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Updated: June 16, 2025
Jugurtha lost another battle, and fled to Thala; but Metellus marched fifty miles across the desert, and forced him to flee by night out of the town, which was taken after a siege of forty days. About the same time Metellus heard that Marius was coming to supersede him.
He seems in his lines round Thala to have had all that he needed for a blockade; even the planks for the great moving turrets were ready to his hand. The engines were soon in place on an artificial mound raised by the labour of the troops, the soldiers advanced under cover of the mantlets, and the rams began to batter against the walls.
But the wall of Thala was weaker than the spirit of its defenders; a portion of the rampart crumbled beneath the blows of the ram, and the victorious Romans rushed in to seize the plunder of the treasure-city. They found instead a holocaust of wealth and human victims. The royal palace had been invaded by the deserters from the Roman army whom Jugurtha had left behind.
It was too much to hope that Jugurtha would be caught in such a trap. The alternative prospects at Thala were immediate capture or a siege as protracted as the nature of the territory would permit. In the latter case a cordon would be drawn round the town and a price would probably be put upon the rebel's head.
The capture of Thala was one of those successes which might have been important, had it been possible to limit the area of the war or to check the disaffection which was now spreading throughout almost the whole of Northern Africa.
The expedition of Marius to Capsa was a venture as aimless, as that of Metellus to Thala had been judicious; but the expedition to the Molochath, which passed along the border of, if not into, the Mauretanian territory, was directly repugnant to sound policy.
The king had vanished out of sight in the distance. In the interior of the modern beylik of Tunis, close on the edge of the great desert, there lay on an oasis provided with springs the strong place Thala; thither Jugurtha had retired with his children, his treasures, and the flower of his troops, there to await better times.
His operations seem to have brought him to a point somewhere in the neighbourhood of Sicca, and this proximity to the southern regions of Numidia suggested the thought of an enterprise that might rival and even surpass Metellus's storm of Thala. About thirteen miles west of that town lay the strong city of Capsa.
He had shut himself up in Thala, a large and wealthy town to which his treasures and his children had already been transferred. This city lay some thirteen miles east of the oasis of Capsa, and a dismal and waterless desert stretched between the Romans and the refuge of the king.
The villagers in the neighbourhood of the recent victory, whom the flight of the king had made for the moment the humble servants of Rome, were bidden to bring water to a certain spot, and the day was named on which this mission was to be fulfilled. Metellus's own vessels were filled from the river, and the rapid march to Thala was begun.
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