Chapter XIII: The African Provinces (1)

[Sidenote: North Africa and the Berber stock.]

North Africa, in a physical and ethnographic point of view, stands by itself like an island. Nature has isolated it on all sides, partly by the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea, partly by the widely-extended shore, incapable of cultivation, of the Great Syrtis below the modern Fezzan, and, in connection therewith, by the desert, likewise closed against cultivation, which shuts off the steppe-land and the oases of the Sahara to the south. Ethnographically the population of this wide region forms a great family of peoples, distinguished most sharply from the Blacks of the south, but likewise strictly separated from the Egyptians, although perhaps with these there may once have subsisted a primeval fellowship. They call themselves in the Riff near Tangier Amâzigh, in the Sahara Imôshagh, and the same name meets us, referred to particular tribes, on several occasions among the Greeks and Romans, thus as Maxyes at the founding of Carthage (ii. 8) {ii. 7.}, as Mazices in the Roman period at different places of the Mauretanian north coast; the similar designation that has remained with the scattered remnants proves that this great people has once had a consciousness, and has permanently retained the impression, of the relationship of its members. To the peoples who came into contact with them this relationship was far from clear; the diversities which prevail among their several parts are not merely at the present day glaring, after in the past thousands of years the mixture with the neighbouring peoples, particularly the Negroes in the south and the Arabs in the north, has had its effect upon them, but certainly were as considerable even before these foreign influences as their extension in space demands. A universally valid expression for the nation as such is wanting in all other idioms; even where the name goes beyond the designation of stock,[275] it yet does not describe the circle as a whole. That of Libyans, which the Egyptians, and after their precedent the Greeks use, belongs originally to the most easterly tribes coming into contact with Egypt, and has always remained specially pertaining to those of the eastern half. That of Nomades, of Greek origin, expresses in the first instance only the absence of settlement, and then in its Roman transformation as Numidians, has become associated with that territory which king Massinissa united under his sway. That of Mauri, of native origin, and current among the later Greeks as well as the Romans, is restricted to the western parts of the land, and continues in use for the kingdoms here formed and the Roman provinces that have proceeded from them. The tribes of the south are comprehended under the name of the Gaetulians, which, however, the stricter use of language limits to the region on the Atlantic Ocean to the south of Mauretania. We are accustomed to designate the nation by the name of Berbers, which the Arabs apply to the northern tribes.

[Sidenote: Type.]

As to their type they stand far nearer to the Indo-Germanic than to the Semitic, and form even at the present day, when since the invasion of Islam North Africa has fallen to the Semitic race, the sharpest contrast to the Arabs. It is not without warrant that various geographers of antiquity have refused to let Africa pass at all as a third continent, but have attached Egypt to Asia and the Berber territory to Europe. As the plants and animals of northern Africa correspond in the main to those of the opposite south-European coast, so the type of man, where it has been preserved unmixed, points altogether to the north:--the fair hair and the blue eyes of a considerable portion, the tall stature, the slender but powerfully knit form, the prevailing monogamy and respect for the position of woman, the lively and emotional temperament, the inclination to settled life, the community founded on the full equality in rights among the grown-up men, which in the usual confederation of several communities affords also the basis for the formation of a state.[276] To strictly political development and to full civilisation this nation, hemmed round by Negroes, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, at no time attained; it must have approximated to it under the government of Massinissa. The alphabet, derived independently from the Phoenician, of which the Berbers made use under Roman rule, and which those of the Sahara still use at the present day, as well as the feeling which, as we have observed, they once had of common national relationship, may probably be referred to the great Numidian king and his descendants, whom the later generations worshipped as gods.[277] In spite of all invasions they have maintained their original territory to a considerable extent; in Morocco now about two-thirds, in Algiers about half of the inhabitants are reckoned of Berber descent.

[Sidenote: Phoenician immigration.]

The immigration, to which all the coasts of the Mediterranean were subjected in the earliest times, made North Africa Phoenician. To the Phoenicians the natives had to give up the largest and best part of the north coast; the Phoenicians withdrew all North Africa from Greek civilisation. The Great Syrtis again forms the linguistic as well as the political line of separation; as on the east the Pentapolis of Cyrene belongs to the Greek circle, so on the west the Tripolis (Tripoli) of Great-Leptis became and remained Phoenician. We have formerly narrated how the Phoenicians after several hundred years of struggle succumbed to the Romans. Here we have to give account of the fortunes of Africa, after the Romans had occupied the Carthaginian territory and had made the neighbouring regions dependent on them.

[Sidenote: The government of the Roman republic.]

The short-sightedness and narrow-mindedness--we may here say, the perversity and brutality--of the foreign government of the Roman republic had nowhere so full sway as in Africa. In southern Gaul, and still more in Spain, the Roman government pursued at least a consolidated extension of territory, and, half involuntarily, the rudiments of Latinising; in the Greek East the foreign rule was mitigated and often almost compensated by the power of Hellenism forcing the hand even of hard policy. But as to this third continent the old national hatred towards the Poeni seemed still to reach beyond the grave of Hannibal’s native city. The Romans held fast the territory which Carthage had possessed at its fall, but less in order to develop it for their own benefit than to prevent its benefiting others, not to awaken new life there, but to watch the dead body; it was fear and envy, rather than ambition and covetousness, that created the province of Africa. Under the republic it had not a history; the war with Jugurtha was for Africa nothing but a lion-hunt, and its historical significance lay in its connection with the republican party struggles. The land was, as a matter of course, turned to full account by Roman speculation; but neither might the destroyed great city rise up afresh, nor might a neighbouring town develop into a similar prosperity; there were here no standing camps as in Spain and Gaul; the Roman province, with its narrow bounds, was on all sides surrounded by relatively civilised territory of the dependent king of Numidia, who had helped in the work of the destruction of Carthage, and now, as a reward for it, received not so much the spoil as the task of protecting it from the inroads of the wild hordes of the interior. That thereby a political and military importance was given to this state, such as no other client-state of Rome ever possessed, and that even on this side the Roman policy, in order merely to banish the phantom of Carthage, conjured up serious dangers, was shown by the share of Numidia in the civil wars of Rome; never during all the internal crises of the empire before or after did a client-prince play such a part as the last king of Numidia in the war of the republicans against Caesar.

[Sidenote: Caesar’s African policy.]

All the more necessarily the state of things in Africa became transformed by this decision of arms. In the other provinces, as a consequence of the civil wars, there was a change of rule; in Africa there was a change of system. The African possession of the Phoenicians itself was not a proper dominion over Africa; it may be in some measure compared with the dominion in Asia Minor of the Hellenes before Alexander. Of this dominion the Romans had then taken over but a small part, and of that part they had nipped the bud. Now Carthage arose afresh, and, as if the soil had only been waiting for the seed, soon flourished anew. The whole country lying behind--the great kingdom of Numidia--became a Roman province, and the protection of the frontier against the barbarians was undertaken by the Roman legionaries. The kingdom of Mauretania became, in the first instance, a Roman dependency, and soon also a part of the Roman empire. With the dictator Caesar the civilising and Latinising of Africa took their place among the tasks of the Roman government. Here we have to set forth how the task was carried out, first as to the outward organisation, and then as to the arrangements made and results achieved for the several districts.

[Sidenote: Extent of the Roman rule.]

Territorial sovereignty over the whole of North Africa had doubtless already been claimed on the part of the Roman republic, perhaps as a portion of the Carthaginian inheritance, perhaps because “our sea” early became one of the fundamental ideas of the Roman commonwealth; and, in so far, all its coasts were regarded by the Romans even of the developed republic as their true property. Nor had this claim of Rome ever been properly contested by the larger states of North Africa after the destruction of Carthage; if in many places the neighbours did not submit to the dominion, they were just as little obedient to their local rulers. That the silver moneys of king Juba I. of Numidia and of king Bogud of Mauretania were coined after the Roman standard, and the Latin legend--little as it was suited to the relations of language and of intercourse then subsisting in North Africa--was never absent from them, was the direct recognition of the Roman supremacy, a consequence, it may be presumed, of the new organisation of North Africa that in the year 674 U.C. {80 B.C.} was accomplished by Pompeius. The generally insignificant resistance which the Africans, apart from Carthage, opposed to the Romans, came from the descendants of Massinissa; after king Jugurtha, and later king Juba, were vanquished, the princes of the western country submitted without more ado to the dependence required of them. The arrangements which the emperors made were carried out quite after the same way in the territory of the dependent princes as in the immediate territory of Rome; it was the Roman government that regulated the boundaries in all North Africa, and constituted Roman communities at its discretion in the kingdom of Mauretania no less than in the province of Numidia. We cannot therefore speak, in the strict sense, of a Roman subjugation of North Africa. The Romans did not conquer it like the Phoenicians or the French; but they ruled over Numidia as over Mauretania, first as suzerains, then as successors of the native governments. It is so much the more a question, whether the notion of frontier admits of application to Africa in the usual sense. The states of Massinissa, of Bocchus, of Bogud, as also the Carthaginian, proceeded from the northern verge, and all the civilisation of North Africa is based pre-eminently on this coast; but, so far as we can discern, they all regarded the tribes settled or roving in the south as subjects, and, if they withdrew themselves from subjection, as insurgents, so far as the distance and the desert did not by doing away with contact do away with control. Neighbouring states, with which relations of right or of treaty might have subsisted, can hardly be pointed out in the south of northern Africa, or where such a one appears, such as, in particular, the kingdom of the Garamantes, its position is not to be strictly distinguished from that of the hereditary principalities within the civilised territory. This was the case also as regards Roman Africa; as for the previous rulers, so also doubtless for Roman civilisation there was to be found a limit to the south, but hardly so for the Roman territorial supremacy. There is never mention of any formal extension or taking back of the frontier in Africa; the insurrections in the Roman territory, and the inroads of the neighbouring peoples, look here all the more similar to each other, as even in the regions undoubtedly in Roman possession, still more than in Syria or Spain, many a remote and impassable district knew nothing of Roman taxation and of Roman recruiting. For that reason it seems appropriate to connect with the view of the several provinces at the same time the slight information which has been left to us in historical tradition, or by means of preserved monuments, respecting the friendly or hostile relations of the Romans with their southern neighbours.

[Sidenote: Province of Africa and Numidia.]

The former territory of Carthage and the larger part of the earlier kingdom of Numidia, united with it by the dictator Caesar, or, as they also called it, the old and the new Africa, formed until the end of the reign of Tiberius the province of that name, which extended from the boundary of Cyrene to the river Ampsaga, embracing the modern state of Tripoli as well as Tunis and the French province of Constantine (iv. 470 f.) {iv. 447.}. The government, however, for this territory, which was considerable, and required an extended frontier-defence, reverted under the emperor Gaius in the main to the twofold division of the republican times, and committed the portion of the province that did not stand in need of special border-defence to the civil government, and the rest of the territory furnished with garrisons to a military commandant not further amenable to its authority. The cause of this was, that Africa in the partition of the provinces between emperor and senate was given to the latter, and, as from the state of things there a command on a larger scale could not be dispensed with, the co-ordination of the governor delegated by the senate and of the military commandant nominated by the emperor--which latter according to the subsisting hierarchy was placed under the orders of the former--could not but provoke and did provoke collisions between these officials and even between emperor and senate. To this an end was put in the year 37 by an arrangement that the coast-land from Hippo (Bonah), as far as the borders of Cyrene, should retain the old name of Africa and should remain with the proconsul, whereas the western part of the province with the capital Cirta (Constantine), as well as the interior with the great military camps to the north of the Aures, and generally all territory furnished with garrisons, should be placed under the commandant of the African legion. This commandant had senatorial rank, but belonged not to the consular, but to the praetorial class.

[Sidenote: The two Mauretanian kingdoms.]

The western half of North Africa was divided at the time of the dictator Caesar (iv. 461) {iv. 438.} into the two kingdoms of Tingi (Tangier), at that time under king Bogud and of Iol, the later Caesarea (Zershell), at that time under king Bocchus. As both kings had as decidedly taken the side of Caesar in the struggle against the republicans as king Juba of Numidia had taken the side of the opposite party, and as they had rendered most essential services to him during the African and the Spanish wars, not merely were both left in possession of their rule, but the domain of Bocchus, and probably also that of Bogud, was enlarged by the victor.[278] Then, when the rivalries between Antonius and Caesar the younger began, king Bogud alone in the west placed himself on the side of Antonius, and on the instigation of his brother and of his wife invaded Spain during the Perusine war (714) {40 B.C.}; but his neighbour Bocchus and his own capital Tingis took part for Caesar and against him. At the conclusion of peace Antonius allowed Bogud to fall, and Caesar gave the rest of his territory to king Bocchus, but gave Roman municipal rights to the town of Tingis. When, some years later, a rupture took place between the two rulers, the ex-king took part energetically in the struggle in the hope of regaining his kingdom on this occasion, but at the capture of the Messenian town Methone he was taken prisoner by Agrippa and executed.

[Sidenote: Juba II.]

Already some years before (721) {33 B.C.} king Bocchus had died; his kingdom, the whole of western Africa, was soon afterwards (729) {25 B.C.} obtained by the son of the last Numidian king, Juba II., the husband of Cleopatra, the daughter of Antonius by the Egyptian queen.[279] Both had been exhibited to the Roman public in early youth as captive kings’ children, Juba in the triumphal procession of Caesar the father, Cleopatra in that of the son; it was a wonderful juncture that they now were sent away from Rome as king and queen of the most esteemed vassal-state of the empire, but it was in keeping with the circumstances. Both were brought up in the imperial family; Cleopatra was treated by the legitimate wife of her father with motherly kindness like her own children; Juba had served in Caesar’s army. The youth of the dependent princely houses, which was numerously represented at the imperial court and played a considerable part in the circle around the imperial princes, was generally employed in the early imperial period for the filling up of the vassal principalities, after a similar manner, according to free selection, as the first class in rank of the senate was employed for the filling up of the governorships of Syria and Germany. For almost fifty years (729-775 U.C., 25 B.C-A.D. 23) he, and after him his son Ptolemaeus, bore rule over western Africa; it is true that, like the town Tingis from his predecessor, a considerable number of the most important townships, particularly on the coast, was withdrawn from him by the bestowal of Roman municipal rights, and, apart from the capital, these kings of Mauretania were almost nothing but princes of the Berber tribes.

[Sidenote: Erection of the provinces of Caesarea and Tingi.]

This government lasted up to the year 40, when it appeared fitting to the emperor Gaius, chiefly on account of the rich treasure, to call his cousin to Rome, to deliver him there to the executioner, and to take the territory into imperial administration. Both rulers were unwarlike, the father a Greek man of letters after the fashion of this period, compiling so-called memorabilia of a historical or geographical kind, or relative to the history of art, in endless books, noteworthy by his--we might say--international literary activity, well read in Phoenician and Syrian literature, but exerting himself above all to diffuse the knowledge of Roman habits and of so-called Roman history among the Hellenes, moreover, a zealous friend of art and frequenter of the theatre; the son a prince of the common type, passing his time in court-life and princely luxury. Among their subjects they were held of little account, whether as regards their personality or as vassals of the Romans; against the Gaetulians in the south king Juba had on several occasions to invoke the help of the Roman governor, and, when in Roman Africa the prince of the Numidians, Tacfarinas, revolted against the Romans, the Moors flocked in troops to his banner. Nevertheless the end of the dynasty and the introduction of Roman provincial government into the land made a deep impression. The Moors were faithfully devoted to their royal house; altars were still erected under the Roman rule in Africa to the kings of the race of Massinissa (p. 305). Ptolemaeus, whatever he might be otherwise, was Massinissa’s genuine descendant in the sixth generation, and the last of the old royal house. A faithful servant of his, Aedemon, after the catastrophe called the mountain-tribes of the Atlas to arms, and it was only after a hard struggle that the governor Suetonius Paullinus--the same who afterwards fought with the Britons (I. 179)--was able to master the revolt (in the year 42). In the organisation of the new territory the Romans reverted to the earlier division into an eastern and a western half, or, as they were thenceforth called from the capitals, into the provinces of Caesarea and of Tingi; or rather they retained that division, for it was, as will be afterwards shown, necessarily suggested by the physical and political relations of the territory, and must have continued to subsist even under the same sceptre in one or the other form. Each of these provinces was furnished with imperial troops of the second class, and placed under an imperial governor not belonging to the senate.

The state and the destinies of this great and peculiar new seat of Latin civilisation were conditioned by the physical constitution of North Africa. It is formed by two great mountain-masses, of which the northern falls steeply towards the Mediterranean, while the southern, the Atlas, slopes off slowly in the Sahara-steppe dotted with numerous oases towards the desert proper. A smaller steppe, similar on the whole to the Sahara and dotted with numerous salt-lakes, serves in the middle portion, the modern Algeria, to separate the mountains on the north coast and those on the southern frontier. There are in North Africa no extensive plains capable of culture; the coast of the Mediterranean Sea has a level foreland only in a few districts; the land capable of cultivation, according to the modern expression the Tell, consists essentially of the numerous valleys and slopes within those two broad mountain-masses, and so extends to its greatest width where, as in the modern Morocco and in Tunis, no steppe intervenes between the northern and the southern border.

[Sidenote: Tripolis.]

The region of Tripolis, politically a part of the province of Africa, stands as respects its natural relations outside of the territory described, and is annexed to it in peninsular fashion. The frontier-range sloping down towards the Mediterranean Sea touches at the bay of Tacapae (Gabes), with its foreland of steppe and salt-lake, immediately on the shore. To the south of Tacapae as far as the Great Syrtis there extends along the coast the narrow Tripolitan island of cultivation, bounded inland towards the steppe by a chain of moderate height. Beyond it begins the steppe-country with numerous oases. The protection of the coast against the inhabitants of the desert is here of special difficulty, because the high margin of mountains is wanting; and traces of this are apparent in the accounts that have come to us of the military expeditions and the military positions in this region.

[Sidenote: The wars with the Garamantes.]

It was the arena of the wars with the Garamantes. Lucius Cornelius Balbus, who in his younger years had fought and administered under Caesar with the most adventurous boldness as well as with the most cruel recklessness, was selected by Augustus to reduce these inconvenient neighbours to quiet, and in his proconsulate (735) he subdued the interior as far as Cidamus (Ghadames), twelve days’ journey inland from Tripolis, and Garama (Germa) in Fezzan;[280] at his triumph--he was the last commoner who celebrated such an one--a long series of towns and tribes, hitherto unknown even by name, were displayed as vanquished. This expedition is named a conquest; and so doubtless the foreland must have been thereby brought in some measure under the Roman power. There was fighting subsequently on many occasions in this region. Soon afterwards, still under Augustus, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius made an expedition against the tribes of Marmarica, that is, of the Libyan desert above Cyrene, and at the same time against the Garamantes. That the war against Tacfarinas under Tiberius extended also over this region will be mentioned further on. After its termination the king of the Garamantes sent envoys to Rome, to procure pardon for his having taken part in it. In the year 70 an irruption of the Garamantes into the pacified territory was brought about by the circumstance that the town Oea (Tripoli) called the barbarians to help the Tripolis in a quarrel, which had grown into war, with the neighbouring town Great-Leptis (Lebda), whereupon they were beaten back by the governor of Africa and pursued to their own settlements. Under Domitian on the coast of the Great Syrtis, which had been from of old held by the Nasamones, a revolt of the natives provoked by the exorbitant taxes had to be repressed with arms by the governor of Numidia; the territory already poor in men was utterly depopulated by this cruelly conducted war. The emperor Severus took conspicuous care of this his native province--he was from Great-Leptis--and gave to it stronger military protection against the neighbouring barbarians. With this we may bring into connection the fact, that in the time from Severus to Alexander the nearest oases, Cidamus (Ghadames), Gharia el Gharbia, Bonjem, were provided with detachments of the African legion, which, it is true, owing to the distance from the headquarters, could not be much more than a nucleus for the probably considerable contingents of the subject tribes here rendering services to the Romans. In fact the possession of these oases was of importance not merely for the protection of the coast, but also for the traffic, which at all times passed by way of these oases from the interior of Africa to the harbours of Tripolis. It was not till the time of decay that the possession of these advanced posts was abandoned; in the description of the African wars under Valentinian and Justinian we find the towns of the coast directly harassed by the natives.

[Sidenote: The Africano-Numidian territory and army.]

The basis and core of Roman Africa was the province of that name, including the Numidian, which was a branch from it. Roman civilisation entered upon the heritage partly of the city of Carthage, partly of the kings of Numidia, and if it here attained considerable results, it may never be forgotten that it, properly speaking, merely wrote its name and inscribed its language on what was already there. Besides the towns, which were demonstrably founded by the former or by the latter, and to which we shall still return, the former as well as the latter led the Berber tribes, inclined at any rate to agriculture, towards fixed settlements. Even in the time of Herodotus the Libyans westward of the bay of Gabes were no longer nomads, but peacefully cultivated the soil; and the Numidian rulers carried civilisation and agriculture still farther into the interior. Nature, too, was here more favourable for husbandry than in the western part of North Africa; the middle depression between the northern and the southern range is indeed here not quite absent, but the salt lakes and the steppe proper are less extensive than in the two Mauretanias. The military arrangements were chiefly designed to plant the troops in front of the mighty Aurasian mountain-block, the Saint Gotthard of the southern frontier-range, and to check the irruption of the non-subject tribes from the latter into the pacified territory of Africa and Numidia. For that reason Augustus placed the stationary quarters of the legion at Theveste (Tebessa), on the high plateau between the Aures and the old province; even to the north of it, between Ammaedara and Althiburus, Roman forts existed in the first imperial period. Of the details of the warfare we learn little; it must have been permanent, and must have consisted in the constant repelling of the border-tribes, as well as in not less constant pillaging raids into their territory.

[Sidenote: War against Tacfarinas.]

Only as to a single occurrence of this sort has information in some measure accurate come to us; namely, as to the conflicts which derive their name from the chief leader of the Berbers, Tacfarinas. They assumed unusual proportions; they lasted eight years (17-24), and the garrison of the province otherwise consisting of a legion was on that account reinforced during the years 20-22 by a second despatched thither from Pannonia. The war had its origin from the great tribe of the Musulamii on the south slope of the Aures, against whom already under Augustus Lentulus had conducted an expedition, and who now under his successor chose that Tacfarinas as their leader. He was an African Arminius, a native Numidian, who had served in the Roman army, but had then deserted and made himself a name at the head of a band of robbers. The insurrection extended eastwards as far as the Cinithii on the Little Syrtis and the Garamantes in Fezzan, westwards over a great part of Mauretania, and became dangerous through the fact that Tacfarinas equipped a portion of his men after the Roman fashion on foot and on horseback, and gave them Roman training; these gave steadiness to the light bands of the insurgents, and rendered possible regular combats and sieges. After long exertions, and after the senate had been on several occasions induced to disregard the legally prescribed ballot in filling up this important post of command, and to select fitting men instead of the usual generals of the type of Cicero, Quintus Iunius Blaesus in the first instance made an end of the insurrection by a combined operation, inasmuch as he sent the left flank column against the Garamantes, and with the right covered the outlets from the Aures towards Cirta, while he advanced in person with the main army into the territory of the Musulamii and permanently occupied it (year 22). But the bold partisan soon afterwards renewed the struggle, and it was only some years later that the proconsul Publius Cornelius Dolabella, after he had nipped in the bud the threatened revolt of the just chastised Musulamii by the execution of all the leaders, was able with the aid of the troops of the king of Mauretania to force a battle in his territory near Auzia (Aumale), in which Tacfarinas lost his life. With the fall of the leader, as is usual in national wars of insurrection, this movement had an end.[281]

[Sidenote: Later conflicts.]

From later times detailed accounts of a like kind are lacking; we can only follow out in some measure the general course of the Roman work of pacification. The tribes to the south of Aures were, if not extirpated, at any rate ejected and transplanted into the northern districts; so in particular the Musulamii themselves,[282] against whom an expedition was once more conducted under Claudius. The demand made by Tacfarinas to have settlements assigned to him and his people within the civilised territory, to which Tiberius, as was reasonable, only replied by redoubling his exertions to annihilate the daring claimant, was supplementarily after a certain measure fulfilled in this way, and probably contributed materially to the consolidation of the Roman government. The camps more and more enclosed the Aurasian mountain-block. The garrisons were pushed farther forward into the interior; the headquarters themselves moved under Trajan away from Theveste farther to the west; the three considerable Roman settlements on the northern slope of the Aures, Mascula (Khenschela), at the egress of the valley of the Arab and thereby the key to the Aures mountains, a colony at least already under Marcus and Verus; Thamugadi, a foundation of Trajan’s; and Lambaesis, after Hadrian’s day the headquarters of the African army, formed together a settlement comparable to the great military camps on the Rhine and on the Danube, which, laid out on the lines of communication from the Aures to the great towns of the north and the coast Cirta (Constantine), Calama (Gelma), and Hippo regius (Bonah), secured the peace of the latter. The intervening steppe-land was, so far as it could not be gained for cultivation, at least intersected by secure routes of communication. On the west side of the Aures a strongly occupied chain of posts which followed the slope of the mountains from Lambaesis over the oases Calceus Herculis (el Kantara) and Bescera (Beskra), cut off the connection with Mauretania. Even the interior of the mountains subsequently became Roman; the war, which was waged under the emperor Pius in Africa, and concerning which we have not accurate information, must have brought the Aurasian mountains into the power of the Romans. At that time a military road was carried through these mountains by a legion doing garrison duty in Syria and sent beyond doubt on account of this war to Africa, and in later times we meet at that very spot traces of Roman garrisons and even of Roman towns, which reach down to Christian times; the Aurasian range had thus at that time been occupied, and continued to be permanently occupied. The oasis Negrin, situated on its southern slope, was even already under or before Trajan furnished by the Romans with troops, and still somewhat farther southward on the extreme verge of the steppe at Bir Mohammed ben Jûnis are found the ruins of a Roman fort; a Roman road also ran along the southern base of this range. Of the mighty slope which falls from the table-land of Theveste, the watershed between the Mediterranean and the desert, in successive stages of two to three hundred mètres down to the latter, this oasis is the last terrace; at its base begins, in sharp contrast towards the jagged mountains piled up behind, the sand desert of Suf, with its yellow rows of dunes similar to waves, and the sandy soil moved about by the wind, a huge wilderness, without elevation of the ground, without trees, fading away without limit into the horizon. Negrin was certainly of old, as it still is in our time, the standing rendezvous and the last place of refuge of the robber chiefs as well as of the natives defying foreign rule--a position commanding far and wide the desert and its trading routes. Even to this extreme limit reached Roman occupation and even Roman settlement in Numidia.

[Sidenote: Roman civilisation in Mauretania.]

Mauretania was not a heritage like Africa and Numidia. Of its earlier condition we learn nothing; there cannot have been considerable towns even on the coast here in earlier times, and neither Phoenician stimulus nor sovereigns after the type of Massinissa effectively promoted civilisation in this quarter. When his last descendants exchanged the Numidian crown for the Mauretanian, the capital, which changed its name Iol into Caesarea, became the residence of a cultivated and luxurious court, and a seat of seafaring and of traffic. But how much less this possession was esteemed by the government than that of the neighbouring province, is shown by the difference of the provincial organisation; the two Mauretanian armies were together not inferior in number to the Africano-Numidian,[283] but here governors of equestrian rank and imperial soldiers of the class of _peregrini_ sufficed. Caesarea remained a considerable commercial town; but in the province the fixed settlement was restricted to the northern mountain-range, and it was only in the eastern portion that larger inland towns were to be found. Even the fertile valley of the most considerable river of this province, the Shelîf, shows weak urban development; further to the west in the valleys of the Tafna and the Malua it almost wholly disappears, and the names of the divisions of cavalry here stationed serve partly in place of local designations. The province of Tingi (Tangier) even now embraced nothing but this town with its immediate territory and the stripe of the coast along the Atlantic Ocean as far as Sala, the modern Rebât, while in the interior Roman settlement did not even reach to Fez. No land-route connects this province with that of Caesarea; the 220 miles from Tingi to Rusaddir (Melilla) they traversed by water, along the desolate and insubordinate coast of the Riff. Consequently for this province the communication with Baetica was nearer than that with Mauretania; and if subsequently, when the empire was divided into larger administrative districts, the province of Tingi fell to Spain, that measure was only the outward carrying out of what in reality had long subsisted. It was for Baetica what Germany was for Gaul; and, far from lucrative as it must have been, it was perhaps instituted and retained for the reason that its abandonment would even then have brought about an invasion of Spain similar to that which Islam accomplished after the collapse of the Roman rule.

[Sidenote: The Gaetulian wars.]

Beyond the limit of fixed settlement herewith indicated,--the line of frontier tolls and of frontier posts--and in various non-civilised districts enclosed by it, the land in the two Mauretanias during the Roman times remained doubtless with the natives, but they came under Roman supremacy; there would be claimed from them, as far as possible, taxes and war-services, but the regular forms of taxation and of levy would not be applied in their case. For example, the tribe of Zimizes, which was settled on the rocky coast to the west of Igilgili (Jijeli) in eastern Mauretania, and so in the heart of the domain of the Roman power, had assigned to it a fortress designed to cover the town of Igilgili, to be occupied on such a footing that the troops were not allowed to pass beyond the radius of 500 paces round the fort.[284] They thus employed these subject Berbers in the Roman interest, but did not organise them in the Roman fashion, and hence did not treat them as soldiers of the imperial army. Even beyond their own province the irregulars from Mauretania were employed in great numbers, particularly as horsemen in the later period,[285] while the same did not hold of the Numidians.

How far the field of the Roman power went beyond the Roman towns and garrisons and the end of the imperial roads, we are not able to say. The broad steppe-land round the salt-lakes to the west of Lambaesis, the mountain-region from Tlemsen till towards Fez, including the coast of the Riff, the fine corn-country on the Atlantic Ocean southward from Sala as far as the high Atlas, the civilisation of which in the flourishing time of the Arabs vied with the Andalusian, lastly, the Atlas range in the south of Algeria and Morocco and its southern slopes, which afforded for pastoral people abundant provision in the alternation of mountain and steppe pastures, and developed the most luxuriant fertility in the numerous oases--all these regions remained essentially untouched by the Roman civilisation; but from this it does not follow that they were in the Roman time independent, and still less that they were not at least reckoned as belonging to the imperial domain. Tradition gives us but slight information in this respect. We have already mentioned (p. 313) that the proconsuls of Africa helped to make the Gaetulians--that is, the tribes in southern Algeria--subject to king Juba; and the latter constructed purple dyeworks at Madeira (p. 338, note). After the end of the Mauretanian dynasty and the introduction of the immediate Roman administration, Suetonius Paullinus crossed, as the first Roman general, the Atlas (p. 313), and carried his arms as far as the desert-river Ger, which still bears the same name, in the south-east of Morocco. His successor, Gnaeus Hosidius Geta, continued this enterprise, and emphatically defeated the leader of the Mauri Salabus. Subsequently several enterprising governors of the Mauretanian provinces traversed these remote regions, and the same holds true of the Numidian, under whose command, not under the Mauretanian, was placed the frontier-range stretching southward behind the province of Caesarea;[286] yet nothing is mentioned from later times of war-expeditions proper in the south of Mauretania or Numidia. The Romans can scarcely have taken over the empire of the Mauretanian kings in quite the same extent as these had possessed it; but yet the expeditions that were undertaken after the annexation of the country were probably not without lasting consequences. At least a portion of the Gaetulians submitted, as the auxiliary troops levied there prove, even to the regular conscription during the imperial period; and, if the native tribes in the south of the Roman provinces had given serious trouble to the Romans, the traces of it would not have been wholly wanting.[287] Probably the whole south as far as the great desert passed as imperial land,[288] and even the effective dependence extended far beyond the domain of Roman civilisation, which, it is true, does not exclude frequent levying of contributions and pillaging raids on the one side or the other.

[Sidenote: Incursions of the Moors into Spain.]

[Sidenote: Quinquegentiani.]

The pacified territory experienced attack, properly so called, chiefly from the inhabitants of the shore settled around and along the Riff, the Mazices, and the Baquates; and this indeed took place, as a rule, by sea, and was directed chiefly against the Spanish coast (I. 67). Accounts of inroads of the Moors into Baetica run through the whole imperial period,[289] and show that the Romans, in consequence of the absence of energetic offensive, found themselves here permanently on a defensive, which indeed did not involve a vital danger for the empire, but yet brought constant insecurity and often sore harm over rich and peaceful regions. The civilised territories of Africa appear to have suffered less under the Moorish attacks, probably because the headquarters of Numidia, immediately on the Mauretanian frontier, and the strong garrisons on the west side of the Aures, did their duty. But on the collapse of the imperial power in the third century the invasion here also began; the feud of Five Peoples, as it was called, which broke out about the time of Gallienus, and on account of which twenty years later the emperor Maximianus went personally to Africa, arose from the tribes beyond the Shott on the Numido-Mauretanian frontier, and affected particularly the towns of Eastern Mauretania and of Western Numidia, such as Auzia and Mileu.[290]

[Sidenote: Continuance of the Berber language.]

We come to the internal organisation of the country. In respect of language, that which belonged properly to the people was treated like the Celtic in Gaul and the Iberian in Spain; here in Africa all the more, as the earlier foreign rule had already set the example in that respect, and certainly no Roman understood this popular idiom. The Berber tribes had not merely a national language, but also a national writing (p. 305); but never, so far as we see, was use made of it in official intercourse, at least it was never put upon the coins. Even the native Berber dynasties formed no exception to this, whether because in their kingdoms the more considerable towns were more Phoenician than Libyan, or because the Phoenician civilisation prevailed so far generally. The language was written indeed also under Roman rule, in fact most of the Berber votive or sepulchral inscriptions proceed certainly from the imperial period; but their rarity proves that it attained only to limited written use in the sphere of the Roman rule. It maintained itself as a popular language above all naturally in the districts, to which the Romans came little or not at all, as in the Sahara, in the mountains of the Riff of Morocco, in the two Kabylias; but even the fertile and early cultivated island of the Tripolis, Girba (Jerba), the seat of the Carthaginian purple manufacture, still at the present day speaks Libyan. Taken on the whole, the old popular idiom in Africa defended itself better than among the Celts and the Iberians.

[Sidenote: Continuance of the Phoenician language.]

The language which prevailed in North Africa, when it became Roman, was that of the foreign rule which preceded the Roman. Leptis, probably not the Tripolitan, but that near Hadrumetum, was the only African town which marked its coins with a Greek legend, and thus conceded to this language an at least secondary position in public intercourse. The Phoenician language prevailed at that time so far as there was a civilisation in North Africa, from Great Leptis to Tingi, most thoroughly in and around Carthage, but not less in Numidia and Mauretania.[291] To this language of a highly developed although foreign culture certain concessions were made on the change in the system of administration. Perhaps already under Caesar, certainly under Augustus and Tiberius, as well the towns of the Roman province, such as Great Leptis and Oea, as those of the Mauretanian kingdom, like Tingi and Lix, employed in official use the Phoenician language, even those which like Tingi had become Roman burgess-communities. Nevertheless they did not go so far in Africa as in the Greek half of the empire. In the Greek provinces of the empire the Greek language prevailed, as in business intercourse generally, so particularly in direct intercourse with the imperial government and its officials; the coin of the city organised after the Greek fashion names also the emperor in Greek. But in the African the coin, even if it speaks in another language, names the emperor or the imperial official always in Latin. Even on the coins of the kings of Mauretania the name of the Greek queen stands possibly in Greek, but that of the king--also an imperial official--uniformly in Latin, even where the queen is named beside him. That is to say, even the government did not admit the Phoenician in its intercourse with the communities and individuals in Africa, but it allowed it for internal intercourse; it was not a third imperial language, but a language of culture recognised in its own sphere.

But this limited recognition of the Phoenician language did not long subsist. There is no document for the public use of Phoenician from the time after Tiberius, and it hardly survived the time of the first dynasty.[292] How and when the change set in we do not know; probably the government, perhaps Tiberius or Claudius, spoke the decisive word and accomplished the linguistic and national annexation of the African Phoenicians as far as it could be done by state authority. In private intercourse the Phoenician held its ground still for a long time in Africa, longer apparently than in the motherland; at the beginning of the third century ladies of genteel houses in Great Leptis spoke so little Latin or Greek, that there was no place for them in Roman society; even at the end of the fourth there was a reluctance to appoint clergymen in the environs of Hippo Regius (Bona), who could not make themselves intelligible in Punic to their countrymen; these termed themselves at that time still Canaanites, and Punic names and Punic phrases were still current. But the language was banished from the school[293] and even from written use, and had become a popular dialect; and even this probably only in the region of the old Phoenician civilisation, particularly the old Phoenician places on the coast that stood aloof from intercourse on a large scale.[294] When the Arabs came to Africa they found as language of the country doubtless that of the Berbers, but no longer that of the Poeni;[295] with the Carthagino-Roman civilisation the two foreign languages disappeared, while the old native one still lives in the present day. The civilised foreign dominions changed; the Berbers remained like the palm of the oasis and the sand of the desert.

[Sidenote: The Latin language.]

The heritage of the Phoenician language fell not to Greek, but to Latin. This was not involved in the natural development. In Caesar’s time the Latin and the Greek were alike in North Africa foreign languages, but as the coins of Leptis already show, the latter by far more diffused than the former; Latin was spoken then only by the officials, the soldiers, and the Italian merchants. It would have at that time been probably easier to introduce the Hellenising of Africa than the Latinising of it. But it was the converse that took place. Here the same will prevailed, which did not allow the Hellenic germs to spring up in Gaul, and which incorporated Greek Sicily into the domain of Latin speech; the same will, which drew the boundaries between the Latin West and the Greek East, assigned Africa to the former.

[Sidenote: The Phoenician urban organisation.]

In a similar sense the internal organisation of the country was regulated. It was based, as in Italy on the Latin and in the East on the Hellenic urban community, so here on the Phoenician. When the Roman rule in Africa began, the Carthaginian territory at that time consisted predominantly of urban communities, for the most part small, of which there were counted three hundred, each administered by its sufetes;[296] and the republic had made no change in this respect. Even in the kingdoms the towns formerly Phoenician had retained their organisation under the native rulers, and at least Calama--an inland town of Numidia hardly of Phoenician foundation--had demonstrably the same Phoenician municipal constitution; the civilisation which Massinissa gave to his kingdom must have consisted essentially in his transforming the villages of the agricultural Berbers into towns after the Phoenician model. The same will hold good of the few older urban communities which existed in Mauretania before Augustus. So far as we see, the two annually changing sufetes of the African communities coincide in the main with the analogous presidents of the community in the Italian municipal constitution; and that in other respects, _e.g._ in the common councils among the Carthaginians formed after a fashion altogether divergent from the Italian (ii. 16) {ii. 15.}, the Phoenician urban constitution of Roman Africa has preserved national peculiarities, does not at least admit of proof.[297] But the fact itself that the contrast, if even but formal, of the Phoenician town to the Italian was retained was, like the permission of the language, a recognition of the Phoenician nationality and a certain security for its continuance even under Roman rule. That it was recognised in the first instance as the regular form of administration of the African territory, is proved by the establishment of Carthage by Caesar primarily as a Phoenician city as well under the old sufetes[298] as in a certain measure with the old inhabitants, seeing that a great, perhaps the greatest part of the new burgesses was taken from the surrounding townships, again also under the protection of the great goddess of the Punic Carthage, the queen of heaven Astarte, who at that time marched in with her votaries anew into her old abode. It is true that in Carthage itself this organisation soon gave place to the Italian colonial constitution, and the protecting patroness Astarte became the--at least in name--Latin Caelestis. But in the rest of Africa and in Numidia the Phoenician urban organisation probably remained throughout the first century the predominant one, in so far as it pertained to all communities of recognised municipal rights and lacking Roman or Latin organisation. Abolished in the proper sense it doubtless was not, as in fact sufetes still occur under Pius; but by degrees they everywhere make way for the duoviri, and the changed principle of government entails in this sphere also its ultimate consequences.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the Phoenician towns into Italian.]

The transformation of Phoenician urban rights into Italian began under Caesar. The old Phoenician town of Utica, predecessor and heiress of Carthage--as some compensation for the severe injury to its interests by the restoration of the old capital of the country--obtained, as the first Italian organisation in Africa, perhaps from the dictator Caesar, Latin rights, certainly from his successor Augustus the position of a Roman _municipium_. The town of Tingi received the same rights, in gratitude for the fidelity which it had maintained during the Perusine war (p. 311). Several others soon followed; yet the number of communities with Roman rights in Africa down to Trajan and Hadrian remained limited.[299] Thenceforth there were assigned on a great scale--although, so far as we see, throughout by individual bestowal--to communities hitherto Phoenician municipal or else colonial rights; for the latter too were subsequently as a rule conferred merely in a titular way without settlement of colonists. If the dedications and memorials of all sorts, that formerly appeared but sparingly in Africa, present themselves in abundance from the beginning of the second century, this was doubtless chiefly the consequence of the adoption of numerous townships into the imperial union of the towns with best rights.

[Sidenote: Settlement of Italian colonists in Africa.]