A History of Rome, Vol 1 by A H.J. Greenidge (page 6)

than when buying allotments which might be held to be still liable to the public dues. On the other hand, the remission of the impost must have relieved, and the sense of private ownership inspired, the labours of the smaller proprietors; and the perpetuation of a considerable proportion of the Gracchan settlers is probable on general grounds. The reason why it is difficult to give specific reasons for this belief is that, at the time when we next begin to get glimpses of the condition of the Italian peasant class, the great reform had been effected which incorporated the nations of Italy into Rome. The existence of numerous small proprietors in the Ciceronian period is attested, but many of these may have been citizens recently given to Rome by the Italian stocks, amongst whom agriculture on a small scale had never become extinct.

But the political import of this measure is considerable. By restricting to narrow limits all the land of Italy to which the State could make a claim, it altered the character of agrarian agitation for the future. It did not indeed fulfil its possible object of obviating such measures; but it rendered the vested interests of all Italian cultivators secure, with the exception of the lessees of the leased domain, who perhaps had no claim to permanence of tenure. This domain was represented chiefly by the Campanian land: and the reformer who would make this territory his prey, injured the finances of the State more than the interests of the individual. If he desired more, he must seek it either in the foreign domains of Rome or by the adoption of some scheme of land purchase. Assignment of lands in particular districts of Italy or in the provinces naturally took the form of colonisation, and this is the favourite shape assumed by the agrarian schemes of the future. Rome was still to witness many fierce controversies as to the merits of the policy of colonial expansion, and as to the wisdom of employing public property and public revenues to this end; the rights of the conqueror to the lands of his vanquished fellow-citizens were also to be cruelly asserted, and the civil wars also invited a species of brigandage for the attainment of possession which too often replaced the judgments of the courts; but never again do we find a regular political warfare waged between the rich and the poor for the possession of territories to which each of the disputants laid claim. The storm which had burst on the Roman world with the land law of Tiberius Gracchus had now spent its force. It had undoubtedly produced a great change on the face of Italy; but this was perhaps more striking in appearance than in reality; neither the work of demolition, nor the opportunities offered for renewal, attained the completeness which they had presented in the reformer’s dreams.

But the peace of the citizen body was not the only blessing believed to be secured by this removal of a temptation to tamper with Italian lands. The anxieties of the Latins and Italians were also quieted, although it may be questioned whether the memory of past wrongs, now rendered irrevocable by the progress of recent agrarian experiments, did not enter into the agitation for the conferment of the franchise, which they still continued to sustain. The last great law, following the spirit of the enactment of Drusus which had preceded it by about a year, does indeed show traces of an anxiety to respect Italian claims. Apart from the fact, which we have already mentioned, that all lands which had been granted in usufruct to colonists, were still to be public and were, therefore, in the case of Latin colonies, to be at the disposal of the communities to which they had been granted by treaty, the law contains a special provision for the maintenance of the rights of Latins and Italians, so far as they are in harmony with the rights allowed to Roman citizens by the enactment.[781] The guarantees which had been sanctioned by Drusus, were therefore respected; but their observance was conditioned by the rule that all prohibitions now created for Romans should be extended to the allies. As we do not know the purport of Drusus’s measure, or the practices current on the Roman domains occupied by Latins, we cannot say whether this clause produced any derogation of their rights; but it must have limited the right of free pasturage on the public commons, if they had possessed this in a higher degree than was now permitted, and the right to occupy public land was also forbidden them in the future. But it was from the negative point of view that the law might be interpreted as creating or perpetuating a grievance; for some of the positive benefits which it conferred seem to have been limited to Romans. The land which it makes private property, is land which has been assigned by colonial or agrarian commissioners, or land which has been occupied up to a certain limit. If colonial land had really been assigned to Latins by Caius Gracchus, their rights are retained by this law, if they had been made Roman citizens at the time of the settlement; but if they had been admitted as participants in the agrarian distribution throughout Italy, their rights as owners are not confirmed with those of Roman citizens; and the Latin who merely occupied land was not given the privilege of the Roman possessor of becoming the owner of the soil, if his occupation were restricted within a certain limit.[782] He still retained merely a precarious possession, for which dues to the State were probably exacted. It was something to have rights confirmed, but they probably appeared less valuable when those of others were extended. A more generous treatment could hardly have been expected from a law of Rome dealing with her own domain, primarily in the interests of her own citizens; but the Italians were tending to forget their civic independence, and chose rather to compare their personal rights with those of the Roman burgesses. Such a comparison applied to the final agrarian settlement must have done something to emphasise their belief in the inferiority of their position.

This review of the legislation on social questions which was initiated or endured by the senate, shows the tentative attitude adopted by the nobility in their dealings with the people, and proves either a statesmanlike view of the needs of the situation or the entire lack of a proud consciousness of their own immunity from attack. Even had they possessed the power to dictate to the Comitia, they were hemmed in on another side; for they had not dared to raise a protest against the law of Gracchus which transferred criminal jurisdiction over the members of their own order to the knights. The equestrian courts sat in judgment on the noblest members of the aristocracy; for the political or personal motives which urged to prosecution were stronger even than the camaraderie of the order, and governors of provinces were still in danger of indictment by their peers. Within two years of the transference of the courts, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, known in later life as “the Augur” and famed for his knowledge of the civil law, returned from his province of Asia to meet the accusation of Titus Albucius.[783] The knights did not begin by a vindictive exercise of their authority. Although Asia was the most favoured sphere of their activity, Scaevola was acquitted. Seven years later they gave a stern and perhaps righteous example of their severity in the condemnation of Caius Porcius Cato.[784] The accused when consul had obtained Macedonia as his province, and had waged a frontier war with the Scordisci, which ended in the annihilation of his forces and his own narrow escape from the field of battle. His ill-success perhaps deepened the impression made by his extortions in Macedonia, and he was sentenced to the payment of a fine. Neither in the case of the acquittal nor in that of the condemnation does political bias seem to have influenced the judgment of the courts, and the equestrian jurors may have seemed for a time to realise the best hopes which had inspired their creation.

The attention of the leading members of the nobility was probably too absorbed by the problem of adapting senatorial rule to altered circumstances to allow them the leisure or the inclination to embark on fresh legislative projects of their own. Our record of these years is so imperfect that it would be rash to conclude that the scanty proposals on new subjects which it reveals exhausted the legislative activity of the senate; but had they done so, the circumstance would be intelligible; for the work that invited the attention of the senate in its own interest, was one of consolidation rather than of reform; the political feeling of the time put measures of a distinctly reactionary character, such as might have been welcomed by the more conservative members of the order, wholly out of the question; and the government was not likely, except under compulsion, to undertake legislation of a progressive type. The only important law of the period certainly proceeding from governmental circles, and dealing with a question that was novel, in the sense that it had not been heard of for a considerable number of years and had played no part in the Gracchan movements, was one passed by the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. It dealt with the voting power of the freedmen,[785] and probably confirmed its restriction to the four city tribes. It is difficult to assign a political meaning to this law, as we do not know the practice which prevailed at the time of Scaurus’s intervention; but it is probable that the restriction imposed by the censors of 169, who had confined the freedmen to a single tribe,[786] had not been observed, that great irregularity prevailed in the manner of their registration, and that Scaurus’s measure, which was a return to the arrangement reached at the end of the fourth century, was intended to restrict the voting privileges of the class. This interpretation of his intention would seem to show that the increasing liberality of the Roman master had created a class the larger portion of which was not dependent on the wealthier and more conservative section of the citizen body, or was at least enabled to assert its freedom from control through the secrecy of the ballot. The interests of the class were almost identical with those of the free proletariate, in which the descendants of the freedmen were merged: and the law of Scaurus, which strengthened the country vote by preventing this urban influence spreading through all the tribes, may be an evidence that the senate distrusted the present passivity of the urban folk, and looked forward with apprehension to a time when they might have to rely on the more stable element which the country districts supplied. We shall see in the sequel that this anticipation of the freedmen’s attitude was not unjustified, and that the increase of their voting power still continued to be an effective battle-cry for the demagogue who was eager to increase his following in the city.

Scaurus was also the author of a sumptuary law.[787] It came appropriately from a man who had been trained in a school of poverty, and shows the willingness of the nobility to submit, at least in appearance, to the discipline which would present it to the world as a self-sacrificing administration, reaping no selfish reward for its intense labour, and submitting to that equality of life with the average citizen which is the best democratic concession that a powerful oligarchy can make. The activity of the censorship was exhibited in the same direction. Foreign and expensive dishes were prohibited by the guardians of public morals, as they were by Scaurus’s sumptuary law:[788] and the censors of 115, Metellus and Domitius, undertook a scrutiny of the stage which resulted in the complete exclusion from Rome of all complex forms of the histrionic art and its reduction to the simple Latin type of music and song.[789] Their energy was also displayed in a destructive examination of the morals of their own order, and as a result of the scrutiny thirty-two senators were banished from the Curia.[790] To guard the senate-house from scandal was indeed the necessary policy of a nobility which knew that its precarious power rested on the opinion of the streets; and the efforts of the censors, directed like those of their predecessors, to a regeneration which had a national type as its goal, show that that opinion could not yet have been considered wholly cosmopolitan or corrupt. The frequent splendour of triumphal processions, such as those which celebrated the victories of Domitius and Fabius over the Allobroges, of Metellus over the Dalmatians, and of Scaurus over the Ligurians,[791] produced a comfortable impression of the efficiency of the government in extending or preserving the frontiers of the empire; the triumph itself was the symbol of success, and few could have cared to question the extent and utility of the achievement. Satisfied with the belief that they were witnessing the average type of successful administration, the electors pursued the course, from which they so seldom deflected, of giving their unreserved confidence to the ancient houses; and this epoch witnessed a striking instance of hereditary influence, if not of hereditary talent, when Metellus Macedonicus was borne to his grave by sons, of whom four had held curule office, three had possessed the consulship, and one had fulfilled in addition the lofty functions of the censor and enjoyed the honour of a triumph.[792]

Yet distinction without a certain degree of fitness was now, as at every other time, an impossibility in Rome. The nobility, although it did not love originality, extended a helping hand to the capacity that was willing to support its cause and showed the likelihood of dignifying its administration; a career was still open to talent and address, if they were held to be wisely directed; and the man of the period who best deserves the title of leader of the State, was one who had not even sprung from the second strata of Roman society, but had struggled with a poverty which would have condemned an ordinary man to devote such leisure as he could spare for politics to swelling the babel of the Forum and the streets. It is true that Marcus Aemilius Scaurus bore a patrician name, and was one of those potential kings who, once in the senate, might assume the royal foot-gear and continue the holy task, which they had performed from the time of Romulus, of guarding and transmitting the auspices of the Roman people. But the splendour of the name had long been dimmed. Even in the history of the great wars of the beginning of the century but one Aemilius Scaurus appears, and he holds but a subordinate command as an officer of the Roman fleet. The father of the future chief of the senate had been forced to seek a livelihood in the humble calling of a purveyor of charcoal.[793] The son, resolute, ambitious and conscious of great powers, long debated with himself the question of his future walk in life.[794] He might remain in the ranks of the business world, supply money to customers in place of coal, and seize the golden opportunities which were being presented by the extension of the banking industry in the provincial world. Had he chosen this path, Scaurus might have been the chief of the knights and the most resolute champion of equestrian claims against the government. But his course was decided by the afterthought that the power of words was greater than that of gold, and that eloquence might secure, not only wealth, but the influence which wealth alone cannot attain. The fame which he gained in the Forum led inevitably to service in the field. He reaped distinction in the Spanish campaigns and served under Orestes in Sardinia. His narrow means rather than his principles may have been the reason why his aedileship was not marked by the generous shows to which the people were accustomed and by which their favour was usually purchased; in Scaurus’s tenure of that office splendour was replaced by a rigorous performance of judicial duties;[795] but that such an equivalent could serve his purpose, that it should be even no hindrance to his career, proves the respect that his strenuous character had won from the people, and the anticipation formed by the government of the value of his future services. Now, when he was nearing his fiftieth year, he had secured the consulship, the bourne of most successful careers, but not to be the last or greatest prize of a man whose stately presence, unbending dignity, and apparent simplicity of purpose, could generally awe the people into respect, and whose keenness of vision and talent for intrigue impressed the senatorial mind with a sense of his power to save, when claims were pressing and difficulties acute.[796] His consulship, though without brilliancy, added to the respectable laurels that he had already attained. A successful raid on some Illyrian tribes[797] showed at least that he had retained the physical endurance of his youth; while his legislation on sumptuary matters and the freedman’s vote showed the spirit of a milder Cato, and the moderate conservatism, not distasteful to the Roman of pure blood, which would preserve the preponderance in political power to the citizen untainted by the stain of servitude. A stormy event of his period of office gave the crowd an opportunity of seeing the severity with which a magistrate of the older school could avenge an affront to the dignity of his office. Publius Decius, who was believed to be a conscious imitator of Fulvius Flaccus in the exaggerated vehemence of his oratory, and who had already proved by his prosecution of Opimius that he was ready to defend certain features of the Gracchan cause even when such championship was fraught with danger, was in possession of the urban praetorship at the time when Scaurus held the consulship. One day the consul passed the open court of justice when the praetor was giving judgment from the curule chair. Decius remained seated, either in feigned oblivion or in ostentatious disregard of the presence of his superior. The politic wrath of Scaurus was aroused; an enemy had been delivered into his hands, and the people might be given an object-lesson of the way in which the most vehement champion of popular rights was, even when covered with the dignity of a magistracy, but a straw in the iron grasp of the higher Imperium. The consul ordered Decius to rise, his official robe to be rent, the chair of justice to be shattered in pieces, and published a warning that no future litigant should resort to the court of the contumacious praetor.[798] The vulgar mind is impressed, when it is not angered, by such scenes of violence. A repute for sternness is the best cloak for the flexibility which, if revealed, would excite suspicion. Scaurus to the popular mind was an embodiment of stiff patrician dignity, perhaps happily devoid of that touch of insolence which is often the mark of a career assured without a struggle; of a self-complacent dignity, quietly conscious of its own deserts and demanding their due reward, of the calmness of a soul that is above suspicion and refuses to admit even in its inmost sanctuary the thought that its motives can be impugned. Meanwhile certain disrespectful onlookers were expressing wonder at his mysteriously growing wealth and marvelling as to its source. But, marvel as they might, they never drove Scaurus to the necessity of an explanation. We shall find him as an old man repelling all attacks by the irresistible appeal to his services and his career. The condemnation of Scaurus appealed to the conservative as a blow struck at the dignity of the State itself; to the man of a more open mind it was at least the shattering of a delightful illusion.

The period which witnessed the crowning of the efforts of the poor and struggling patrician was also sufficiently liberal, or sufficiently poor in aristocratic talent, to admit the initial steps in the official career of a genuine son of the people. It was now that Caius Marius was laboriously climbing the grades of curule rank, and showing in the pursuit of political influence at home the rugged determination which had already distinguished him in the field. A Volscian by descent, he belonged to Rome through the accident of birth in the old municipality of Arpinum, which since the early part of the second century had enjoyed full Roman citizenship and therefore gave its citizens the right of suffrage and of honours in the capital. Born of good yeoman stock in the village of Cereatae in the Arpinate territory,[799] he had passed a boyhood which derived no polish from the refinements, and no taint from the corruptions, of city life. In his case there was no puzzling discrepancy between the outer and the inner man. His frame and visage were the true index of a mind, somewhat unhewn and uncouth, but with a massive reserve of strength, a persistence not blindly obstinate, a patience that could wear out the most brilliant efforts of his rivals and opponents. He did not court hostility, but simply shouldered his way sturdily to the front, encouraged by Rome’s better spirits, who saw in him the excellent officer with qualities that might make the future general, and appealing to the people, when they gradually became familiar with his presence, as a type of that venerable myth, the rustic statesman of the past. The poverty of his early lot was perhaps exaggerated by historians[800] who wished to point the contrast between his humble origin and his later glory, and to find a suitable cradle for his rugged nature; even the initial stages of his career afford no evidence of a struggle against pressing want, nor is there any proof that he was supported by the bounty of his powerful friends. Even if he entered the army as a common foot-soldier, he would merely have shared the lot of many a well-to-do yeoman who obeyed the call of the conscription. With Marius, however, military service was not to be an incident, but a profession. The needs of a widening empire were calling for special capacities such as had never been demanded in the past. The career of Scaurus had shown the successful pleader surmounting the obstacle of poverty; even the higher barrier of birth might be leaped amidst the democratising influences of the camp. The nobility was not sufficiently self-centred to be wholly blind to its own interests; and it was easier to patronise a soldier than a pleader. In the latter case the aspirant’s political creed must be examined; in the former the last question that would be asked was whether the officer possessed any political creed at all. It might be a question of importance for the future with respect to the candidature for those offices which alone conferred high military command, even though there was as yet no dream of the sword becoming the arbiter of political life; but the genuine commander, engaged in the difficult task of remodelling an army, had no eye but for the bearing and qualities of the soldier, and would not scruple to cast aside his patrician prejudices in a despairing effort to find the fittest instruments for the perfecting of his great design. It was Marius’s fortunate lot to enter the field at a time of trial, and to serve his first campaign under a general, who was combating the adverse forces of influence, licence and incompetence in the official staff supplied by the government and represented by the young scions of the nobility. To the camp before Numantia, where Scipio was scourging his men into obedience, rooting out the amenities of life, and astonishing his officers with new ideas of the meaning of a campaign, Marius brought the very qualities on which the general had set his heart. An unflinching courage, shown on one occasion in single combat when he overthrew a champion of the foe, a power of physical endurance which could submit to all changes of temperature and food, a minute precision in the performance of the detailed duties of the camp, soon led to his rapid advancement and to his selection as a member of the intimate circle which surrounded the commander-in-chief. Every great specialist has a small claim to the gift of prophecy; for he possesses an instinct which reveals more than his reason will permit him to prove; and we need not wonder at the story that, when once the debate grew warm round Scipio’s table as to who would succeed him as the chosen commander of the Roman host, he lightly touched the shoulder of Marius and answered “Perhaps we shall find him here”.[801]

The higher commands in the army could be sought only through a political career; and Marius, inspired with the highest hopes by Scipio’s commendation, was forced to breathe the uncongenial atmosphere of the city and to fight his way upwards to the curule offices. There is no proof that he took advantage of the current of democratic feeling which accompanied the movements of the Gracchi. It was, perhaps, as well that he did not; for such an association might have long delayed his higher political career. The nobles who posed as democrats probably attached more importance to forensic skill than to military merit; and the support which Marius enjoyed was sought and found amongst the representatives of the opposite party. Scipio’s death removed a man who might have been a powerful advocate on his behalf; the vague relationship of clientship in which the family of Marius had stood to the clan of the Herennii[802]–a relation common between Roman families and the members of Italian townships, and in this case probably dating from a time before Arpinum had received full Roman rights–seems never to have led to active interference on his behalf on the part of the representatives of that ancient Samnite house. Perhaps the Herennii were too weak to assist the fortunes of their client; they certainly give no names to the Fasti of this period. It is also possible that the proud soldier was galled by the memory of the hereditary yoke, and sought assistance where it would be given simply as a mark of merit, not as a duty conditioned by the claim to irksome reciprocal obligations. The all-powerful family of the Caecilii Metelli, who were at this time vigorously fulfilling the destiny of office which heaven had prescribed for their clan, stretched out a helping hand to the distinguished soldier;[803] a family born to military command might consult its interests, while it gratified its sympathies, by attaching to its _clientèle_ a warrior who had received the best training of the school of Africanus. After he had held the military tribunate and the quaestorship,[804] Marius attained the tribunate of the Plebs with the assistance of Lucius Caecilius Metellus.[805] He was in his thirty-ninth year when he entered on the first office which gave him the opportunity of claiming the attention of the people by the initiation of legislative measures. The slowness of his rise may have led him to believe that he might accelerate his career by taking his fortune into his own hands; certainly if the law which bore his name was not unwelcome to the better portion of the nobility, the methods by which he forced it through did not commend themselves even to his patron. His proposal was meant to limit the exercise of undue influence at the Comitia, and although the law doubtless referred to legislative meetings summoned for every purpose, it was chiefly directed to securing the independence of the voter in such public trials as still took place before the people,[806] and was perhaps inspired by scenes that might have been witnessed at the acquittal of Opimius one year previously. One of the clauses of the bill provided that the exits to the galleries, through which the voters filed to give their suffrages to the tellers, should be narrowed,[807] the object being to exclude the political agents who were accustomed to occupy the sides of the passages, and influence or intimidate, by their presence if not by their words, the voting citizen at the critical moment when he was about to record his verdict. Such methods were probably found effective even where the ballot was used, but their success must have been even greater in trials for treason, at which voting by word of mouth was still employed. It was difficult for a government, which had accepted the ballot, to offer a decent resistance to a measure of this kind. The proposal attacked indifferently political methods which might be, and probably were, employed by both parties; and, although its success would no doubt inflict more injury on the government than on the opposition, it could not be repudiated by the senate on the ground that it was tainted by an aggressively “popular” character. The opposition which it actually encountered was apparently based on the formal ground that the heads of the administration had not been sufficiently consulted. The law was not the outcome of any senatorial decree, nor had the senate’s opinion been deliberately taken on the utility of the measure. The consul Cotta persuaded the house to frame a resolution expressing dissatisfaction with the proposal as it stood, and to summon Marius for an explanation. The summons was promptly obeyed, but the expected scene of humiliation of the untried parvenu was rudely interrupted at an early period of the debate. Marius knew that he had the people and the tribunician college with him, and that even the most perverse ingenuity could never construe the measure as a factious opposition to the interests of the State. Obedience to the senate would in this instance mean the sacrifice of a reputation for political honesty and courage; it might be better to burn his boats and to trust for the future to the generosity of the people for the gifts which the nobility so grudgingly bestowed. He chose to regard the controversy as one of those cases of hopeless conflict between the members of the magistracy, for the solution of which the law had provided regular though exceptional means. He fell back on the majesty of the tribunician power, and threatened Cotta with imprisonment if he did not withdraw his resolution.[808] It is probable that up to this point no decree expressing wholesale condemnation of the bill had been passed, and the senate might therefore be coerced through the magistrate, without its authority being utterly disregarded. Cotta turned to his colleague Metellus, known to be the friend of the obstinate tribune, and Metellus rising gave the consul his support. Marius, undaunted by the attitude of his patron, hurried matters to a close. He summoned his attendant to the Curia, and bade him take Metellus himself into custody and conduct him to a place of confinement. Metellus appealed to the other tribunes, but none would offer his help; and the senate was forced to save the situation by sacrificing its vote of censure. So rapid and complete a victory, even on an issue of no great importance, delighted the popular mind. The senate was then in good favour at Rome; but a chance for realising their superiority over the greatest of their servants was always welcome to the people. They also loved those exhibitions of physical force by which the genius of Rome had solved the difficulties of her constitution: and the violence of a tribune was as impressive now as was that of a consul four years later. Marius had gained a character for sturdy independence and unshaken constancy, which was to produce unexpected results in the political world of the future, and was to be immediately tested in a manner that must have proved profoundly disappointing to many who acclaimed him. It seems as though this victory over the resolution of the senate may have urged certain would-be reformers to believe that measures of a Gracchan type might win the favour of the people, and secure the support of a tribunician college which seemed to be out of sympathy with the government. Some proposal dealing with the distribution of corn,[809] perhaps an extension of the existing scheme, was made. It found no more resolute opponent than Marius, and his opposition helped to secure its utter defeat. In this resistance we may perhaps see the genuinely neutral character of the man; for the attribution of interested motives, although the historian’s favourite revenge for the difficulties of his task, endows his characters with a foresight which is as abnormal as their lack of principle; although it is questionable whether Marius would have gained by identifying himself with a cause which had not yet emerged from the ruin of its failure.

The lack of official support and the alienation of a section of the people may perhaps be traced in the successive defeats of his candidature for the curule and plebeian aedileships,[810] although in the elections to these offices the attention of the people was so keenly directed to the candidate’s pecuniary means as a guarantee of their gratification by brilliant shows, that the aedileship must have been of all magistracies the most difficult of attainment by merit unsupported by wealth. Even when the rejected candidate had won favour on other grounds, the electors could salve their consciences with the reflection that the aedileship was no obligatory step in an official career, and that, where merit and not money was in question, they could show their appreciation of personal qualities in the elections to the praetorship. A year after his repulse Marius turned to the candidature for this office, which conveyed the first opportunity of the tenure of an independent military command. He was returned at the bottom of the poll, and even then had to fight hard to retain his place in the praetorian college.[811] A charge of undue influence was brought against the man who had struggled successfully to preserve the purity of the Comitia, and it was pretended that a slave of one of his closest political associates had been seen within the barriers mixing with the voters. That the charge was supported by powerful influences, or was generally believed to be correct, is perhaps shown by the conduct of the censors of the succeeding year who expelled this associate from the senate.[812] The jurors[813] before whom the case was tried–representatives, as we must suppose, of the equestrian order and therefore presumably uninfluenced by senatorial hostility–were long perplexed by the conflict of evidence. During the first days of the trial it seemed as though the doom of Marius was sealed, and his unexpected acquittal was only secured by the scrutiny of the tablets revealing an equality of votes, a condition which, according to the rules of Roman process, necessitated a favourable verdict.

His praetorship, in accordance with the rules which now governed this magistracy in consequence of the multiplication of the courts of justice, confined his energies to Rome. We do not know what department of this office he administered; but, as the charge of no department could make an epoch in the career of any one but a lawyer gifted with original ideas, we are not surprised to find that Marius’s tenure of this magistracy, although creditable, did not excite any marked attention.[814] After his praetorship he obtained his first independent military command in Farther Spain. Such a province had always its little problems of pacification to present to an energetic commander, and Marius’s military talents were moderately exercised by the repression of the habitual brigandage of its inhabitants.[815] His tenure of a foreign command may have added to his wealth, for provincial government could be made to increase the means of the most honest administrator. It was still more important that his tenure of the praetorship had added him to the ranks of the official nobility. His birth was now no bar to any social distinction to which his simple and resolute soul might think it profitable to aspire: and a family of the patrician Julii was not ashamed to give one of its daughters to the adventurer from Arpinum.[816] Thus Marius remained for a while; to Roman society an interesting specimen of the self-made man, marked by a bluntness and directness appropriate to the type and provocative of an amused regard; to the professed politician a man with a fairly successful but puzzling political career, and one that perhaps needed not to be too seriously considered. For to all who understood the existent conditions of Roman public life, his attainment of the consulship and of a dominant position in the councils of the State must have seemed impossible. There was but one contingency that could make Marius a necessary man. This was war on a grand scale. But the contingency was distant, and, even if it arose, the government might employ his skill while keeping him in a subordinate position.

The career of Marius is not the only proof that the tradition of successful opposition to the senate could be easily revived. In the year following his tribunate a new and successful effort was made in the direction of transmarine colonisation.[817] The pretext for the measure was the necessity for preserving command of the territory which had been won by the great victories of Domitius and Fabius on the farther side of the Alps; the strategic value of the foundation was undeniable, and the opposition of the government was probably directed by the form which it was proposed that the new settlement should take. It was not to be a mere fort in the enemy’s country, like the already-established Aquae Sextiae,[818] but a true _colonia_ of Roman citizens,[819] the creation of which was certain to lead to excessive complications in the foreign policy which dealt with the frontiers of the north. Such a colony would become the centre of an active trade with the surrounding tribes; though professedly founded in the people’s interest, it would rapidly become a mere feeler for extending the operations of the great mercantile class; the growth of Roman trade-interests would necessarily involve a policy of defence and probably of expansion, which would tell heavily on the resources of the State. The success of the government was dependent on the restriction of its efforts, and there is nothing surprising in the hearty opposition which it offered to the projected colony of Narbo Martius. Even after the original measure sanctioning the settlement had passed the Comitia, senatorial influence led to the promulgation of a new proposal in which the people was asked to reconsider its decision.[820] But the project had found an ardent champion in the young Lucius Crassus, who strengthened the position which he had won in the previous year, by a speech weighty beyond the promise of his age.[821] In his successful advocacy of a national undertaking he was not afraid to impugn the authority of the senate, and reaped an immediate reward in being selected, despite his youth, as one of the commissioners for establishing the settlement.[822]

It is probable that without the support of the equestrian order the project for the foundation of Narbo Martius might have fallen through. The man of popular sympathies whose measures attracted their support was tolerably certain of success, and the man who posed as the champion of the order was still more firmly placed. The latter position was occupied for a considerable time by Caius Servilius Glaucia, whose tribunate probably belongs to the close of the period which we are describing.[823] Glaucia himself, probably one of those scions of the nobility whom an original bent of mind had alienated from the narrow interests of his order, was a man who, lacking in the gift of passionate but steadfast seriousness which makes the great reformer, possessed powers admirably adapted for holding the popular ear and inspiring his auditors with a kind of robust confidence in himself. Ready, acute and witty,[824] he possessed the happy faculty of taking the Comitia, under the guise of the plain and honest man, into his confidence. The very ignorance of his auditors became a respectable attribute, when it was figured as ingenuous simplicity which needed protection against the tortuous wiles of the legislator and the official draughtsman. On one occasion he told his audience that the essence of a law was its preamble. If, when read to them, it was found to contain the words “dictator, consul, praetor or magister equitum,” the bill was no concern of theirs. But, if they caught the utterance “and whosoever after this enactment,” then they must wake up, for some new fetter of law was being forged to bind their limbs.[825] A man of this unconventional type was not likely to be popular in the senate, and the opprobrious name, which he subsequently bore in the Curia,[826] is a proof of the liveliness which he imparted to debate.

At the time of Glaucia’s tribunate some subtle movement seems to have been on foot for undoing the judiciary law of Caius Gracchus and ousting the knights from their possession of the court before which senators most frequently appeared. The law which dealt with the crime of extortion by Roman officials had been frequently renewed, and, whenever a proposal was made for recasting the enactment with a view to effecting improvements in procedure, the equestrian tenure of the court was threatened; for a new law might state qualifications for the jurors differing from those which had given this department of jurisdiction to the knights. The relief of the order was therefore great when the necessary work of revision was undertaken by one who showed himself an ardent champion of equestrian claims.[827] Glaucia’s alteration in procedure was thorough and permanent. He introduced the system of the “second hearing “–an obligatory renewal of the trial, which rendered it possible for counsel to discuss evidence which had been already given, and for jurors to get a grasp of the mass of scattered data which had been presented to their notice–[828] and he also made it possible to recover damages, not only from the chief malefactor, but from all who had dishonestly shared his spoils.[829] These principles continued to be observed in trials for extortion to the close of the Republic, and may have been the only permanent relic of Glaucia’s feverish political career. But for the moment the clauses of his law which dealt with the qualifications of the jurors, were those most anxiously awaited and most heartily acclaimed. He had stemmed a reaction and consolidated, beyond hope of alteration for a long term of years, the system of dual control established by Caius Gracchus.

The careers and successes of Marius, Crassus and Glaucia exhibit the spirit of unrest which broke at intervals through the apathetic tolerance displayed by the people towards the rule of the nobility. These alternations of confidence and distrust find their counterpart in the religious history of the times; but a panic springing from a belief in the anger of the gods was even more difficult to control than the alarm excited by the attitude of the government. Such a panic knew no distinctions of station, sex or age; it seized on citizens who cared nothing for the problems of administration, it was strong in proportion to the weakness of its victims, and gathered from the dark thoughts and wild words of the imbecile the poison which infected the sober mind and assumed, from the very universality of the sickness, the guise of a healthy effort at rooting out some deep-seated pollution from the State. The gloomy record of the religious persecutions of the past made it still more difficult for a government, which prided itself on the retention of the ancient control of morals, which gloried in its monopoly of an historic priesthood that had often set its hand to the work of extirpation, to stifle such a cry. The demand for atonement was the voice of the conserver of Rome’s moral life, of the patriotic devotee who was striving earnestly to reclaim the waning favour of her tutelary gods. If it was further believed that the seat of the corruption was to be found amidst the families of the nobility itself, the last barrier to resistance had been broken down, for even to seem to shield the unholy thing was to make its lurking place an object of horror and execration.

The nerves of the people were first excited by various prodigies that had appeared; a confirmation of their fears might have been found in the utter destruction of the army of Porcius Cato in Thrace;[830] and a strange calamity soon gave an index to the nature of the offence which excited the anger of the gods. When Helvius, a Roman knight, was journeying with his wife and daughter from Rome to Apulia, they were enveloped in a sudden storm. The alarm of the girl urged the father to seek shelter with all speed. The horses were loosed from the vehicle, the maiden was placed on one, and the party was hastening along the road, when suddenly there was a blinding flash and, when it had passed, the young Helvia and her horse were seen prone upon the ground. The force of the lightning had stripped every garment and ornament from her body, and the dead steed lay a few paces off with its trappings riven and scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the gods had not left the inquiring votary utterly in doubt. The nakedness of the stricken maiden was a riddle that the priests could read. It was a manifest sign that a virginal vow had been broken, and that some of the keepers of the eternal fire were tainted with the sin of unchastity. The destruction of the horse seemed to portend that a knight would be found to be a partner in the crime.[832] Evidence was invited and was soon forthcoming. The slave of a certain Barrus came forward and deposed to the corruption of three of the vestal virgins, Aemilia, Licinia and Marcia.[833] He pretended that the incestuous intercourse had been of long standing, and he named his own master amongst many other men whom he declared to be the authors of the sacrilege. The maidens were believed to have added to their lovers to screen their first offence; the sacrifice of their honour became the price of silence; and their first corrupters were forced to be dumb when jealousy was mastered by fear. The knowledge of the crime is believed to have been widely spread amongst the circles of the better class, until the conspiracy of silence was broken down by the action of a slave,[834] and all who would not be deemed accomplices were forced to add their share to the weight of the accusing testimony.

A scandal of this magnitude called for a formal trial by the supreme religious tribunal, and towards the close of the year[835] Lucius Metellus, the chief pontiff, summoned the incriminated vestals before the college. Aemilia was condemned, but Licinia and Marcia were acquitted. There was an immediate outcry; the pontiff’s leniency was severely censured; and the anger and fear of the people emboldened a tribune, Sextus Peducaeus, to propose for the first time that the secular arm should wrest from the pontifical college the spiritual jurisdiction that it had abused. He carried a resolution that a special commission should be established by the people to continue the investigation.[836] The judges were probably Roman knights after the model of the Gracchan jurors; the president was the terrible Lucius Cassius Longinus, already known for his severity as a censor and famed for his penetration as a criminal judge. This fatal penetration, which had endowed his tribunal with the nickname “the reef of the accused,” [837] was now welcomed as a surety that the inquiry would be searching, and that the innocence which survived it would be so well established that all doubt and fear would be dissolved. This commission condemned, not only the two vestals whom the pontiffs had acquitted, but many of their female intermediaries as well.[838] Some of their supposed paramours must also have been convicted; amongst the accused was Marcus Antonius, who was in future days to share the realm of oratory with Lucius Crassus. He was on the eve of his departure to Asia, where he was to exercise the duties of a quaestor, when he was summoned to appear before the court over which Cassius presided. He might have pleaded the benefit of his obligation to continue his official duties;[839] but he preferred to waive his claim and face his judges. His escape was believed to have been mainly due to the heroic conduct of a young slave, who, presented of his own free will to the torture, bore the anguish of the rack, the scourge and the fire without uttering a word that might incriminate his master.[840] The free employment of such methods in trials for incest throws a grave doubt on the value of the judgment which they elicited; and, when a court is established for the purpose of appeasing the popular conscience, a part at least of its conduct may be easily suspected of being preordained. Cassius’s rigour in this matter was thought excessive;[841] but, even had he and the jurors meted out nothing but the strictest justice, the memory of their sentence would long have rankled in the minds of the influential families whose members they had condemned, and thus perpetuated the tradition of their unnecessary severity. It may be doubted, however, whether a secular court was competent to inflict the horrible penalties of pontifical jurisdiction, to condemn the vestal to a living grave and her paramour to death by the scourge;[842] interdiction, and perhaps in the more serious cases the death by strangling usually reserved for traitors, may have been meted out to the men, while the women may have been handed over to their relatives for execution. But even this exemplary visitation of the vices which lurked in the heart of the State was not deemed sufficient to appease the gods or to quiet the popular conscience. To punish the guilty was to offer the barest satisfaction to heaven and to conscience; a fuller atonement was demanded, and the Sibylline oracles, when consulted on the point, were understood to ordain the cultivation of certain strange divinities by the living sacrifice of four strangers, two of Hellenic and two of Gallic race.[843] The accomplishment of this act must have been a severe strain on the reason and conscience of a government which sixteen years later absolutely prohibited the performance of human sacrifice[844] and soon made efforts to stamp out the barbarous ritual even in its foreign dependencies.[845] Even this concession to the panic of the times could not be regarded as fraught with much worldly success. The gods seemed still to retain an unkind feeling both to the city and the government. Two years later there was a return of dreadful prodigies, and a great part of Rome was laid waste by a terrible fire. A few months more and news was brought from Africa which shook to its very foundations the fabric of senatorial rule.[846]

CHAPTER VI

The land, on which the eyes of the world were soon to be fastened, was the neglected protectorate which had been built up to secure the temporary purpose of the overthrow of Carthage, and had since remained in the undisturbed possession of the peaceful descendants of Masinissa. The fortunes of the kingdom of Numidia, so far as they affected that kingdom itself, deserved to be neglected by its suzerain; for the power which Masinissa had won by arms and diplomacy was more than sufficient to protect its own interests. The Numidia of the day formed in territorial extent one of the mightiest kingdoms of the world, and ranked only second to Egypt amongst the client powers of Rome.[847] It extended from Mauretania to Cyrenaica,[848] from the river Muluccha to the greater Syrtis, thus touching on the west the Empire of the Moors, at that time confined to Tingitana, on the east almost penetrating to Egypt, and enjoying the best part of the fertile region which borders the coast of the Mediterranean.[849] For the Moroccan boundary of the kingdom–the river Muluccha or Molocath–see Göbel _Die Westküste Afrikas im Altertum_ pp. 79,80. From this vast tract of country Rome had cut out for herself a small section on the north-east. In the creation of the province of Africa her moderation and forbearance must have astonished her Numidian client; and, if Masinissa showed signs of hesitancy in rousing himself for the destruction of Carthage, the fears of his sons must have been immediately dispelled when they saw the slender profits which Rome meant to reap from the suppression of their joint rival. The Numidian kings were even allowed to keep the territory which had been wrested from Carthage between the Second and Third Punic Wars. This comprised the region about the Tusca, which boasted not less than fifty towns, the district known as the Great Plains,[850] which has been identified with the great basin of the Dakhla of the Oulad-bon-Salem, and probably the plateau of Vaga (Bêdja) which dominates this basin.[851] The Roman lines merely extended from the Tusca (the Wäd El-Kebir) in the North, where that river flows into the Mediterranean opposite the island of Thabraca (Tabarka) to Thenae (Henschir Tina) on the south-east.[852] But even the upper waters of the Tusca belonged to Numidia, as did the towns of Vaga, Sicca Veneria and Zama Regia. Consequently the Roman frontier must have curved eastward until it reached the point where a rocky region separates the basin of the Bagradas (Medjerda) from the plains of the Sahel; thence it ran to the neighbourhood of Aquae Regiae and thence, probably following the line of a ditch drawn between the two great depressions of Kairouan and El-Gharra, to its ultimate bourne at Thenae.[853] It is clear that the Romans did not look on their province as an end desirable in itself. They had left in the hands of their Numidian friends some of the most fertile lands, some of the richest commercial towns, situated in a district which they might easily have claimed. Against such annexation Masinissa could have uttered no word of legitimate protest. His kingdom had already been almost doubled by the acquisition of the lands of his rival Syphax, and his sons saw themselves through the aid of Rome in possession of an artificially created kingdom, which was so entirely out of harmony with the traditions of Numidian life that it could scarcely have entered into the dreams of any prince of that race. But the conquering city reposed some faith in gratitude, and reposed still more in its habitual policy of caution. The province which it created was simply a political and strategic necessity. It was intended to secure the negative object of preventing the reconstitution of the great political and commercial centre which had fallen.[854] If Carthage was never to rise again, a fragment of the coast-line must be kept in the hands of the possessors of its devastated site. It might have been better for the peace of Africa had the Romans been a little more grasping and had the Roman position been stronger than it was. The Phoenicians scattered along the coast had become familiar objects to the Berber inhabitants and their kings; to the enlightened monarch they were a valuable addition to the population of any of his cities–all the more valuable now that they were politically powerless. But with the Roman official and the Roman trader it was different. Here was an alien and (in spite of the restraint of the government) an encroaching civilisation, utterly unfamiliar to the eyes of the natives, but known to justify its lordly security by that dim background of power which clung to the name of the paramount city of the West. The Roman possessions were an ugly eyesore to a man who held that Africa should be for the Africans. The wise Masinissa might tolerate the spectacle, content (as, indeed, he should have been) with the power and security which Rome’s friendship had brought to her ally. But it remained to be seen whether his views would always be held by his own subjects or by some less cautious or less happily placed successor of his own line.

It was indeed possible that a hostile feeling of nationality might be awakened beyond the limits even of the great kingdom of Numidia. The designations which the Romans employ for the natives of North Africa obscure the fact, which was recognised in later times by the Arab conquerors, of the unity of the great Berber folk.[855] Roman historians and geographers speak of the Numidians and Mauretanians as though they were distinct peoples; but there can be little doubt that, then as to-day, they were but two fractions of the same great race, and that even the wild Gaetulians of the South are but representatives of the parent stock of this indigenous people. As in the case of nearly all races which in default of historical data we are forced to call indigenous, two separate elements may be distinguished in this stock, an earlier and a later, and survivals of the original distinctions between these elements were clearly discernible in many parts of Northern Africa; but, as the fusion between these stocks had been effected in prehistoric times, a common Berber nationality may be held to have extended from the Atlantic almost to Egypt, at the time when the Romans were added to the immigrant Semites and Greeks who had already sought to dwell amidst its borders. The basis of this nationality is thought to be found in the aborigines of the Sahara who had gradually moved up from the desert to the present littoral. There they were joined by a race of another type who were wending their way from what is now the continent of Europe. The Saharic man was of a dark-brown colour but with no traces of the negroid type. His European comrade was a man of fair complexion and light hair; and these curiously blended races continued to live side by side and to form a single nation, preserving perhaps each some of its own psychical characteristics, but speaking in common the language of the older Saharic stock.[856] But the two races were not uniformly distributed over the various territories of Northern Africa. The white race was perhaps more in evidence in Mauretania, as it is in the Morocco of to-day;[857] the dark race was probably most strongly represented amongst the Gaetulians of the South. There were, in short, in Northern Africa two zones, marked by differences of civilisation as well as of ethnic descent, which were clearly distinguished in antiquity. The first is represented by the Afri, Numidians, and Moors, who inhabited the coast region from East to West. These were early subjected to alien influences, the greatest of which, before the coming of the Roman, was the advent of the Semite. The second is shown by the vast aggregate of tribes which form a curve along the south from the ocean to the Cyrenaica. These tribes, which were called by the common name of Gaetuli, were almost exempt from European influences in historic, and probably in prehistoric, times. A few intermingled with the Aethiopians of the Sahara,[858] but, taken as a whole, they are believed to represent the primitive race of brown Saharic dwellers in all its purity.

Had the term Nomad or Numidian been applied to the southern races, the designation might have been justified by the migratory character of their life. But it is more than questionable whether the designation is defensible as applied to the people to whom it is usually attached. The Numidians do not seem to have possessed either the character or habits of a genuinely nomadic people such as the Arabs.[859] They lived in huts and not in tents. These huts (_mapalia_), which had the form of an upturned boat, may have seemed a poor habitation to Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans; but, as habitations, they were meant to be permanent; they were an index of the possession of property, of a lasting attachment to the soil. The village formed by a group of these little homes clustering round a steep height, was a still further index of a political and military society that intended to maintain and defend the area on which it had settled. The pages of Sallust give ample evidence of an active village life engrossed with the toils of agriculture, and the mass of the population of the region of the Tell must have been for a long time fixed to the soil which yielded it a livelihood. Elsewhere there was indeed need of something like periodic migration. On the high plateaux pastoral life made the usual change from summer to winter stations necessary. But this regulated movement does not correspond strictly to the desultory life of a truly nomadic people. Yet it is easy to see how, in contrast to the regular and often sedentary mercantile life of the Phoenician and the Greek, that of the Numidian might be considered wild and migratory. He was in truth a “trekker” rather than a nomad, and he possessed the invaluable military attributes of the man unchained by cities and accustomed to wander far in a hard and bracing country. A skill in horsemanship that was the wonder of the world, the eye for a country hastily traversed, the memory for the spot once seen, the power of rapid mobilisation and of equally rapid disappearance, the gift of being a knight one day, a shepherd or a peasant the next–these were the attributes that made a Roman conquest of Numidia so long impossible and rendered diplomacy imperative as a supplement to war.

It is less easy to reconstruct the moral and political attributes of this people from the data which we at present possess, or to reconcile the experience of to-day with the impressions of ancient historians. But so permanent has been the great bulk of the population of Northern Africa that it is tempting to interpret the ancient Numidian in the light of the modern Kabyle. One who has had experience of the latter endows him with an intelligent head, a frank and open physiognomy and a lively eye, describes him as active and enterprising, lively and excitable, possessed of moral pride, eminently truthful, a stern holder of his plighted word and a respecter of women–a respect shown by the general practice of monogamy.[860] Even when stirred to war he is said not to lend himself to unnecessary cruelty.[861] The activity, liveliness and excitability of this people may be traced in the accounts of antiquity; but Roman records would add the impression of duplicity, treachery and cruelty as characteristics of the race. Yet as these characteristics are exhibited in the record of a great national war against a hated invader, and are chiefly illustrated in the persons of a king or his ministers–individuals spoilt by power or maddened by fear–we need not perhaps attach too much importance to the discrepancy between the evidence of the ancient and modern world.

Much of the history of Numidia, especially during the epoch of the war of the Romans against Jugurtha, would be illuminated if we could interpret the political tendencies of its ancient inhabitants by those of the Kabyle of modern times. The latter is said to be a sturdy democrat, founding his society on the ideas of equality and individuality. Each member of this society enjoys the same rights and is bound down to the same duties. There is no military or religious nobility, there are no hereditary chiefs. The affairs of the society, about which all can speak or vote, are administered by simple delegates.[862] There is nothing in the history of the war with Jugurtha to belie these characteristics, there is much which confirms them. In the narrative of that war there is no mention of a nobility. The influential men described are simply those who have been elevated by wealth or familiarity with the king. The monarchy itself is a great power where the king is present, but the life of the community is not broken when the king is a fugitive; and loyalty to the crown centres round a great personality, who is expected to drive the hated invaders into the sea, not merely round the name of a legitimate dynasty.

Monarchy, in fact, seems a kind of artificial product in Numidia; but, artificial as it may have been, it had done good work. An active reign of more than fifty years by a man who united the absolutism of the savage potentate with the wisdom and experience of the civilised ruler, had produced effects in Numidia that could never die, Masinissa had proved what Numidian agriculture might become under the guidance of scientific rules by the creation of model farms, whose fertile acres showed that cultivated plants of every kind could be grown on native soil;[863] while under his rule and that of his son Micipsa the life of the city showed the same progress as that of the country. Numidia could not become one of the granaries of the world without its capital rising to the rank of a great commercial city. Cirta, though situated some forty-eight Roman miles from the sea,[864] was soon sought by the Greeks, those ubiquitous bankers of the Mediterranean world,[865] while Roman and Italian capitalists eagerly plied their business in this new and attractive sphere which had been presented to their efforts by the conquests of Rome and the civilising energy of its native rulers.

The kingdom of Numidia suffered from a weakness common to monarchies where the strong spirits of subjects and local chiefs can be controlled only by the still stronger hand of the central potentate, and where the practice of polygamy and concubinage in the royal house sometimes gave rise to many pretenders but to no heir with an indefeasible claim to rule. There was no settled principle of succession to the throne, and the death of the sovereign for the time being threatened the peace or unity of the kingdom, while it entailed grave responsibilities upon its nominal protector. Masinissa himself had been excluded from the throne by an uncle,[866] and but for his vigour and energy might have remained the subject of succeeding pretenders.

A crisis was threatened at his own decease but was happily averted by the prudence of the dying monarch. Loath as he probably was to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome, he thrust on her the invidious task of deciding the succession to the throne. He felt that Roman authority would be more effective than paternal wishes; perhaps he saw that amongst his sons there was not one who could be trusted alone and unaided to continue to build up the fortunes of the state and to claim recognition from his brothers as their undisputed lord, while the show of submission to Rome might weaken the vigilance and disarm the jealousy of the protecting power. Scipio was summoned to his deathbed to apportion the kingdom between the legitimate sons who survived him, Micipsa, Gulussa and Mastanabal.[867] To Micipsa was given the capital Cirta, the royal palace and the general administration of the kingdom, the warlike Gulussa was made commander-in-chief, while to Mastanabal the youngest was assigned the task of directing the judicial affairs of the dominion.[868] This division of authority was soon disturbed by the death of the two younger brothers, and Micipsa was left alone to indulge his peaceful inclinations during a long and uneventful reign of nearly thirty years. The fall of Carthage had left him free from all irritating external relations; for the King of Numidia was no longer required to act the part of a constant spy on the actions, and an occasional trespasser on the territory, of the greatest of African powers. The nearest scene of disturbance was the opposite continent of Spain, and here he did Rome good service by sending her assistance against Viriathus and the Numantines.[869] Unvexed by troubles within his borders, Micipsa devoted his life to the arts of peace. He beautified Cirta and attracted Greek settlers to the town, amongst them men of arts and learning, who delighted the king with their literary and philosophic discourse.[870] The period of rest fostered the resources of the kingdom, and in spite of a devastating pestilence which is said to have swept off eight hundred thousand of the king’s subjects,[871] the state could boast at his death of a regular army of ten thousand cavalry and twenty thousand foot.[872] This was but the nucleus of the host that might be raised in the interior, and swelled by the border tribes of Numidia; and the man who could win the confidence of the soldiers and the attachment of the peasantry held the fortune of Numidia in his hands. This reflection may have cast a shadow over the latter years of Micipsa. Certainly the prospect of the succession was as dark to him as it had been to his father, Masinissa. Like his predecessor he believed that a dynasty was stronger than an individual, and he deliberately imitated the work of Scipio by leaving a collegiate rule to his successors. One of these successors, however, was not his own offspring. His brother Mastanabal had left behind him an illegitimate son named Jugurtha. The boy had been neglected during the lifetime of his grandfather, Masinissa; perhaps the hope that Mastanabal might yet beget a representative worthy of the succession caused little importance to be attached to the concubine’s son, in spite of the fact that it was the policy of the Numidian monarchs to keep as many heirs in reserve as it was possible for them to procure. But when Gauda, the only legitimate son of Mastanabal, proved to be weak in body and deficient in mind,[873] greater regard was paid to the vigorous boy who was now the sole efficient representative of one branch of the late dynasty. Even without this motive the kindly nature of Micipsa would probably have led him to look with favour on the orphan child of his brother; the young Jugurtha was reared in the palace and educated with the heirs presumptive, Adherbal and Hiempsal, the two sons of the reigning king. It soon became manifest that a very lion had been begotten and was growing to strength in the precincts of the royal court. All the graces of the love-born offspring seem to have been present at Jugurtha’s birth. A mighty frame, a handsome face, were amongst his lesser gifts. More remarkable were the vigour and acuteness of his mind, the moral strength which yielded to no temptation of ease or indolence, the keen zest for life which led him to throw himself into the hardy sports of his youthful compeers, to run, to ride, to hurl the javelin with a skill known only to the nomad, the _bonhomie_ and bright good temper which endeared him to the comrades whom his skill had vanquished. Much of his leisure was passed in tracking the wild beasts of the desert; his skill as a hunter was matchless, or was equalled only by his easy indifference to his success.[874]

The sight of these qualities gladdened Micipsa’s heart; for the military leader, so essential to the safety of the Numidian monarchy, seemed to be now assured. We are told that a shade of anxiety crossed his mind when he compared the youth of his own sons with the glorious manhood of Jugurtha, and thought of the temptations which the prospect of an undivided monarchy might present to a mind gradually weaned from loyalty by the very sense of its own greatness;[875] but there is no reason to believe that the good old king allowed his imagination to embrace visions of the dagger or the poisoned bowl, and that the mysterious death of his nephew was only hindered by the thought of the resentment which it would arouse amongst the Numidian chiefs and their dependents. Certainly the mission with which Jugurtha was soon credited–the mission which was perhaps to alter the whole tone of his mind and to concentrate its energies on an unlawful end–was one which any Numidian king might have destined for the most favoured of his sons. Jugurtha was to be sent to Numantia to lead the Numidian auxiliaries of horse and foot, to be a member of the charmed circle that surrounded Scipio, to see, as he moved amongst the young nobility, the promise of greatness that was in store for Rome in the field whether of politics or of war, to form perhaps binding friendships and to lay up stores of gratitude for future use. In dismissing his nephew, Micipsa was putting the issue into the hands of fate. Jugurtha might never return; but, if he did, it would be with an experience and a prestige which would render him more than ever the certain arbiter of the destinies of the kingdom.

The advantage which Jugurtha took of this marvellous opportunity was a product of his nature and proves no ulterior design. Had he been the simplest and most loyal of souls, he would have been forced to act as he did. As a man of insight he soon learnt Scipio by heart, as a born strategist and trained hunter he soon saw through the tricks of the enemy, as a man devoid of the physical sense of fear he was foremost in every action. He had grasped at once the secret of Roman discipline, and his habit of implicit obedience to the word of command was as remarkable as his readiness in offering the right suggestion, when his opinion was asked. Intelligence was not a striking feature in the mental equipment of the staff which surrounded Scipio; it was grasped by the general wherever found without respect to rank or nationality; and while Marius was rising step by step in virtue of his proved efficiency, the Numidian prince, who might have been merely an ornamental adjunct to the army, was made the leader or participant in almost every enterprise which demanded a shrewd head and a stout heart. The favour of Scipio increased from day to day.[876] This was to be won by merit and success alone. With Romans of a weaker mould Jugurtha’s wealth and social qualities produced a similar result. He entertained lavishly, he was clever, good-natured and amusing. He charmed the Romans whom he excelled as in his childish days he had charmed the Numidian boys whom he outraced.

In these rare intervals of rest from warfare there was opportunity for converse with men of influence and rank. Jugurtha’s position and the future of Numidia were sometimes discussed, and the youthful wiseacres who claimed his friendship would sometimes suggest, with the cheerful cynicism which springs from a shallow dealing with imperial interests, that merit such as his could find its fitting sphere only if he were the sole occupant of the Numidian throne.[877] The words may often have been spoken in jest or idle compliment; although some who used them may have meant them to be an expression of the maxim that a protectorate is best served by a strong servant, and that a divided principality contains in itself the seeds of disturbance. Others went so far as to suggest the means as well as the end. Should difficulties arise with Rome, might not the assent of the great powers be purchased with a price? Scipio had not been blind to the colloquies of his favourite. When Numantia had been destroyed and the army was folding its tents, he gave Jugurtha the benefit of a public ovation and a private admonition. Before the tribunal he decorated him with the prizes of war, and spoke fervidly in his praise; then he invited him secretly to his tent and gave him his word of warning. “The friendship of the Roman people should be sought from the Roman people itself; no good could come of securing the support of individuals by equivocal means; there was a danger in purchasing public interest from a handful of vendors who professed to have power to sell; Jugurtha’s own qualities were his best asset; they would secure him glory and a crown; if he tried to hasten on the course of events, the material means on which he relied might themselves provoke his utter ruin.” [878]

On one point only Scipio seems to have been in agreement with the evil counsellors of Jugurtha. He seems to have believed that the true guardian of Numidia had been found, and the prince took with him a splendid testimonial to be presented to his uncle Micipsa. Scipio wrote in glowing terms of the great qualities which Jugurtha had displayed throughout the war; he expressed his own delight at these services, his own intention of making them known to the senate and Roman people, his sense of the joy that they must have brought to the monarch himself. His old friendship with Micipsa justified a word of congratulation; the prince was worthy of his uncle and of his grandfather Masinissa.[879]

Whatever Micipsa’s later intentions may have been, whether under ordinary circumstances his natural benevolence and even his patriotism would have continued to war with an undefined feeling of distrust, this letter relieved his doubts, if only because it showed that Jugurtha could never fill a private station. The act of adoption was immediately accomplished, and a testament was drawn up by which Jugurtha was named joint heir with Micipsa’s own sons to the throne of Numidia.[880] A few years later the aged king lay on his deathbed. As he felt his end approaching, he is said to have summoned his friends and relatives together with his two sons, and in their presence to have made a parting appeal to Jugurtha. He reminded him of past kindnesses but acknowledged the ample return; he had made Jugurtha, but Jugurtha had made the Numidian name again glorious amongst the Romans and in Spain. He exhorted him to protect the youthful princes who would be his colleagues on the throne, and reminded him that in the maintenance of concord lay the future strength of the kingdom. He appealed to Jugurtha as a guardian rather than as a mere co-regent; for the power and name of the mature and distinguished ruler would render him chiefly responsible for harmony or discord; and he besought his sons to respect their cousin, to emulate his virtues, to prove to the world that their father was as fortunate in the children whom nature had given him as in the one who had been the object of his adoption.[881] The appeal was answered by Jugurtha with a goodly show of feeling and respect, and a few days later the old king passed away. The hour which closed his splendid obsequies was the last in which even a show of concord was preserved between the ill-assorted trio who were now the rulers of Numidia. The position of Jugurtha was difficult enough; for to rule would mean either the reduction of his cousins to impotence or the perpetual thwarting of his plans by crude and suspicious counsels. For that these would be suspicious as well as crude, was soon revealed: and the situation was immediately rendered intolerable by the conduct of Hiempsal. This prince, the younger of the two brothers, was a headstrong boy filled with a sense of resentment at Jugurtha’s elevation to the throne and smarting at the neglect of what he held to be the legitimate claim to the succession. When the first meeting of the joint rulers was held in the throne room, Hiempsal hurried to a seat at the right of Adherbal, that Jugurtha might not occupy the place of honour in the centre; it was with difficulty that he was induced by the entreaties of his brother to yield to the claims of age and to move to the seat on the other side. This struggle for precedence heralded the coming storm. In the course of a long discussion on the affairs of the kingdom Jugurtha threw out the suggestion that it might be advisable to rescind the resolutions and decrees of the last five years, since during that period age had impaired the faculties of Micipsa. Hiempsal said that he agreed, since it was within the last three years that Jugurtha had been adopted to a share in the throne. The object of this remark betrayed little emotion; but it was believed that the peevish insult was the stimulus to an anxious train of thought which, as was to be expected from the resolute character of the thinker, soon issued into action. To be a usurper was better than to be thought one; the first situation entailed power, the second only danger. Anger played its part no doubt; but in a temperament like Jugurtha’s such an emotion was more likely to be the justification than the cause of a crime. His thoughts from that moment were said to have been bent on ensnaring the impetuous Hiempsal. But guile moves slowly, and Jugurtha would not wait.[882]

The first meeting of the kings had given so thorough a proof of the impossibility of united rule that a resolution was soon framed to divide the treasures and territories of the monarchy. A time was fixed for the partition of the domains, and a still earlier date for the division of the accumulated wealth. The kings meanwhile quitted the capital to reside in close propinquity to their cherished treasures. Hiempsal’s temporary home was in the fortified town of Thirmida,[883] and, as chance would have it, he occupied a house which belonged to a man who had once been a confidential attendant on Jugurtha.[884] The inner history of the events which followed could never have been known with certainty; but it was believed that Jugurtha induced this man to visit the house under some pretext and bring back impressions of the keys. The security of Hiempsal’s person and treasures was supposed to be guaranteed by his regularly receiving into his own hands the keys of the gates after they had been locked; but a night came in which the portals were noiselessly opened and a band of soldiers burst into the house. They divided into parties, ranging each room in turn, prying into every recess, bursting doors that barred their entrance, stabbing the attendants, some in their sleep, others as they ran to meet the invaders. At last Hiempsal was found crouching in a servant’s room; he was slain and beheaded, and those who held Jugurtha to be the author of the crime reported that the head of the murdered prince was brought to him as a pledge of the accomplished act.[885]

The news of the crime was soon spread through the whole of Northern Africa. It divided Numidia into two camps. Adherbal was forced by panic to arm in his own defence, and most of those who remained loyal to the memory of Micipsa gathered to the standard of the legitimate heir. But Jugurtha’s fame amongst the fighting men of the kingdom stood him in good stead. His adherents were the fewer in number, but they were the more effective warriors.[886] He rapidly gathered such forces as were available, and dashed from city to city, capturing some by storm and receiving the voluntary submission of others. He had plunged boldly into a civil war, and by his action declared the coveted prize to be nothing less than the possession of the whole Numidian kingdom. But boldness was his best policy; Rome might more readily condone a conquest than a rebellion, and be more willing to recognise a king than a claimant.

Adherbal meanwhile had sent an embassy to the protecting State, to inform the senate of his brother’s murder and his own evil plight. But, diffident as he was, he must have felt that a passive endurance of the outrages inflicted by Jugurtha dimmed his prestige and imperilled his position; he found himself at the head of the larger army, and trusting to his superiority in numbers ventured to risk a battle with his veteran enemy. The first conflict was decisive; his forces were so utterly routed that he despaired of maintaining his position in any part of the kingdom. He fled from the battlefield to the province of Africa and thence took ship to Rome.[887]

Jugurtha was now undisputed master of the whole of Numidia and had leisure to think out the situation. It could not have needed much reflection to show that the safer course lay in making an appeal to Rome. It was no part of his plan to detach Numidia entirely from the imperial city; even if such an end were desirable, a national war could not be successfully waged by a people divided in allegiance, against a state whose tenacious policy and inexhaustible resources were only too well known to Jugurtha. But he also knew that Rome, though tenacious, had the tolerance which springs from the unwillingness to waste blood and treasure on a matter of such little importance as a change in the occupancy of a subject throne, that a dynastic quarrel would seem to many _blasé_ senators a part of the order of nature in a barbarian monarchy, that it is usually to the interest of a protecting state to recognise a king in fact as one in law, and that he himself possessed many powerful friends in the capital and had been told on good authority that royal presents judiciously distributed might confirm or even mould opinion. Within a few days of his victory he had despatched to Rome an embassy well equipped with gold and silver. His ambassadors were to confirm the affection of his old friends, to win new ones to his cause, and to spare no pains to gain any fraction of support that a bountiful generosity could buy.[888] Possibly few, who received courteous visits or missives from these envoys, would have admitted that they had been bribed. It was the custom of kings to send presents, and they did but answer to the call of an old acquaintance and a man who had done signal service to Rome. The news of Hiempsal’s tragic end, the flight and arrival of his exiled brother, had at the moment caused a painful sensation in Roman circles. Now many members of the nobility plucked up courage to remark that there might be another side to the question. The newly gilded youth thronged their seniors in the senate and begged that no inconsiderate resolution should be taken against Jugurtha. The envoys, as men conscious of their virtue, calmly expressed their readiness to await the senate’s pleasure. The appointed day arrived, and Adherbal, who appeared in person, unfolded the tale of his wrongs.[889]

Apart from the emotions of pity and consequent sympathy which may have been awakened in some breasts by the story of the ruined and exiled king, his appeal–passionate, vigorous and telling as it was–could not have been listened to with any great degree of pleasure by the assembled fathers; for it brought home to the government of a protecting state that most unpleasant of lessons, its duty to the protected. With the ingenuity of despair Adherbal exaggerated the degree of Roman government, in order to emphasise the moral and political obligations of the rulers to their dependents. If the King of Numidia was a mere agent of the imperial[890] city, subordinating his wishes to her ends, seeing the security of his own possessions in the extension of her influence alone, clinging to her friendship with a trust as firm as that inspired by ties of blood, it was the duty of the mistress to protect such a servant, and to avenge an outrage which reflected alike on her gratitude and her authority. It had been a maxim of Micipsa’s that the clients of Rome supported a heavy burden, but were amply compensated by the immunity from danger that they enjoyed. And, if Rome did not protect, to whom could a client-king look for aid? His very service to Rome had made him the enemy of all neighbouring powers. It was true that Adherbal could claim little in his own right; he was a suppliant before he could be a benefactor, stripped of all power of benefiting his great protector before his devotion could be put to the test. Yet he could claim a debt; for he was the sole relic of a dynasty that had given their all to Rome. Jugurtha was destroying a family whose loyalty had stood every test, he was committing horrid atrocities on the friends of Rome, his insolence and impunity were inflicting as grave an injury on the Roman name as on the wretched victims of his cruelty.

Such was the current of subtle and cogent reasoning that ran through the passionate address of the exiled king, crying for vengeance, but above all for justice. The answer of Jugurtha’s envoys was brief and to the point. They had only to state their fictitious case. A plausible case was all that was needed; their advocates would do the rest. Hiempsal, they urged, had been put to death by the Numidians in consequence of the cruelty of his rule. Adherbal had been the aggressor in the late war. He had suffered defeat, and was now petitioning for help because he had found himself unable to perpetrate the wrong which he had intended. Jugurtha entreated the senate to let the knowledge which had been gained of him at Numantia guide their opinion of him now, and to set his own past deeds before the words of a personal enemy.[891] Both parties then withdrew and the senate fell to debate.

It is sufficiently likely that, even had there been no corruption or suspicion of corruption, the opinions of the House would have been divided on the question that was put before them. Some minds naturally suspicious might have been doubtful of the facts. Were Hiempsal’s death and Adherbal’s flight due to national discontent or the unprovoked ambition of Jugurtha? If the former was the case, was the restoration of the king to an unwilling people by an armed force a measure conducive to the interest of the protecting state? But even some who accepted Adherbal’s statement of the case, may have doubted the wisdom of a policy of armed intervention; for it was manifest that a considerable degree of force would have to be employed to lead Jugurtha to relinquish his claims and to stamp out the loyalty of his adherents. The senate could have been in no humour for another African war; they regarded their policy as closed in that quarter of the world; they had shifted the burden of frontier defence on to the Kings of Numidia, and must have viewed with alarm the prospect of something far worse than a frontier war arising from the quarrels of those kings. It is probable, therefore, that proposals for a peaceful settlement would in any case have commanded the respectful attention of the senate; had these been made with a show of decency, with a general recognition of Adherbal’s claims, and some censure of Jugurtha’s overbearing conduct (for this must have been better attested than his share in Hiempsal’s death), but little adverse comment might have been excited by the tone of the debate. As it was, when member after member rose, lauded Jugurtha’s merits to the skies and poured contempt on the statements of Adherbal,[892] an unpleasant feeling was excited that this fervour was not wholly due to a patriotic interest in the security of the empire. The very boisterousness of the championship induced a more rigorous attitude on the part of those who had not been approached by Jugurtha’s envoys or had resisted their overtures. They maintained that Adherbal must be helped at all costs, and that strict punishment should be exacted for Hiempsal’s murder. This minority found an ardent advocate in Scaurus, the keeper of the conscience of the senate, the man who knew better than any that an individual or a government lives by its reputation, who saw with horror that no specious pretexts were being employed to clothe a policy which the malevolent might interpret as a political crime, and that the sinister rumours which had been current in Rome were finding their open verification in the senate. A vigorous championship of the cause of right from the foremost politician of the day, might not influence the decision of the House, and would certainly not lead to a quixotic policy of armed intervention; but it might prove to critics of the government that the inevitable decision had not been reached wholly in defiance of the claims of the suppliant and wholly in obedience to the machinations of a usurper. The decision, which closed the unreal debate, recognised Jugurtha and Adherbal as joint rulers of Numidia. It wilfully ignored Hiempsal’s death, it wantonly exposed the lamb to the wolf, it was worthless as a settlement of the dynastic question, unless Jugurtha’s supporters entertained the pious hope that their favourite’s ambition might be satisfied with the increase now granted to his wealth and territory, and that his prudence might withhold him from again testing the forbearance of the protecting power. But those who possessed keener insight or who knew Jugurtha better, must have foreseen the probable result of the impunity which had been granted; they must have presaged, with anxious foreboding or with patient cynicism, the final disappearance of Adherbal from the scene and a fresh request for the settlement of the Numidian question, which would have become less complex when there was but one candidate for the throne. The decree of the senate enjoined the creation of a commission of ten, which should visit Numidia and divide the whole of the kingdom which had been possessed by Micipsa, between the rival chiefs.[893]

The head of the commission was Lucius Opimius, whose influence amongst the members of his order had never waned since he had exercised and proved his right of saving the State from the threatened dangers of sedition. His selection on this occasion gave an air of impartiality to the commission, for he was known to be no friend to Jugurtha.[894]

That prince, however, did not allow his past relations to be an obstacle to his present enterprise. The conquest of Opimius was the immediate object to which he devoted all his energies. As soon as the commissioners had appeared on African soil, they and their chief were received with the utmost deference by the king. The frequent and secret colloquies which took place between the arbitrators and one of the parties interested in their decision were not a happy omen for an impartial judgment, and, if the award could by the exercise of malevolent ingenuity be interpreted as unfair, would certainly breed the suspicion, and, in case the matter was ever submitted to a hostile court of law, the proof that the honour of the commissioners had succumbed to the usual vulgar and universally accredited methods of corruption. On the face of it the award seemed eminently just. Numidia was becoming a commercial and agricultural state; but since commerce and agriculture did not flourish in the same domains, it was impossible to endow each of the claimants equally with both these sources of wealth. To Adherbal was given that part of the kingdom which in its external attributes seemed the more desirable; he was to rule over the eastern half of Numidia which bordered on the Roman province, the portion of the country which enjoyed a readier access to the sea and could boast of a fuller development of urban life. Cirta the capital lay within this sphere, and Adherbal could continue to give justice from the throne of his fathers. But those who held that the strength of a country depended mainly on its people and its soil, believed that Jugurtha had received the better part. The territories with which he was entrusted were those bordering on Mauretania, rich in the products of the soil and teeming with healthy human life.[895] From the point of view of military resources there could be no question as to which of the two kings was the stronger. The peaceful character of Adherbal may have seemed a justification for his peaceful sphere of rule; but the original aggressor was kept at his normal strength. Jugurtha ruled over the lands in which the national spirit, of which he was himself the embodiment, found its fullest and fiercest expression. He did not mean to acquiesce for a moment in the settlement effected by the commission. No sooner had it completed its task and returned home, than he began to devise a scheme which would lead to war between the two principalities and the consequent annihilation of Adherbal. He shrank at first from provoking the senate by a wanton attack on the neighbouring kingdom which they had just created; his design was rather to draw Adherbal into hostilities which would lead to a pitched battle, a certain victory, the disappearance of the last of Micipsa’s race and the union of the two crowns. With this object he massed a considerable force on the boundary between the two kingdoms and suddenly crossed the frontier. His mounted raiders captured shepherds with their flocks, ravaged the fields of the peasantry, looted and burned their homes; then swept back within their own borders.[896] But Adherbal was not moved to reprisals. His circumstances no less than his temperament dictated methods of peace: and, if he could not keep his crown by diplomacy, he must have regarded it as lost. The Roman people was a better safeguard than his Numidian subjects, and it was necessary to temporise with Jugurtha until the senate could be moved by a strong appeal. Envoys were despatched to the court of the aggressor to complain of the recent outrage; they brought back an impudent reply; but Adherbal, steadfast in his pacific resolutions, still remained quiescent, Jugurtha’s plan had failed and he was in no mood for further delay; he held now, as he had done once before, that his end could best be effected by vigorous and decisive action. The lapse of time could not improve his own position but might strengthen that of Adherbal, and it was advisable that a new Roman commission should witness an accomplished fact and make the best of it rather than engage again in the settlement of a disputed claim. It was no longer a predatory band but a large and regular army that he now collected; his present purpose was not a foray but a war.[897] He advanced into his rival’s territory ravaging its fields, harrying its cities and gathering booty as he went. At every step the confidence of his own forces, the dismay of the enemy increased.

Adherbal was at last convinced that he must appeal to the sword for the security of his crown. A second flight to Rome would have utterly discredited him in the eyes of his subjects, perhaps in those of the Roman government itself; yet, as his chief hope still lay in Rome, he hurriedly despatched an embassy to the suzerain city[898] while he himself prepared to take the field. With unwilling energy he gathered his available forces and marched to oppose Jugurtha’s triumphant progress. The invading host had now skirted Cirta to the west and was apparently attempting to cut off its communications with the sea. The disastrous results that would have followed the success of this attempt, may have been the final motive that spurred Adherbal to his appeal to arms; and it was somewhere within the fifty miles that intervened between the capital and its port of Rusicade and at a spot nearer to the sea than to Cirta,[899] that the opposing armies met. The day was already far spent when Adherbal came into touch with his enemy: there was no thought of a pitched battle in the gathering gloom, and either party took up his quarters for the night. Towards the late watches of the night, in the doubtful light of the early dawn, the soldiers of Jugurtha crept up to the outposts of the enemy; at a given signal they rushed on the camp and carried it by storm. Adherbal’s soldiers, heavy with sleep and groping for their arms, were routed or slain; the prince himself sprang on his horse and with a handful of his knights sped for safety to the walls of Cirta, Jugurtha’s troops in hot pursuit. They had almost closed on the fugitive before the walls were reached; but the race had been watched from the battlements, and, as the flying Adherbal passed the gates, the walls were manned by a volunteer body of Italian merchants who kept the pursuing Numidians at bay.[900] It was the merchant class that had most to fear from the cruelty and cupidity of the nomad hordes that now beat against the fortress, and during the siege that followed they controlled the course of events far more effectually than the unhappy king whom they had for the moment saved from destruction.

Jugurtha’s plans were foiled; Adherbal had escaped, and there lay before him the irksome prospect of a siege, of probable interference from Rome and, it might be, of the necessity of openly defying the senate’s commands. But it was now too late to draw back, and he set himself vigorously to the work of reducing Cirta by assault or famine. The task must have been an arduous one. The town formed one of the strongest positions for defence that could be found in the ancient world. It was built on an isolated cube of rock that towered above the vast cultivated tracts of the surrounding plain. At its eastern extremity the precipice made a sheer drop of six hundred feet, and was perhaps quite inaccessible on this side, although it threw out spurs, whether natural or of artificial construction, which formed a difficult and easily defensible communication with the lower land around. Its natural bastions were completed by a natural moat, for the river Ampsaga (the Wäd Remel) almost encircled the town, and on the eastern side its deep and rushing waters could only be crossed by a ledge of rock, through which it bored a subterranean channel and over which some kind of bridge or causeway had probably been formed.[901] The natural and easy mode of approach to the city was to be found in the south-west, where a neck of land of half a furlong’s breadth led up to the principal gate.

In spite of the formidable difficulties of the task Jugurtha attempted an assault, for it was of the utmost importance that he should possess the person of Adherbal before interference was felt from Rome. Mantlets, turrets and all the engines of siege warfare were vigorously employed to carry the town by storm;[902] but the stout walls baffled every effort, and Jugurtha was forced to face as best he might another Roman embassy which Adherbal’s protests had brought to African soil. The senate, when it had learnt the news of the renewed outbreak of the war, was as unwilling as ever to intervene as a third partner in a three-sided conflict. To play the part of the policeman as well as of the judge was no element in Roman policy; the very essence of a protectorate was that it should take care of itself; were intervention necessary, it should be decisive, and it would be a lengthy task and an arduous strain to gather and transport to Africa a force sufficient to overawe Jugurtha. The easy device of a new commission was therefore adopted. If its Suggestions were obeyed, all would be well; if they were neglected, matters could not be much worse than they were at present. As the new commissioners had merely to take a message and were credited with no discretionary power, it was thought unnecessary to burden the higher magnates of the State with the unenviable task, or to expose them to the undignified predicament of finding their representations flouted by a rebel who might have eventually to be recognised as a king. A chance was given to younger members of the senatorial order, and the three who landed in Africa were branded by the hostile criticism that was soon to find utterance and in the poverty of its indictment to catch at every straw, as lacking the age and dignity demanded by the mission–qualities which, had they been present, would probably have failed to make the least impression on Jugurtha’s fixed resolve. The commissioners were to approach both the kings and to bring to their notice the will and resolution of the Roman senate and people, which were to the effect that hostilities should be suspended and that the questions at issue between the rivals should be submitted to peaceful arbitration. This conduct the senate recommended as the only one worthy of its royal clients and of itself.[903]

The speed of the envoys was accelerated by the impression that they might find but one king to be the recipient of their message. On the eve of their departure the news of the decisive battle and the siege of Cirta had reached their ears. Haste was imperative, if they were to retain their position as envoys, for the next despatch might bring news of Adherbal’s death. The actual news received fell short of the truth,[904] and was perhaps still further softened for the public ear; the fact that the envoys had sailed was itself an official indication that all hope had not been abandoned. If they cherished a similar illusion themselves, it must almost have vanished before the sight that met their eyes in Numidia. They saw a closely beleaguered town in which one of the kings, who were to be the recipients of their message, was so closely hemmed that access to him was impossible.[905] The other, without abating one jot of his military preparations, met them with an answer as uncompromising as it was courteous. Jugurtha held nothing more precious than the authority of the senate; from his youth up he had striven to meet the approbation of the good; it was by merit not by artifice, that he had gained the favour of Scipio; it was desert that had won him a place amongst Micipsa’s children and a share in the Numidian crown. But qualities carry their responsibilities; the very distinction of his services made it the more incumbent on him to avenge a wrong. Adherbal had treacherously plotted against his life; the crime had been revealed and he had but taken steps to forestall it; the Roman people would not be acting justly or honourably, if they hindered him from taking such steps in his own defence as were the common right of all men.[906]

He would soon send envoys to Rome to deal with the whole question in dispute.

This answer showed the Roman commissioners the utter helplessness of their position. Their presence in Jugurtha’s camp within sight of a city in which a client king and a number of their own citizens were imprisoned, was itself a stigma on the name of Rome. If they had prayed to see Adherbal, the request, must have been refused; to prolong the negotiations was to court further insult, and they set their faces once more for Rome after faithfully performing the important mission of repeating a message of the senate with verbal correctness. Jugurtha granted them the courtesy of not renewing his active operations until he thought that they had quitted Africa. Then, despairing of carrying the town by assault, he settled to the work of a regular siege. The nature of the ground must have made a complete investment impossible; but it also rendered it unnecessary. The cliffs and the river bed made escape as difficult as attack. On some sides it was but necessary to maintain a strenuous watch on every possible egress; on others lines of circumvallation, with ramparts and ditches, kept the beleaguered within their walls. Siege-towers were raised to mate the height of the fortifications which they threatened, and manned with garrisons to harry the town and repel all efforts of its citizens to escape. The blockade was varied by a series of surprises, of sudden assaults by day or night; no method of force or fraud was left untried; the loyalty of the defenders who appeared on the walls was assailed by threats or promises; the assailants were strenuously exhorted to effect a speedy entry.

It would seem that Cirta was ill-provided with supplies.[907] Adherbal, who had made it the basis of his attack and must have foreseen the probability of his defeat, should have seen that it was well provisioned; and the vast cisterns and granaries cut in the solid rock, that were in later times to be found within the city, should have supplied water and food sufficient to prolong the siege to a degree that might have tried the senate’s patience as sorely as Jugurtha’s. But neither the king nor his advisers were adepts in the art of war; it must have been difficult to regulate the distribution of provisions amidst the trading classes, of unsettled habits and mixed nationalities, that were crowded within the walls; discontent could not be restrained by discipline and might at any moment be a motive to surrender. The imprisoned king saw no prospect of a prolongation of the war that could secure even his personal safety; no help could be looked for from without and a ruthless enemy was battering at his gates. His only hope, a faint one, lay in a last appeal to Rome; but the invader’s lines were drawn so close that even a chance of communicating with the protecting city seemed denied. At length, by urgent appeals to pity and to avarice, he induced two of the comrades who had joined his flight from the field of battle, to risk the venture of penetrating the enemy’s lines and reaching the sea.[908] The venture, which was made by night, succeeded; the two bold messengers stole through the enclosing fortifications, rapidly made for the nearest port, and thence took ship to Rome. Within a few days they were in the presence of the senate,[909] and the despairing cry of Adherbal was being read to an assembly, to whom it could convey no new knowledge and on whom it could lay no added burden of perplexity. But emotion, although it cannot teach, may focus thought and clarify the promptings of interest. To many a loose thinker Adherbal’s missive may have been the first revelation, not only of the shame, but of the possible danger of the situation. The facts were too well known to require detailed treatment. It was sufficient to remind the senate that for five months a friend and ally of the Roman people had been blockaded in his own capital; his choice was merely one between death by the sword and death by famine. Adherbal no longer asked for his kingdom; nay, he barely ventured to ask for his life; but he deprecated a death by torture–a fate that would most certainly be his if he fell into the hands of his implacable foe. The appeal to interest was interwoven with that made to pity and to honour. What were Jugurtha’s ultimate motives? When he had consummated his crimes and absorbed the whole of Numidia, did he mean to remain a peaceful client-king, a faithful vassal of Rome? His fidelity and obedience might be measured by the treatment which he had already accorded to the mandate and the envoys of the senate. The power of Rome in her African possessions was at stake; and the majesty of the empire was appealed to no less than the sense of friendship, loyalty, and gratitude, as a ground for instant assistance which might yet save the suppliant from a terrible and degrading end.

The impression produced by this appeal was seen in the bolder attitude adopted by that section of the senate which had from the first regarded Jugurtha as a criminal at large, and had never approved the policy of leaving Numidia to settle its own affairs. Voices were heard advocating the immediate despatch of an army to Africa, the speedy succour of Adherbal, the consideration of an adequate punishment for the contumacy of Jugurtha in not obeying the express commands of Rome.[910] But the usual protests were heard from the other side, protests which were interpreted as a proof of the utter corruption of those who uttered them,[911] but which were doubtless veiled in the decent language, and may in some cases have been animated by the genuine spirit, of the cautious imperialist who prefers a crime to a blunder. The conflict of opinion resulted in the usual compromise. A new commission was to be despatched with a more strongly worded message from the senate; but, as rumour had apparently been busy with the adventures of the “three young men” whom Jugurtha had turned back, it was deemed advisable to select the present envoys from men whose age, birth and ample honours might give weight to a mission that was meant to avert a war.[912] The solemnity of the occasion was attested, and some feeling of assurance may have been created, by the fact that there figured amongst the commissioners no less a person than the chief of the senate Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, beyond all question the foremost man of Rome,[913] the highest embodiment of patrician dignity and astute diplomacy. The pressing appeal of Adherbal’s envoys, the ugly rumours which were circulating in Rome, urged the commissioners to unwonted activity. Within three days they were on board, and after a short interval had landed at Utica in the African province. The experience of the former mission had taught them that their dignity might be utterly lost if they quitted the territory of the Roman domain. They did not deign to set foot in Numidia, but sent a message to Jugurtha informing him that they had a mandate from the senate and ordering him to come with all speed to the Roman province.

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