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Updated: May 28, 2025
In spite of the carnage of this battlefield, victory here, as elsewhere throughout the war, meant little more than driving off the foe. We possess but a fragmentary record of this terrible retreat to Cirta, but it is certain that its dangers and losses were by no means exhausted in two pitched battles.
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.
These men, accustomed as they were to war, were wearied by residence in a town; there was difficulty in convincing them, and the people mounted the walls to see them go away. They defiled through the street of Khamon, and the Cirta gate, pell-mell, archers with hoplites, captains with soldiers, Lusitanians with Greeks.
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.
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.
But we cannot say whether his original choice was a station so distant as the neighbourhood of Cirta, or whether his movement in this direction, which severed him by some hundreds of miles from the region which he had lately commanded, was a measure forced on him by the danger to which his army was exposed in the distant west from the overwhelming forces of the enemy.
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.
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 plied with Mediterranean cities a trade in purple dye, the material for which was gathered on the Atlantic coast; and their merchants were sometimes seen in the marketplace at Cirta; but as fighting men they lacked even the organisation to which the Numidians had attained, and Jugurtha, while he sought or purchased their help, was obliged to teach them the rudiments of disciplined warfare.
While Justinian approved himself the defender of the faith, he entertained an ambitious hope, that his victorious lieutenant would speedily enlarge the narrow limits of his dominion to the space which they occupied before the invasion of the Moors and Vandals; and Belisarius was instructed to establish five dukes or commanders in the convenient stations of Tripoli, Leptis, Cirta, Cæsarea, and Sardinia, and to compute the military force of palatines or borderers that might be sufficient for the defence of Africa.
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