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Updated: June 3, 2025
But if Tigranes should now make peace, not only would Mithradates lose the last chance of being reinstated in his kingdom, but his surrender would be beyond doubt the first condition of peace; and certainly Tigranes would not have acted otherwise towards him than Bocchus had formerly acted towards Jugurtha.
He had at any rate covered a great stretch of territory before he actually came into touch with the combined forces of Bocchus and Jugurtha; for the almost continuous fighting that ensued, when once the armies had come into contact, seems all to have been confined to the last few days before Cirta was reached and to a period of time which could have formed but a small fraction of the whole duration of the march.
But some believed that his inaction was due to surprise, and that the transit of Sulla through the hostile camp was one of those actions which are rendered safe by their very boldness. In a few days the travellers had reached the spot where Bocchus held his court. The secret advocates of Numidia and Rome were already in possession of the king.
It is true that an incursion, which Sulla happily carried out with the same artful audacity as formerly his expedition to Bocchus, relieved the hard-pressed Aesernians for a moment; nevertheless they were after an obstinate resistance compelled by the extremity of famine to capitulate towards the end of the year.
King Bocchus, in whose power it lay to bring the war to an issue favourable for the Romans or endlessly to prolong it, now concluded with Jugurtha a treaty, in which the latter ceded to him a part of his kingdom and Bocchus promised actively to support his son-in-law against Rome.
Further, there still roamed in the border-region between the kingdoms of Juba and Bocchus the last of the Catilinarians, that Publius Sittius of Nuceria, who eighteen years before had become converted from a bankrupt Italian merchant into a Mauretanian leader of free bands, and since that time had procured for himself a name and a body of retainers amidst the Libyan quarrels.
King Bocchus was not unwilling to return to his old ambiguous position: without dissolving his agreement with Jugurtha or dismissing him, he entered into negotiations with the Roman general respecting the terms of an alliance with Rome.
The result of this battle was that Bocchus became anxious to come to terms. Sulla was sent to arrange them. The Senate replied that they excused his past errors, and that he should have the friendship and alliance of Rome when he had earned it. The Roman devised a trap.
Jugurtha, who was fighting against Masinissa in the front, rode also to the rear, and, holding up a bloody head, cried out that he had slain Marius. The Romans began to give way, when Sulla, like Cromwell at Marston Moor, having done his own work charged the troops of Bocchus on the flank. Still Jugurtha fought on, and fled only when all around him were slain.
He no longer had the help of his Mauretanian auxiliaries, for Bocchus had retired to his own kingdom, and he had therefore lost his desire for a pitched battle; but his swarms of Gaetulian horse had enabled him to resume his old style of guerilla fighting, and he had taken advantage of the practical suspension of hostilities which had accompanied the change in the Roman command, to set on foot a series of raids against the friends of Rome and even to penetrate the borders of the Roman province itself.
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