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Updated: May 28, 2025
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.
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.
The Numidians perhaps objected to being partitioned. Micipsa died soon after. Jugurtha at once murdered Hiempsal, claimed the sovereignty, and attacked his other cousin. Adherbal, closely besieged in the town of Cirta, which remained faithful to him, appealed to Rome; but Jugurtha had already prepared his ground, and knew that he had nothing to fear. The Senate sent out commissioners.
The stately provincial towns indeed, which the insane fury of Juba and of the desperate remnant of the constitutional party had converted into ruins, did not revive so rapidly as they had been reduced to ashes, and many a ruinous site recalled long afterwards this fatal period; but the two new Julian colonies, Carthage and Cirta, became and continued to be the centres of Africano-Roman civilization.
If the incursion which he made into this region was unprovoked, it was a challenge to King Bocchus and an impolitic disturbance of the recent attitude of quiescence that had been assumed by that hesitating monarch; but it is possible that news had reached Marius that a Mauretanian attack was impending, and that the same motive which had impelled Metellus to hasten from the south to the defence of Cirta, now urged his successor to push his army more than five hundred miles farther to the west up to the very borders of Mauretania.
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.
I admired the scenery, and I delighted in the cities, not only Carthage and Utica, but both Hippo Regius and Hippo Diarrhytus, and also Hadrumetum, Tacape, Cirta and Theveste, and even such mere towns as Lambaesis and Thysdrus, which last has an amphitheater second only to the Colosseum itself.
Bocchus and Sittius united fell on the Numidian land, and occupied the important town of Cirta; and their attack, as well as that of the Gaetulians, compelled king Juba to send a portion of his troops to his southern and western frontiers. Caesar's situation, however, continued sufficiently unpleasant.
The fathers listened to the report, and allowed their countrymen in Cirta just to fight on as long as they pleased.
Another equally fine site is that of Bou Merzoug, near Oulad Rahmoun, about an hour's railway journey from Constantine. The place is naturally adapted for a settlement as there is a spring of water there. This spring was later utilized by the Romans to provide water for the city of Cirta.
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