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 of the new province was entrusted to a Roman governor, who had his seat at Utica.  Its frontier did not need any regular defence, as the allied Numidian kingdom everywhere separated it from the inhabitants of the desert.  In the matter of taxes Rome dealt on the whole with moderation.  Those communities which from the beginning of the war had taken part with Rome—­viz.  Only the maritime towns of Utica, Hadrumetum, Little Leptis, Thapsus, Achulla, and Usalis, and the inland town of Theudalis—­ retained their territory and became free cities; which was also the case with the newly-founded community of deserters.  The territory of the city of Carthage—­with the exception of a tract presented to Utica—­and that of the other destroyed townships became Roman domain-land, which was let on lease.  The remaining townships likewise forfeited in law their property in the soil and their municipal liberties; but their land and their constitution were for the time being, and until further orders from the Roman government, left to them as a possession liable to be recalled,