Destruction of Carthage

But by far the larger portion of the city still remained standing.  We may believe that Scipio desired its preservation; at least he addressed a special inquiry to the senate on the subject.  Scipio Nasica once more attempted to gain a hearing for the demands of reason and honour; but in vain.  The senate ordered the general to level the city of Carthage and the suburb of Magalia with the ground, and to do the same with all the townships which had held by Carthage to the last; and thereafter to pass the plough over the site of Carthage so as to put an end in legal form to the existence of the city, and to curse the soil and site for ever, that neither house nor cornfield might ever reappear on the spot.  The command was punctually obeyed.  The ruins burned for seventeen days:  recently, when the remains of the Carthaginian city wall were excavated, they were found to be covered with a layer of ashes from four to five feet deep, filled with half-charred pieces of wood, fragments of iron, and projectiles.  Where the industrious Phoenicians had bustled and trafficked for five hundred years, Roman slaves henceforth pastured the herds of their distant masters.  Scipio, however, whom nature had destined for a nobler part than that of an executioner, gazed with horror on his own work; and, instead of the joy of victory, the victor himself was haunted by a presentiment of the retribution that would inevitably follow such a misdeed.

Province of Africa

There remained the work of arranging the future organization of the country.  The earlier plan of investing the allies of Rome with the transmarine possessions that she acquired was no longer viewed with favour.  Micipsa and his brothers retained in substance their former territory, including the districts recently wrested from the Carthaginians on the Bagradas and in Emporia; their long-cherished hope of obtaining Carthage as a capital was for ever frustrated; the senate presented them instead with the Carthaginian libraries.  The Carthaginian territory as possessed by the city in its last days—­ viz.  The narrow border of the African coast lying immediately opposite to Sicily, from the river Tusca (near Thabraca) to Thaenae (opposite to the island of Karkenah)—­became a Roman province.  In the interior, where the constant encroachments of Massinissa had more and more narrowed the Carthaginian dominions and Bulla, Zama, and Aquae already belonged to the kings, the Numidians retained what they possessed.  But the careful regulation of the boundary between the Roman province and the Numidian kingdom, which enclosed it on three sides, showed that Rome would by no means tolerate in reference to herself what she had permitted in reference to Carthage; while the name of the new province, Africa, on the other hand appeared to indicate that Rome did not at all regard the boundary now marked off as a definitive one.  The supreme administration