CHAPTER XIII.
THE AFRICAN PROVINCES.
North Africa and the Berber stock.North Africa, in a physical and ethnographic point of view, stands by itself like an island. Nature has isolated it on all sides, partly by the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea, partly by the widely-extended shore, incapable of cultivation, of the Great Syrtis below the modern Fezzan, and, in connection therewith, by the desert, likewise closed against cultivation, which shuts off the steppe-land and the oases of the Sahara to the south. Ethnographically the population of this wide region forms a great family of peoples, distinguished most sharply from the Blacks of the south, but likewise strictly separated from the Egyptians, although perhaps with these there may once have subsisted a primeval fellowship. They call themselves in the Riff near Tangier Amâzigh, in the Sahara Imôshagh, and the same name meets us, referred to particular tribes, on several occasions among the Greeks and Romans, thus as Maxyes at the founding of Carthage (ii. 8)ii. 7., as Mazices in the Roman period at different places of the Mauretanian north coast; the similar designation that has remained with the scattered remnants proves that this great people has once had a consciousness, and has permanently retained the impression, of the relationship of its members. To the peoples who came into contact with them this relationship was far from clear; the diversities which prevail among their several parts are not merely at the present day glaring, after in the past thousands of years the mixture with the neighbouring peoples, particularly the Negroes in the south and the Arabs in the north, has had its effect upon them, but certainly were as considerable even before these foreign influences as their extension in space demands. A universally valid expression for the nation as such is wanting in all other idioms; even where the name goes beyond the designation of stock,[275] it yet does not describe the circle as a whole. That of Libyans, which the Egyptians, and after their precedent the Greeks use, belongs originally to the most easterly tribes coming into contact with Egypt, and has always remained specially pertaining to those of the eastern half. That of Nomades, of Greek origin, expresses in the first instance only the absence of settlement, and then in its Roman transformation as Numidians, has become associated with that territory which king Massinissa united under his sway. That of Mauri, of native origin, and current among the later Greeks as well as the Romans, is restricted to the western parts of the land, and continues in use for the kingdoms here formed and the Roman provinces that have proceeded from them. The tribes of the south are comprehended under the name of the Gaetulians, which, however, the stricter use of language limits to the region on the Atlantic Ocean to the south of Mauretania. We are accustomed to designate the nation by the name of Berbers, which the Arabs apply to the northern tribes.
Type.As to their type they stand far nearer to the Indo-Germanic than to the Semitic, and form even at the present day, when since the invasion of Islam North Africa has fallen to the Semitic race, the sharpest contrast to the Arabs. It is not without warrant that various geographers of antiquity have refused to let Africa pass at all as a third continent, but have attached Egypt to Asia and the Berber territory to Europe. As the plants and animals of northern Africa correspond in the main to those of the opposite south-European coast, so the type of man, where it has been preserved unmixed, points altogether to the north:—the fair hair and the blue eyes of a considerable portion, the tall stature, the slender but powerfully knit form, the prevailing monogamy and respect for the position of woman, the lively and emotional temperament, the inclination to settled life, the community founded on the full equality in rights among the grown-up men, which in the usual confederation of several communities affords also the basis for the formation of a state.[276] To strictly political development and to full civilisation this nation, hemmed round by Negroes, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, at no time attained; it must have approximated to it under the government of Massinissa. The alphabet, derived independently from the Phoenician, of which the Berbers made use under Roman rule, and which those of the Sahara still use at the present day, as well as the feeling which, as we have observed, they once had of common national relationship, may probably be referred to the great Numidian king and his descendants, whom the later generations worshipped as gods.[277] In spite of all invasions they have maintained their original territory to a considerable extent; in Morocco now about two-thirds, in Algiers about half of the inhabitants are reckoned of Berber descent.
Phoenician immigration.The immigration, to which all the coasts of the Mediterranean were subjected in the earliest times, made North Africa Phoenician. To the Phoenicians the natives had to give up the largest and best part of the north coast; the Phoenicians withdrew all North Africa from Greek civilisation. The Great Syrtis again forms the linguistic as well as the political line of separation; as on the east the Pentapolis of Cyrene belongs to the Greek circle, so on the west the Tripolis (Tripoli) of Great-Leptis became and remained Phoenician. We have formerly narrated how the Phoenicians after several hundred years of struggle succumbed to the Romans. Here we have to give account of the fortunes of Africa, after the Romans had occupied the Carthaginian territory and had made the neighbouring regions dependent on them.
The government of the Roman republic.The short-sightedness and narrow-mindedness—we may here say, the perversity and brutality—of the foreign government of the Roman republic had nowhere so full sway as in Africa. In southern Gaul, and still more in Spain, the Roman government pursued at least a consolidated extension of territory, and, half involuntarily, the rudiments of Latinising; in the Greek East the foreign rule was mitigated and often almost compensated by the power of Hellenism forcing the hand even of hard policy. But as to this third continent the old national hatred towards the Poeni seemed still to reach beyond the grave of Hannibal’s native city. The Romans held fast the territory which Carthage had possessed at its fall, but less in order to develop it for their own benefit than to prevent its benefiting others, not to awaken new life there, but to watch the dead body; it was fear and envy, rather than ambition and covetousness, that created the province of Africa. Under the republic it had not a history; the war with Jugurtha was for Africa nothing but a lion-hunt, and its historical significance lay in its connection with the republican party struggles. The land was, as a matter of course, turned to full account by Roman speculation; but neither might the destroyed great city rise up afresh, nor might a neighbouring town develop into a similar prosperity; there were here no standing camps as in Spain and Gaul; the Roman province, with its narrow bounds, was on all sides surrounded by relatively civilised territory of the dependent king of Numidia, who had helped in the work of the destruction of Carthage, and now, as a reward for it, received not so much the spoil as the task of protecting it from the inroads of the wild hordes of the interior. That thereby a political and military importance was given to this state, such as no other client-state of Rome ever possessed, and that even on this side the Roman policy, in order merely to banish the phantom of Carthage, conjured up serious dangers, was shown by the share of Numidia in the civil wars of Rome; never during all the internal crises of the empire before or after did a client-prince play such a part as the last king of Numidia in the war of the republicans against Caesar.
Caesar’s African policy.All the more necessarily the state of things in Africa became transformed by this decision of arms. In the other provinces, as a consequence of the civil wars, there was a change of rule; in Africa there was a change of system. The African possession of the Phoenicians itself was not a proper dominion over Africa; it may be in some measure compared with the dominion in Asia Minor of the Hellenes before Alexander. Of this dominion the Romans had then taken over but a small part, and of that part they had nipped the bud. Now Carthage arose afresh, and, as if the soil had only been waiting for the seed, soon flourished anew. The whole country lying behind—the great kingdom of Numidia—became a Roman province, and the protection of the frontier against the barbarians was undertaken by the Roman legionaries. The kingdom of Mauretania became, in the first instance, a Roman dependency, and soon also a part of the Roman empire. With the dictator Caesar the civilising and Latinising of Africa took their place among the tasks of the Roman government. Here we have to set forth how the task was carried out, first as to the outward organisation, and then as to the arrangements made and results achieved for the several districts.
Extent of the Roman rule.Territorial sovereignty over the whole of North Africa had doubtless already been claimed on the part of the Roman republic, perhaps as a portion of the Carthaginian inheritance, perhaps because “our sea” early became one of the fundamental ideas of the Roman commonwealth; and, in so far, all its coasts were regarded by the Romans even of the developed republic as their true property. Nor had this claim of Rome ever been properly contested by the larger states of North Africa after the destruction of Carthage; if in many places the neighbours did not submit to the dominion, they were just as little obedient to their local rulers. That the silver moneys of king Juba I. of Numidia and of king Bogud of Mauretania were coined after the Roman standard, and the Latin legend—little as it was suited to the relations of language and of intercourse then subsisting in North Africa—was never absent from them, was the direct recognition of the Roman supremacy, a consequence, it may be presumed, of the new organisation of North Africa that in the year 674 U.C.80 B.C. was accomplished by Pompeius. The generally insignificant resistance which the Africans, apart from Carthage, opposed to the Romans, came from the descendants of Massinissa; after king Jugurtha, and later king Juba, were vanquished, the princes of the western country submitted without more ado to the dependence required of them. The arrangements which the emperors made were carried out quite after the same way in the territory of the dependent princes as in the immediate territory of Rome; it was the Roman government that regulated the boundaries in all North Africa, and constituted Roman communities at its discretion in the kingdom of Mauretania no less than in the province of Numidia. We cannot therefore speak, in the strict sense, of a Roman subjugation of North Africa. The Romans did not conquer it like the Phoenicians or the French; but they ruled over Numidia as over Mauretania, first as suzerains, then as successors of the native governments. It is so much the more a question, whether the notion of frontier admits of application to Africa in the usual sense. The states of Massinissa, of Bocchus, of Bogud, as also the Carthaginian, proceeded from the northern verge, and all the civilisation of North Africa is based pre-eminently on this coast; but, so far as we can discern, they all regarded the tribes settled or roving in the south as subjects, and, if they withdrew themselves from subjection, as insurgents, so far as the distance and the desert did not by doing away with contact do away with control. Neighbouring states, with which relations of right or of treaty might have subsisted, can hardly be pointed out in the south of northern Africa, or where such a one appears, such as, in particular, the kingdom of the Garamantes, its position is not to be strictly distinguished from that of the hereditary principalities within the civilised territory. This was the case also as regards Roman Africa; as for the previous rulers, so also doubtless for Roman civilisation there was to be found a limit to the south, but hardly so for the Roman territorial supremacy. There is never mention of any formal extension or taking back of the frontier in Africa; the insurrections in the Roman territory, and the inroads of the neighbouring peoples, look here all the more similar to each other, as even in the regions undoubtedly in Roman possession, still more than in Syria or Spain, many a remote and impassable district knew nothing of Roman taxation and of Roman recruiting. For that reason it seems appropriate to connect with the view of the several provinces at the same time the slight information which has been left to us in historical tradition, or by means of preserved monuments, respecting the friendly or hostile relations of the Romans with their southern neighbours.
Province of Africa and Numidia.The former territory of Carthage and the larger part of the earlier kingdom of Numidia, united with it by the dictator Caesar, or, as they also called it, the old and the new Africa, formed until the end of the reign of Tiberius the province of that name, which extended from the boundary of Cyrene to the river Ampsaga, embracing the modern state of Tripoli as well as Tunis and the French province of Constantine (iv. 470 f.)iv. 447.. The government, however, for this territory, which was considerable, and required an extended frontier-defence, reverted under the emperor Gaius in the main to the twofold division of the republican times, and committed the portion of the province that did not stand in need of special border-defence to the civil government, and the rest of the territory furnished with garrisons to a military commandant not further amenable to its authority. The cause of this was, that Africa in the partition of the provinces between emperor and senate was given to the latter, and, as from the state of things there a command on a larger scale could not be dispensed with, the co-ordination of the governor delegated by the senate and of the military commandant nominated by the emperor—which latter according to the subsisting hierarchy was placed under the orders of the former—could not but provoke and did provoke collisions between these officials and even between emperor and senate. To this an end was put in the year 37 by an arrangement that the coast-land from Hippo (Bonah), as far as the borders of Cyrene, should retain the old name of Africa and should remain with the proconsul, whereas the western part of the province with the capital Cirta (Constantine), as well as the interior with the great military camps to the north of the Aures, and generally all territory furnished with garrisons, should be placed under the commandant of the African legion. This commandant had senatorial rank, but belonged not to the consular, but to the praetorial class.