Jugurtha was the idol of the Africans, who readily overlooked the double fratricide in the liberator and avenger of their nation.  Twenty years afterwards a Numidian corps which was fighting in Italy for the Romans had to be sent back in all haste to Africa, when the son of Jugurtha appeared in the enemy’s ranks; we may infer from this, how great was the influence which he himself exercised over his people.  What prospect was there of a termination of the struggle in regions where the combined peculiarities of the population and of the soil allowed a leader, who had once secured the sympathies of the nation, to protract the war in endless guerilla conflicts, or even to let it sleep for a time in order to revive it at the right moment with renewed vigour?

War in the Desert
Mauretanian Complications

When Metellus again took the field in 647, Jugurtha nowhere held his ground against him; he appeared now at one point, now at another far distant; it seemed as if they would as easily get the better of the lions as of these horsemen of the desert.  A battle was fought, a victory was won; but it was difficult to say what had been gained by the victory.  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;(14) thither Jugurtha had retired with his children, his treasures, and the flower of his troops, there to await better times.  Metellus ventured to follow the king through a desert, in which his troops had to carry water along with them in skins forty-five miles; Thala was reached and fell after a forty days’ siege; but the Roman deserters destroyed the most valuable part of the booty along with the building in which they burnt themselves after the capture of the town, and—­what was of more consequence—­king Jugurtha escaped with his children and his chest.  Numidia was no doubt virtually in the hands of the Romans; but, instead of their object being thereby gained, the war seemed only to extend over a field wider and wider.  In the south the free Gaetulian tribes of the desert began at the call of Jugurtha a national war against the Romans.  In the west Bocchus king of Mauretania, whose friendship the Romans had in earlier times despised, seemed now not indisposed to make common cause with his son-in-law against them; he not only received him in his court, but, uniting to Jugurtha’s followers his own numberless swarms of horsemen, he marched into the region of Cirta, where Metellus was in winter quarters.  They began to negotiate:  it was clear that in the person of Jugurtha he held in his hands the real prize of the struggle for Rome.  But what were his intentions—­whether to sell his son-in-law dear to the Romans, or to take up the national war in concert with that son-in-law—­neither the Romans nor Jugurtha nor perhaps even the king himself knew; and he was in no hurry to abandon his ambiguous position.