Reorganization of the Coalition in Africa

All the more serious was the position of things in Africa, where the constitutional party had from the outset of the civil war ruled absolutely and had continually augmented their power.  Down to the battle of Pharsalus king Juba had, properly speaking, borne rule there; he had vanquished Curio, and his flying horsemen and his numberless archers were the main strength of the army; the Pompeian governor Varus played by his side so subordinate a part that he even had to deliver those soldiers of Curio, who had surrendered to him, over to the king, and had to look on while they were executed or carried away into the interior of Numidia.  After the battle of Pharsalus a change took place.  With the exception of Pompeius himself, no man of note among the defeated party thought of flight to the Parthians.  As little did they attempt to hold the sea with their united resources; the warfare waged by Marcus Octavius in the Illyrian waters was isolated, and was without permanent success.  The great majority of the republicans as of the Pompeians betook themselves to Africa, where alone an honourable and constitutional warfare might still be waged against the usurper.  There the fragments of the army scattered at Pharsalus, the troops that had garrisoned Dyrrhachium, Corcyra, and the Peloponnesus, the remains of the Illyrian fleet, gradually congregated; there the second commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio, the two sons of Pompeius, Gnaeus and Sextus, the political leader of the republicans Marcus Cato, the able officers Labienus, Afranius, Petreius, Octavius and others met.  If the resources of the emigrants had diminished, their fanaticism had, if possible, even increased.  Not only did they continue to murder their prisoners and even the officers of Caesar under flag of truce, but king Juba, in whom the exasperation of the partisan mingled with the fury of the half-barbarous African, laid down the maxim that in every community suspected of sympathizing with the enemy the burgesses ought to be extirpated and the town burnt down, and even practically carried out this theory against some townships, such as the unfortunate Vaga near Hadrumetum.  In fact it was solely owing to the energetic intervention of Cato that the capital of the province itself the flourishing Utica—­which, just like Carthage formerly, had been long regarded with a jealous eye by the Numidian kings—­ did not experience the same treatment from Juba, and that measures of precaution merely were taken against its citizens, who certainly were not unjustly accused of leaning towards Caesar.