in the territory of the Three
Cities between the gulfs which separated Roman Africa from the territory
of Cyrene, had sought the friendship and alliance of Rome from the very
commencement of the war. A Sidonian settlement,[1100] it had, like most
commercial towns which sought a life of peace, preferred the
protectorate of Rome to that of the neighbouring dynasties, and had
readily responded to the calls made on it by Bestia, Albinus and
Metellus.[1101] Such assistance as it furnished must have been supplied
by sea, for it was more than four hundred miles by land from the usual
sphere of Roman operations; but the commissariat of the Roman army was
so serious a problem that the ships of the men of Leptis must always
have been a welcome sight at the port of Utica. Now the stability of
their constitution, and their service to Rome, were threatened by the
ambition of a powerful noble. This Hamilcar was defying the authority
both of laws and magistrates, and Leptis, they wrote, would be lost, if
Metellus did not send timely help. Four cohorts of Ligurians with a
praefect at their head were sent to the faithful state, and the Roman
general turned to meet the graver dangers which were threatening in
the west.

Jugurtha had crossed the desert with a handful of his men and was now
amongst the Gaetulian tribes,[1102] who stretched from the limits of his
own dominions far across the southern frontier of his brother king of
Mauretania. His eyes were now turned to the west; the men of the desert,
the King of the Moors, would be infallible means of prolonging the war
with Rome, if their help could be secured. No Roman army had yet dared
to penetrate even into Western Numidia, and such a venture would be more
hopeless than ever, if the nomad tribes of the desert frontier and
Bocchus of Mauretania enclosed that district with myriads of mounted men
that might sweep it at any time from point to point, and destroy in a
moment the laborious efforts at occupation that might be made by Rome.
The Gaetulians, although perhaps a nomad, were not a barbarian people.
They plied with Mediterranean cities a trade in purple dye, the material
for which was gathered on the Atlantic coast; and their merchants were
sometimes seen in the marketplace at Cirta;[1103] but as fighting men
they lacked even the organisation to which the Numidians had attained,
and Jugurtha, while he sought or purchased their help, was obliged to
teach them the rudiments of disciplined warfare. Gradually they learnt
to keep the line, to follow the standards, to wait for the word of
command before they threw themselves upon the foe;[1104] these untrained
warriors must have been fired mainly by the love of adventure, of pay or
of plunder, or have been impressed by the greatness of the fugitive who
had suddenly appeared amongst their tribes; they had no hatred or
previous fear of the power of Rome, for most of the Gaetulian chiefs
were ignorant even of the name of the imperial city.[1105]

This name, however, had long been in the mind of the king who governed
the northern neighbours of the Gaetulians, and it was to the fears or
hopes of Bocchus of Mauretania that Jugurtha now appealed with the
design of gaining an auxiliary force greater than any which he himself
could put into the field. He had a claim on the Mauretanian king which
might have been valid in a land in which polygamy did not prevail, for
he was the husband of that monarch's daughter; but the dissipation of
affection amongst a multitude of wives and their respective progeny did
not permit the connection with a son-in-law to be a particularly binding
tie.[1106] There were, however, other motives which might spur the king
to action. His early overtures to Rome had been rejected, and this
neglect must have aroused in his mind a feeling of anxiety as well as of
wounded pride. If Rome conquered Numidia, she might become his
neighbour. What in that case would be the position of Mauretania,
connected as it would be by no previous ties of friendship or alliance
with the conquering state? If Bacchus joined Jugurtha, he would
immediately become a power with whom Rome would be forced to deal. An
ally detached from her enemies had often become her most trusted friend;
it was thus that the power of Masinissa had been secured and his kingdom
had been increased. If Jugurtha were victorious, the Romans would be
kept at bay; if he showed signs of failure, the defection of Bocchus
might be bought at a great price. The game on which he had entered was
absolutely safe; he could only be the loser if at the critical moment
chivalry or national sentiment interfered with the designs of a
calculating prudence. The great necessity of his position was to force
the hand of the Roman general and the Roman senate; but meanwhile he
would keep an open mind and see whether the power which he dreaded might
not be permanently kept at bay.

It may have been with thoughts like these that Bocchus bowed to the
teaching of his counsellors when they urged a meeting with
Jugurtha.[1107] The meeting was that of equals, not of a suppliant and
his protector. The Numidian king again headed an army of his own, and,
after the oath of alliance had been given and received, exhorted his
father-in-law in his own interest to join in a war that was as necessary
as it was just. The Romans, he pointed out, had been made by their lust
for conquest the common enemies of the human race. One had only to look
at their treatment of Perseus of Macedon, of Carthage, of himself. Who
was Bocchus that he alone should be immune from such a danger? The mood
of the king responded to Jugurtha's words, and without an instant's
delay they took the field together. Jugurtha was insistent on despatch,
for he knew the varying temper of his relative and feared that even a
slight delay would cool his resolve for decisive action.

The scene of the war now shifts with amazing suddenness to the north and
centres for the first time round the walls of Cirta.[1108] Metellus had
evidently been drawn from the south by the news of the threatened
coalition; for, if the territories near the coast were undefended, the
Mauretanians might sweep like a devastating storm over the land that
might have been held with some show of justice to be in the possession
of Rome. Cirta now appears as within the pacified territory and,
although we have no record as to the time when it was lost by
Jugurtha,[1109] its possession by the Romans need excite no surprise. It
may have been lost at an early period of the war, for there is no sign
that it was employed by Jugurtha either as a military or political
capital, and if, in spite of the massacre that had followed its capture
from Adherbal, its cosmopolitan mercantile life had been revived, the
attachment of the town to Rome would be assured on the news of the
waning fortunes of its king. Its surrender was certainly peaceful, and
the strength which might have defied the arms of Rome had rendered it
incapable of recovery by its former owner. To Cirta Metellus had
transferred his prisoners, his booty and his baggage,[1110] and it was
against Cirta that the two kings moved with their formidable force.
Jugurtha was the moving spirit in the enterprise, his idea being that,
even if the town could not be taken, the Romans would be forced to come
to its support and a battle would be fought beneath its walls. A battle
was now an issue to be courted, for never had he faced the enemy with
greater numbers on his side.

Metellus was as fully conscious of the change in the situation. Lately
he had been forcing himself on Jugurtha at every point; now he held back
and waited for the favourable chance. He wished above all to learn
something of the fighting spirit and methods of the Moors;[1111] they
were an untried foe, and Roman success was usually the fruit of
knowledge and not of experiment. He waited in his fortified camp near
Cirta to watch events, when news was brought from Rome which proved to
his mind that cautious inaction was now not merely the wiser but the
only policy. The news that came by letter was of stunning force.
Metellus had already learnt of Marius's election to the consulship. This
knowledge should have prepared him for the worst; but a proud man,
conscious of his deserts, will not meet in anticipation an event that,
however probable, seems incredible. Yet here it was before him in black
and white. He had been superseded in his command and the province of
Numidia belonged to Marius.[1112] There was no pretence of
self-restraint; tears rose to his eyes, as bitter language flowed from
his lips. It was disputed whether natural pride or the sense of
unmerited wrong was the secret of his wrath, or whether he held (as many
thought) that a victory already won was being wrested from his grasp.
But it was safely conjectured that his grief would not have been so
violent had any man but Marius been his successor.

To risk a defeat at the moment when the command was slipping from his
grasp seemed to Metellus the height of folly; but, even had he not
possessed this additional motive for inaction, the situation would
probably have forced him to temporise and to attempt to dissolve the
hostile coalition by diplomacy. He therefore sent a message to Bocchus
urging him to think seriously of the course of action which he had
adopted.[1113] An opportunity was still open to him of becoming the
friend and ally of Rome; why should he adopt this motiveless attitude of
hostility? The cause of Jugurtha was desperate; did the King of
Mauretania wish to bring his own country into the same miserable plight?
These were the first words that Bocchus had heard of a possible
convention with Rome; he had scored the first point, but was much too
wise to give away the game. Definite offers must be made and securely
guaranteed before he would withdraw the terror of his presence. Firmness
and conciliation must be blended in his answer, which, when delivered,
was both gracious and chivalrous. He longed, he said, for peace, but was
stirred to pity for the fortunes of Jugurtha. If the latter were also
given the chance of making terms with Rome, all might be arranged.
Metellus replied with another message framed to meet the position taken
up by the king; the answer of Bocchus was a cautious mixture of assent
and protest. As he showed no unwillingness to continue the discussion,
Metellus occupied the remainder of his own tenure of the command in
further parleyings. Envoys came and went, and the war was practically
suspended. A delicate and promising negotiation was on foot; it remained
to be seen whether it would be patiently continued or rudely interrupted
by the new governor of Numidia.

CHAPTER VIII

The summer must have been well advanced when Marius landed at Utica with
his untried forces. The veterans were handed over to his care by the
legate Rutilius[1114] for Metellus had fled the sight of the man, whose
success had been based on a slanderous attack on his own reputation. It
must have been with a heavy heart that he accomplished the voyage to
Rome; for the greatest expert in the moods of the people could scarcely
have foretold the surprise that awaited him there. The popular passion
was spent; it was a feverish force that had burnt itself out; the
country voters had at last bethought themselves of their work and
returned to their farms; many of the most active and disorderly spirits,
the restless loud-voiced men who are the potent minority in an
agitation, had been removed by the levy of Marius; with the city mob
docility generally alternated with revolution, and it was now inclined
to look to the verdict of the recognised heads of the State. In this
moment of reaction, too, many must have been inclined to wonder what
after all could be said against this general who had never lost a
battle, who had conquered cities and pitilessly revenged the one
disaster which was not his fault, who had constantly swept the terrible
King of Numidia as a helpless fugitive before him. The presence of
Metellus completed the work by giving stability to these half-formed
views. The common folk are the true idealists. They love a hero rather
better than a victim, although it often depends on the turn of a hair
which part the object of their attentions is to play. Now they followed
the lead of the senate; the returned commander was the man of the
day[1115] he had exalted the glory of the Roman name; and if there was
no fault, there could only have been misfortune; but misfortune might be
compensated by honour. There was the prospect of a triumph in store,
that mixed source of sensuous satisfaction and national
self-congratulation. Thus Metellus won his prizes from the Numidian war,
a parade through the streets to the Capitol and the addition of the
surname "Numidicus" to the already lengthy nomenclature of his
house[1116]

The war itself, under the guidance of Marius, soon assumed the character
which it had possessed under that of all his predecessors. The
originality of the new commander seemed to have spent itself in the
selection of his troops; no new idea seems to have been introduced into
the conduct of operations, which resumed their old shapes of precautions
against surprise, weary marches from end to end of Numidia, and the
siege of strongholds which were no sooner taken than they proved to be
beyond the area of actual hostilities. Perhaps no new idea was possible
except one that exchanged the weapons of war for those of diplomacy; but
even the final attempt that had been made in this direction by Metellus
was not continued by Marius. Bocchus, unwilling to lose the chance which
had been presented of a definite convention with Home, sent repeated
messages to her new representative to the effect that he desired the
friendship of the Roman people, and that no acts of hostility on his
part need be feared[1117] but his protestations were received with
distrust, and Marius, accustomed to the duplicity of the African mind
and rejecting the view that the king might really be wavering between
war and peace, chose to regard them as the treacherous cover for a
sudden attack. The desultory campaign which followed seems to have been
directed by two motives. The first was the training of the raw levies
which had just been brought from Rome; the second the supposed necessity
of cutting Jugurtha off from the strongholds which he still held at the
extremities of his kingdom. As these extremities were now threatened or
commanded, on the south by the Gaetulians and on the west by the
Mauretanians, the area of the war was no less than that of Numidia
itself; and, as the occupation of such an area was impossible, the
destruction of these strongholds, which was little loss to a mobile
self-supporting force such as that which Jugurtha had at his command,
was the utmost end which could be secured.

The practice of the untrained Roman levies was rendered easy by the fact
that Jugurtha had resumed the offensive. He no longer had the help of
his Mauretanian auxiliaries, for Bocchus had retired to his own kingdom,
and he had therefore lost his desire for a pitched battle; but his
swarms of Gaetulian horse had enabled him to resume his old style of
guerilla fighting, and he had taken advantage of the practical
suspension of hostilities which had accompanied the change in the Roman
command, to set on foot a series of raids against the friends of Rome
and even to penetrate the borders of the Roman province itself.[1118]
For some time the attention of Marius was absorbed in following his
difficult tracks, in striving to anticipate his rapidly shifting plans,
in creating in his own men the habits of endurance, the mobility and the
strained attention, which even a brief period of such a chase will
rapidly engender in the rawest of recruits. The pursuit gradually
shifted to the west, and a series of sharp conflicts on the road ended
finally in the rout of the king in the neighbourhood of Cirta. With
troops now seasoned to the toils of long marches and deliberate attack,
Marius turned to the more definite, if not more effective, enterprise of
beleaguering such fortified positions as were still strongly held, and
by their position seemed to give a strategic advantage to the enemy. His
object was either to strip Jugurtha of these last garrisons or to force
him to a battle if he came to their defence. At first he confined his
operations within a narrow area; the best part of the summer months
seems to have been spent in the territory lying east and south of Cirta,
and within this region several fortresses and castles still adhering to
the king were reduced by persuasion or by force.[1119] Yet Jugurtha made
no move, and Marius gained a full experience of the helpless irritation
of the commander who hears that his enemy is far away, neglectful of his
efforts and wholly absorbed in some deep-laid scheme the very rudiments
of which are beyond the reach of conjecture. His operations seem to have
brought him to a point somewhere in the neighbourhood of Sicca, and this
proximity to the southern regions of Numidia suggested the thought of an
enterprise that might rival and even surpass Metellus's storm of Thala.
About thirteen miles west of that town[1120] lay the strong city of
Capsa.[1121] It marked almost the extremest limit of Jugurtha's empire
in this direction, placed as it was just north of the great lakes and
west of the deepest curve of the Lesser Syrtis. The town was the gift of
an oasis, which here broke the monotony of the desert with pleasant
groves of dates and olives and a perennial stream of water. The sources
of this stream, which was formed by the union of two fountains, had been
enclosed within the walls, and supplied drinking water for the city
before it passed beyond it to irrigate the land. Even this supply hardly
sufficed for the moderate needs of the Numidians, who supplemented it by
rain water[1122] which they caught and stored in cisterns. A siege of
Capsa in the dry season might therefore prove irksome to the
inhabitants; but the invading army might be even less well supplied, for
although four other springs outside the walls fed the canals which
served the work of irrigation, they tended to run low when the season of
rain was past. The security of the city, although its defences and its
garrison were strong, was thought to reside mainly in its desert
barrier. The waste through which an invading army would have to pass was
waterless and barren, while the multitude of snakes and scorpions that
found a congenial home on the arid soil increased the horror, if not the
danger, of the route.[1123] Jugurtha had dealt kindly by the lonely
citizens of Capsa; they were free from taxes and had seldom to answer to
any demand of the king: and this favour, which was perhaps as much the
product of necessity as of policy, had strengthened their loyalty to the
Numidian throne. It is probable that some strategic, or at least
military, motive was mingled in the mind of Marius with the mere desire
of excelling his predecessor and creating a deep impression in the minds
of the proletariate in his army and at home. Although Capsa, with its
limited resources, could hardly ever have served as the point of
departure for a large Numidian or Gaetulian host, it might have been of
value as a refuge for the king when he wished to vanish from the eyes of
his enemies, and perhaps as a means of communication with friendly
cities or peoples situated between the two Syrtes. To vanquish the
difficulties of such an enterprise might also strike terror into the
Numidian garrisons of other towns, and the subjects of Jugurtha might
feel that no stronghold was safe when the unapproachable Capsa had been
taken or destroyed. But the difficulties of the task were great. The
Numidians of these regions were more attached to a pastoral life than to
agriculture; the stores of corn to be found along the route were
therefore scanty, and their scarcity was increased by the fact that the
king, who seems but lately to have passed through these regions, had
ordered that large supplies of grain should be conveyed from the
district and stored in the fortresses which his garrisons still
held.[1124] Nothing could be got from the fields, which at this late
period of the autumn showed nothing but arid stubble. It was fortunate
that some stores still lay at Lares (Lorbeus), a town at a short
distance to the south-east of his present base;[1125] these were to be
supplemented by the cattle that the foraging parties had driven in, and
the Roman soldier would at least have his unwelcome supply of meat
tempered by a moderate allowance of meal. Yet the terrors of the journey
were so great that Marius thought it wise to conceal the object of his
enterprise even from his own men, and even when, after a six days' march
to the south, he had reached a stream called the Tana,[1126] the motive
of the expedition was still in all probability unknown. Here, as in
Metellus's march on Thala, a large supply of water was drawn from the
river and stored in skins, all heavy baggage was discarded, and the
lightened column prepared for its march across the desert. By day the
soldiers kept their camp and every stage of the journey was accomplished
between night-fall and dawn. On the morning of the third day they had
reached some rising ground not more than two miles from Capsa.[1127] The
sun had not yet risen when Marius halted his men in a hollow of the
dunes, and watched the town to see whether his cautious plans had really
effected a surprise. Evidently they had; for, when day broke, the gates
were seen to open and large numbers of Numidians could be observed
leaving the city for the business of the fields. The word was given, and
in a moment the whole of the cavalry and the lightest of the infantry
were dashing on the town. They were meant to block the gates; while
Marius and the heavier troops followed as speedily as they could,
driving the straggling Numidians before them. It was the possession of
these hostages that decided the fate of the town. The commandant
parleyed and agreed to admit the Romans within the walls, the condition,
whether tacit or expressed, of this surrender being that the lives of
the citizens should be spared. The condition was immediately broken. The
town was given over to the flames, all the Numidians of full age were
put to the sword, the rest were sold into slavery, and the movable
property which had been seized was divided amongst the soldiers. The
breach of international custom was not denied; the only attempt at
palliation was drawn from the reflection that it was due neither to
motiveless treachery nor to greed; a position like Capsa, it was
urged,--difficult of approach, open to the enemy, the home of a race
notorious for its mobile cunning-could be held neither by leniency nor
by fear.[1128] The expedition had miscarried, if the town was not
destroyed; and, as frequently happens in the pursuit of wars with
peoples to whom the convenient epithet of "barbarian" can be applied,
the successful fruit of cruelty and treachery was perhaps defended on
the ground that the obligations of international law must be either
reciprocal or non-existent.