and 300 hostages, as well as 3000 Roman deserters, who were immediately put to death.  At the same time, however, the king’s most confidential counsellor, Bomilcar—­who not unreasonably apprehended that, if peace should ensue, Jugurtha would deliver him up as the murderer of Massiva to the Roman courts—­was gained by Metellus and induced, in consideration of an assurance of impunity as respected that murder and of great rewards, to promise that he would deliver the king alive or dead into the hands of the Romans.  But neither that official negotiation nor this intrigue led to the desired result.  When Metellus brought forward the suggestion that the king should give himself up in person as a prisoner, the latter broke off the negotiations; Bomilcar’s intercourse with the enemy was discovered, and he was arrested and executed.  These diplomatic cabals of the meanest kind admit of no apology; but the Romans had every reason to aim at the possession of the person of their antagonist.  The war had reached a point, at which it could neither be carried farther nor abandoned.  The state of feeling in Numidia was evinced by the revolt of Vaga,(13) the most considerable of the cities occupied by the Romans, in the winter of 646-7; on which occasion the whole Roman garrison, officers and men, were put to death with the exception of the commandant Titus Turpilius Silanus, who was afterwards—­whether rightly or wrongly, we cannot tell—­condemned to death by a Roman court-martial and executed for having an understanding with the enemy.  The town was surprised by Metellus on the second day after its revolt, and given over to all the rigour of martial law; but if such was the temper of the easy to be reached and comparatively submissive dwellers on the banks of the Bagradas, what might be looked for farther inland and among the roving tribes of the desert?  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