Jugurtha was sacrificed.  Under the pretext that all his requests were to be granted, he was allured by his own father-in-law into an ambush, his attendants were killed, and he himself was taken prisoner.  The great traitor thus fell by the treachery of his nearest relatives.  Lucius Sulla brought the crafty and restless African in chains along with his children to the Roman headquarters; and the war which had lasted for seven years was at an end.  The victory was primarily associated with the name of Marius.  King Jugurtha in royal robes and in chains, along with his two sons, preceded the triumphal chariot of the victor, when he entered Rome on the 1st of January 650:  by his orders the son of the desert perished a few days afterwards in the subterranean city-prison, the old -tullianum- at the Capitol—­ the “bath of ice,” as the African called it, when he crossed the threshold in order either to be strangled or to perish from cold and hunger there.  But it could not be denied that Marius had the least important share in the actual successes:  the conquest of Numidia up to the edge of the desert was the work of Metellus, the capture of Jugurtha was the work of Sulla, and between the two Marius played a part somewhat compromising the dignity of an ambitious upstart.  Marius reluctantly tolerated the assumption by his predecessor of the name of conqueror of Numidia; he flew into a violent rage when king Bocchus afterwards consecrated a golden effigy at the Capitol, which represented the surrender of Jugurtha to Sulla; and yet in the eyes of unprejudiced judges the services of these two threw the generalship of Marius very much into the shade—­more especially Sulla’s brilliant expedition to the desert, which had made his courage, his presence of mind, his acuteness, his power over men to be recognized by the general himself and by the whole army.  In themselves these military rivalries would have been of little moment, if they had not been mixed up with the conflict of political parties, if the opposition had not supplanted the senatorial general by Marius, and if the party of the government had not, with the deliberate intention of exasperating, praised Metellus and still more Sulla as the military celebrities and preferred them to the nominal victor.  We shall have to return to the fatal consequences of these animosities when narrating the internal history.

Reorganization of Numidia

Otherwise, this insurrection of the Numidian client-state passed away without producing any noticeable change either in political relations generally or even in those of the African province.  By a deviation from the policy elsewhere followed at this period Numidia was not converted into a Roman province; evidently because the country could not be held without an army to protect the frontier against the barbarians of the desert, and the Romans were by no means disposed to maintain a standing army in Africa.  They contented themselves accordingly with annexing the