At first perfidy did not seem to prosper. Furius and his successor Calpurnius Piso made no more progress than their predecessors, and so high grew the reputation of the besieged for valour, that no one, Florus says, ever expected to see the back of a Numantine. At last, A. U. 619, the Romans, weary of the war, and anxious above all things to bring it to an end, re–elected to the office of consul Scipio Æmilianus, celebrated as the final conqueror and destroyer of Carthage, and expressly assigned Spain to him as his province, instead of suffering the two consuls to draw lots for the choice of provinces, as was the usual course. Scipio’s first care was to restore discipline in his army, which he found corrupted by luxury. With this view he expelled all the idle and profligate followers of the camp; practised his troops in all military exercises, inured them to exposure and fatigue, and when he thought the ancient tone of Roman discipline was restored, led them, not against the formidable Numantines, but against a neighbouring people. Obtaining a trifling advantage over a party of the former who had attacked his foragers, he refused to prosecute it, thinking it enough that the reputed invincibility of the Numantines was disproved. On this occasion, says Plutarch, the Numantines being reproached on their return to the city, for retiring before an enemy whom they had so often beaten, replied, “The Romans might indeed be the same sheep, but they had gotten a new shepherd.”
In the ensuing winter, his army being increased to 60,000 men, Scipio determined to invest the town. Regardless of the disproportion of force, the besieged often offered battle, which he refused, preferring the slow work of famine to encountering the desperation of veteran and approved soldiers. With this view he proceeded to draw lines of circumvallation round the town; and it is said by Appian, that he was the first general who ever took that method of reducing a place, the garrison of which did not decline a battle in the open field. The town was about three miles in compass, and lay on the slope of a hill, at the foot of which ran the river Durius, now called the Douro. Around it Scipio traced a double ditch, six miles in circuit, with a rampart eight feet thick and ten feet high, not including a parapet strengthened by towers at intervals of 125 feet. The river, where it intersected the works, was effectually blocked up by chains and booms. The besieged often endeavoured to check the progress of the Romans, but the superiority of numbers, aided by restored discipline, was too much for them.
The blockade had lasted six months, and the Numantines were hard pressed by famine, before they condescended to inquire whether, if they surrendered, they would meet with honourable treatment. An unconditional surrender was required. Urged even to desperation, they still refused to consign themselves to slavery or mutilation, for the latter often was the fate of those whose strength and valour the Romans had found reason to respect. Rather than submit to such a fate, they consumed their arms and effects, and houses, in one general conflagration, and dying by the sword, or poison, or fire, left the victor nothing of Numantia to adorn his triumph but the name.[12]
Such was the unworthy fate of a city which had spared more Roman soldiers than itself could muster armed men. “Most brave,” says the historian, “and, in my opinion, most happy in its very misfortunes! It asserted faithfully the cause of its allies; alone it resisted, for how long a time, a nation armed with the strength of the whole world.”[13] It is an easy thing to write rhetorical flourishes, and very often mischievous as well as easy. Had Florus ever undergone one tithe of the sufferings inflicted on the miserable Numantines, we might possibly not have heard of their supreme felicity. It might have done him some good by quickening his moral sense, and might have prevented his beginning the next chapter with the assertion, that “hitherto the Roman people was excellent, pious, holy.” Verily, such history as this is a profitable study!
Battering–ram, combined with tower, from Pompeii, vol. i. p. 78.
In reading of such sieges as these, one of the first things which strikes a reader not familiar with ancient warfare, is the extreme rudeness of the methods employed, and the vast expense of time and labour; yet, compared with earlier times, even the siege of Platæa is of no extraordinary duration. Not to go back to the ten–year sieges of Troy and Eira, the Messenians in Ithome held out against the Spartans during nine years; and, in the Peloponnesian war itself, Potidæa resisted for a still longer period than Platæa: such was the patience of a besieging army in waiting for the slow operation of hunger, or for some fortunate chance which, as at Eira, might give possession of the town at an unguarded moment. Before the battering–ram was invented, force could avail little against solid walls; and men soon found out, with Wamba, in Ivanhoe, that their hands were little fitted to make mammocks of stone and mortar. A well–conducted escalade might succeed; a skilful stratagem might deceive the vigilance of the garrison; an ingenious general might devise some method of attack which should render walls useless, as in the attempt to burn out the Platæans, and might derive some advantage from natural facilities, or even from natural obstacles, so as to convert what the besieged most trusted in into the means of their destruction; but to overthrow or pass the walls by violence was commonly beyond his power. But the introduction of the ram worked a material change in the relative strength of the besiegers and besieged, for few walls could be found strong enough to bear the repeated application of its powerful shocks. Next in importance to the ram were those huge moving towers which overtopped walls, and were provided with drawbridges, by means of which, the battlements being previously cleared of their defenders by missile weapons from above, a body of troops might at once be thrown upon them.
