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Updated: May 24, 2025
Yet Aulus, either dazzled by the vision of the gold concealed within the fortress which it had caused him such labour to reach, or with some vague idea that a pretence at an investment might alarm the king into coming to terms for the protection of his hoard, began to make formal preparations for a siege, to bring up mantlets, to mark out his lines of circumvallation, to deceive his enemy, if he could not deceive himself, into a belief that the conditions rendered an attack on Suthul possible.
His aim was Suthul, a strongly fortified post on the river Ubus, nearly forty miles south of Hippo Regius and the sea, and so short a distance from the larger and better-known town of Calama, the modern Gelma, that the latter name was sometimes used to describe the scene of the incidents that followed.
We are not told the site of the winter quarters from which the march began; but the ineffectiveness of the former campaign and the caution of Albinus, who did not mean his legions to fight during his absence, might lead us to suppose that the troops had been quartered in or near the Roman province; and in this case Aulus might have marched along the valley of the Bagradas to reach his destined goal, which would finally have been approached from the south through a narrow space between two ranges of hills, the westernmost of which was crowned at its northern end by the fortifications of Suthul.
Most of these were auxiliaries, Thracians and Ligurians such as had abandoned Aulus at Suthul; and the sense of the danger threatened by the treachery of allies, who must form a vital element in all Roman armies, may have been the motive for the awful example now given to the empire of Rome's punishment for breach of faith.
The disgust of the soldiers at the hardships to which they had been submitted in the pursuit of this phantom gold, the last evidence of which had vanished when their commander turned his back on the walls of Suthul, now resulted in a frightful state of demoralisation.
But it was one that must be transacted personally and in private. The plain round Suthul was much too public a spot; let the legate follow the king into the fastnesses of the desert and all would be arranged. The legate advanced as the king retired; but at every point of the difficult march Numidian spies were hovering around the Roman column.
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