There in the ruin heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.”
Goldsmith.
East and west of Batna lay the Roman frontier line during the first two centuries of the Empire. It was marked by a series of cities, partly military, partly commercial; extensive ruins bespeak their ancient importance. As elsewhere in Europe and North Africa the fall of the Empire seldom meant the abandonment of the city sites; they continued to be occupied by successive generations of men, even though, like Rome herself, for a period they sank to insignificance. And their ruined buildings, public and private, offered a convenient quarry to the builders of subsequent ages. It results that we are scarcely able to find an ancient city in which the original plan of house and street has not been seriously interfered with. While, as in many English towns, the main lines of the streets often follow the Roman thoroughfares, we have seldom the opportunity of studying the scheme as a whole, although all through Southern and Western Europe innumerable individual features exist more or less well preserved.
We owe the existence of Pompeii and Herculaneum to the accident of their overwhelming by ashes and lava from Vesuvius. The former has been laid bare; the excavation of the latter, a much more serious matter, awaits the day when the disposers of wealth, public or private, shall see fit to undertake a work, which promises the greatest results. It happens by a piece of exceptional good fortune that here, on the southern edge of Barbary, Pompeii has a serious rival. The Roman city of Thamagudi, now called Timgad, has since its destruction at the time of the Arab invasion of A.D. 692 never been the habitation of man. To this cause alone may its present condition be attributed. It has passed twelve centuries in a great silence. Its ruined temples and baths have been the haunt of the panther and the jackal. No neighbouring town despoiled its stones, or ground its marbles to make mortar. Its columns lay prone, its temples and houses were for the most part levelled with the ground; yet a massive arch or two told through the centuries to the watcher from afar that here once stood a Roman city.
A STREET AT TIMGAD
The night of centuries is past; the long silence is broken; the jackals have fled to their mountains; and a Latin race is tenderly safeguarding its heritage. Once again a road leads to the portals of the ancient city, and with infinite skill and care the debris has been cleared away. Columns have been re-erected, masonry replaced in its original position and fragments of inscriptions pieced together; a very triumph of that vast capacity for taking pains which is such an important element of French genius. One charm of the place to the visitor is that it is not exploited as a tourist resort. A little museum has been set up to hold the treasures found among the ruins, a modest hotel has been built, and the neighbouring Arabs have been encouraged to hold a weekly market outside the walls; but there is no turnstile to be passed, you are not delivered over to a guide, no tout is permitted to worry you, and you are free to pass to and fro, to go in and out as you list as long as you don’t steal or deface anything. So for a contemplative mind every possible attraction is conserved.
The Roman conquest and civilization—or rather assimilation—of North Africa were slow, tentative and reluctant. Scipio Æmilianus burnt Carthage in 146 B.C.; it was more than a hundred years later that Julius Cæsar handed over Cirta to the soldiers of Sittius. Under Augustus a camp was established at Theveste (Tebessa), and the Third Legion, Augusta, was stationed there with the object of protecting the territory of Cirta, and the proconsular province which is now Tunisia. Under the shelter of this post, during the first century of our era, the great corn lands enclosed by the Aurès mountains were gradually brought under Roman control. The building of Thamagudi in the reign of Trajan, in the year A.D. 100, is evidence of the importance to which this region had by that time risen. This process continued during the next two centuries. No doubt as the population of Italy declined, and her fertility decreased, Rome came to rely more and more on the corn of Africa, and more land was continually brought under cultivation. This is the significance of such a city as Timgad, lying over 3000 feet above the sea on a slope of the Aurès mountains.
Our ideas of the Roman Empire are perhaps coloured by the title of Gibbon’s great work. We are disposed to think that its decline began with its establishment. Gibbon had always at the back of his mind the belief that Christianity was the cause of its ultimate ruin, and that the Empire began to totter on the day when the first Roman citizen was baptised a Christian. But for two or three hundred years, though the Empire was frequently torn by political dissensions, its material prosperity was very great. We know now that it was ruined in the end by its financial errors, its unwise and unjust system of land taxation, the grasping greed of Treasury officials and the anxiety of upstart Emperors to gratify their supporters in the army and the Roman mob at anybody’s cost.