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Adherbal, having put the conspirators on board a quinquereme, sent it in advance, because it sailed slower than a trireme, and followed himself at a moderate distance with eight triremes.
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, that the opposing armies met.
The Senate then sent Marcus Scaurus, who held endless debates with Jugurtha, at Utica, to which place he was summoned. These were not attended with any results. Scaurus returned to Rome, and Jugurtha pressed the siege of Aita, which soon capitulated. Adherbal was executed with cruel torture, and the adult population was put to the sword. A cry of indignation arose in Italy.
With his less numerous but better disciplined and better led troops Jugurtha conquered, and seized the whole territory of the kingdom, subjecting the chiefs who adhered to his cousin to the most cruel persecution. Adherbal escaped to the Roman province and proceeded to Rome to make his complaint there. Jugurtha had expected this, and had made his arrangements to meet the threatened intervention.
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.
Thyra had for the last year been betrothed to Adherbal, and he, too, was to accompany Hamilcar to Spain, and none could say how long it might be before they would return. While the others were sitting round the festive board, Adherbal and Thyra strolled away among the groves in the garden.
The general had therefore consented, upon the entreaties of his nephew Adherbal, and his son, to organize a hunt upon the following night. As soon as the sun set the troops, who had already received their orders, fell into their ranks. The full moon rose as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon, and her light was ample for the object they had in view.
Then the ten young men without even seeing Adherbal, left Africa, not we may conjecture so lightly laden as they came there. The town of Cirta stood on the promontory of a peninsula formed by a loop of the river Ampsaga, and was almost impregnable.
His position in the kingdom, and the influence which he possessed with the Roman government by means of his numerous friends and war-comrades, made it appear to king Micipsa advisable to adopt him , and to arrange in his testament that his own two elder sons Adherbal and Hiempsal, and his adopted son Jugurtha along with them, should jointly inherit and govern the kingdom, just as he himself had done with his two brothers.
Adherbal found himself reduced to extremities and despaired of Roman support; the Italians in Cirta moreover, weary of the siege and firmly relying for their own safety on the terror of the Roman name, urged a surrender. So the town capitulated.
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