Next year he was surprised by the enemy near Leucae.  Apparently he could have got off if he had not been laden with his collections in Asia, to procure which he had intrigued to prevent his colleague Flaccus getting that province.  Unable to escape, he provoked his captor to kill him by thrusting a stick into his eye.  His death was a striking comment on the Senate’s government.  Cruelty and culture, personal bravery and. incompetence—­such an alloy was now the best metal which its most respectable representatives could supply.

[Sidenote:  End of Aristonicus and settlement of the kingdom.] Aristonicus was now the more formidable because he had roused the slaves, among whom the spirit of revolt, in sympathy with the rest of their kind throughout the Roman world, was then working.  But in the year 130 M. Perperna surprised him, and carried him to Rome.  Blossius committed suicide.  The pretender was strangled in prison.  Part of his territory was given to the kings who had helped the consul, one of whom was the father of the great Mithridates.  Phrygia was the share assigned to him; but the Senate took it back from his successor, saying that the consul Aquillius had been bribed to give it.  The consul may have been base or the Senate mean, or, what is more probable, the baseness of the one was used as a welcome plea by the other’s meanness.  The European part was added to the province of Macedonia.  The Lycian confederacy received Telmissus.  The rest was formed into a province, which was called Asia—­the name being at once an incentive to and a nucleus for future annexation.  Such a nucleus they already possessed in the province of Africa, and there also war was kindled by the ambition of a bastard.

[Sidenote:  Jugurtha.] Jugurtha was the illegitimate son of Mastanabal, Micipsa’s brother.  He had served at Numantia under Scipio, along with his future conqueror Marius.  There he had begun to intrigue with influential Romans for the succession to the Numidian kingdom, and had been rebuked by Scipio, who told him he should cultivate the friendship, not of individual Romans, but of the State.  But in Jugurtha’s heart a noble sentiment found no echo.  Brave, treacherous, restless, an able commander, a crafty politician, adroit in discerning and profiting by other men’s bad qualities, wading to the throne through the blood of three kinsmen, he in some respects resembles Shakspeare’s Richard III.,—­his ’prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous,’ his ‘age confirmed, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody.’ [Sidenote:  Micipsa’s will.] Micipsa had shared the kingdom with his two brothers, who died before him; and as this, which was Scipio’s arrangement, had not worked badly in his own case, he in his turn left his kingdom between Adherbal, Hiempsal, and Jugurtha.  Adherbal was weak and pusillanimous, Hiempsal hot-tempered and rash.  Jugurtha, ten or fifteen years older than either, was the favourite of the nation, his handsome, martial