The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 2

by Theodor Mommsen

The two Mauretanian kingdoms.The western half of North Africa was divided at the time of the dictator Caesar (iv. 461)iv. 438. into the two kingdoms of Tingi (Tangier), at that time under king Bogud and of Iol, the later Caesarea (Zershell), at that time under king Bocchus. As both kings had as decidedly taken the side of Caesar in the struggle against the republicans as king Juba of Numidia had taken the side of the opposite party, and as they had rendered most essential services to him during the African and the Spanish wars, not merely were both left in possession of their rule, but the domain of Bocchus, and probably also that of Bogud, was enlarged by the victor.[278] Then, when the rivalries between Antonius and Caesar the younger began, king Bogud alone in the west placed himself on the side of Antonius, and on the instigation of his brother and of his wife invaded Spain during the Perusine war (714)40 B.C.; but his neighbour Bocchus and his own capital Tingis took part for Caesar and against him. At the conclusion of peace Antonius allowed Bogud to fall, and Caesar gave the rest of his territory to king Bocchus, but gave Roman municipal rights to the town of Tingis. When, some years later, a rupture took place between the two rulers, the ex-king took part energetically in the struggle in the hope of regaining his kingdom on this occasion, but at the capture of the Messenian town Methone he was taken prisoner by Agrippa and executed.

Juba II.Already some years before (721)33 B.C. king Bocchus had died; his kingdom, the whole of western Africa, was soon afterwards (729) 25 B.C. obtained by the son of the last Numidian king, Juba II., the husband of Cleopatra, the daughter of Antonius by the Egyptian queen.[279] Both had been exhibited to the Roman public in early youth as captive kings’ children, Juba in the triumphal procession of Caesar the father, Cleopatra in that of the son; it was a wonderful juncture that they now were sent away from Rome as king and queen of the most esteemed vassal-state of the empire, but it was in keeping with the circumstances. Both were brought up in the imperial family; Cleopatra was treated by the legitimate wife of her father with motherly kindness like her own children; Juba had served in Caesar’s army. The youth of the dependent princely houses, which was numerously represented at the imperial court and played a considerable part in the circle around the imperial princes, was generally employed in the early imperial period for the filling up of the vassal principalities, after a similar manner, according to free selection, as the first class in rank of the senate was employed for the filling up of the governorships of Syria and Germany. For almost fifty years (729–775 U.C., 25–23 B.C.A.D.) he, and after him his son Ptolemaeus, bore rule over western Africa; it is true that, like the town Tingis from his predecessor, a considerable number of the most important townships, particularly on the coast, was withdrawn from him by the bestowal of Roman municipal rights, and, apart from the capital, these kings of Mauretania were almost nothing but princes of the Berber tribes.

Erection of the provinces of Caesarea and Tingi.This government lasted up to the year 40, when it appeared fitting to the emperor Gaius, chiefly on account of the rich treasure, to call his cousin to Rome, to deliver him there to the executioner, and to take the territory into imperial administration. Both rulers were unwarlike, the father a Greek man of letters after the fashion of this period, compiling so-called memorabilia of a historical or geographical kind, or relative to the history of art, in endless books, noteworthy by his—we might say—international literary activity, well read in Phoenician and Syrian literature, but exerting himself above all to diffuse the knowledge of Roman habits and of so-called Roman history among the Hellenes, moreover, a zealous friend of art and frequenter of the theatre; the son a prince of the common type, passing his time in court-life and princely luxury. Among their subjects they were held of little account, whether as regards their personality or as vassals of the Romans; against the Gaetulians in the south king Juba had on several occasions to invoke the help of the Roman governor, and, when in Roman Africa the prince of the Numidians, Tacfarinas, revolted against the Romans, the Moors flocked in troops to his banner. Nevertheless the end of the dynasty and the introduction of Roman provincial government into the land made a deep impression. The Moors were faithfully devoted to their royal house; altars were still erected under the Roman rule in Africa to the kings of the race of Massinissa ([p. 305]). Ptolemaeus, whatever he might be otherwise, was Massinissa’s genuine descendant in the sixth generation, and the last of the old royal house. A faithful servant of his, Aedemon, after the catastrophe called the mountain-tribes of the Atlas to arms, and it was only after a hard struggle that the governor Suetonius Paullinus—the same who afterwards fought with the Britons (I. 179)—was able to master the revolt (in the year 42). In the organisation of the new territory the Romans reverted to the earlier division into an eastern and a western half, or, as they were thenceforth called from the capitals, into the provinces of Caesarea and of Tingi; or rather they retained that division, for it was, as will be afterwards shown, necessarily suggested by the physical and political relations of the territory, and must have continued to subsist even under the same sceptre in one or the other form. Each of these provinces was furnished with imperial troops of the second class, and placed under an imperial governor not belonging to the senate.

The state and the destinies of this great and peculiar new seat of Latin civilisation were conditioned by the physical constitution of North Africa. It is formed by two great mountain-masses, of which the northern falls steeply towards the Mediterranean, while the southern, the Atlas, slopes off slowly in the Sahara-steppe dotted with numerous oases towards the desert proper. A smaller steppe, similar on the whole to the Sahara and dotted with numerous salt-lakes, serves in the middle portion, the modern Algeria, to separate the mountains on the north coast and those on the southern frontier. There are in North Africa no extensive plains capable of culture; the coast of the Mediterranean Sea has a level foreland only in a few districts; the land capable of cultivation, according to the modern expression the Tell, consists essentially of the numerous valleys and slopes within those two broad mountain-masses, and so extends to its greatest width where, as in the modern Morocco and in Tunis, no steppe intervenes between the northern and the southern border.

Tripolis.The region of Tripolis, politically a part of the province of Africa, stands as respects its natural relations outside of the territory described, and is annexed to it in peninsular fashion. The frontier-range sloping down towards the Mediterranean Sea touches at the bay of Tacapae (Gabes), with its foreland of steppe and salt-lake, immediately on the shore. To the south of Tacapae as far as the Great Syrtis there extends along the coast the narrow Tripolitan island of cultivation, bounded inland towards the steppe by a chain of moderate height. Beyond it begins the steppe-country with numerous oases. The protection of the coast against the inhabitants of the desert is here of special difficulty, because the high margin of mountains is wanting; and traces of this are apparent in the accounts that have come to us of the military expeditions and the military positions in this region.

The wars with the Garamantes.It was the arena of the wars with the Garamantes. Lucius Cornelius Balbus, who in his younger years had fought and administered under Caesar with the most adventurous boldness as well as with the most cruel recklessness, was selected by Augustus to reduce these inconvenient neighbours to quiet, and in his proconsulate (735) he subdued the interior as far as Cidamus (Ghadames), twelve days’ journey inland from Tripolis, and Garama (Germa) in Fezzan;[280] at his triumph—he was the last commoner who celebrated such an one—a long series of towns and tribes, hitherto unknown even by name, were displayed as vanquished. This expedition is named a conquest; and so doubtless the foreland must have been thereby brought in some measure under the Roman power. There was fighting subsequently on many occasions in this region. Soon afterwards, still under Augustus, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius made an expedition against the tribes of Marmarica, that is, of the Libyan desert above Cyrene, and at the same time against the Garamantes. That the war against Tacfarinas under Tiberius extended also over this region will be mentioned further on. After its termination the king of the Garamantes sent envoys to Rome, to procure pardon for his having taken part in it. In the year 70 an irruption of the Garamantes into the pacified territory was brought about by the circumstance that the town Oea (Tripoli) called the barbarians to help the Tripolis in a quarrel, which had grown into war, with the neighbouring town Great-Leptis (Lebda), whereupon they were beaten back by the governor of Africa and pursued to their own settlements. Under Domitian on the coast of the Great Syrtis, which had been from of old held by the Nasamones, a revolt of the natives provoked by the exorbitant taxes had to be repressed with arms by the governor of Numidia; the territory already poor in men was utterly depopulated by this cruelly conducted war. The emperor Severus took conspicuous care of this his native province—he was from Great-Leptis—and gave to it stronger military protection against the neighbouring barbarians. With this we may bring into connection the fact, that in the time from Severus to Alexander the nearest oases, Cidamus (Ghadames), Gharia el Gharbia, Bonjem, were provided with detachments of the African legion, which, it is true, owing to the distance from the headquarters, could not be much more than a nucleus for the probably considerable contingents of the subject tribes here rendering services to the Romans. In fact the possession of these oases was of importance not merely for the protection of the coast, but also for the traffic, which at all times passed by way of these oases from the interior of Africa to the harbours of Tripolis. It was not till the time of decay that the possession of these advanced posts was abandoned; in the description of the African wars under Valentinian and Justinian we find the towns of the coast directly harassed by the natives.

The Africano-Numidian territory and army.The basis and core of Roman Africa was the province of that name, including the Numidian, which was a branch from it. Roman civilisation entered upon the heritage partly of the city of Carthage, partly of the kings of Numidia, and if it here attained considerable results, it may never be forgotten that it, properly speaking, merely wrote its name and inscribed its language on what was already there. Besides the towns, which were demonstrably founded by the former or by the latter, and to which we shall still return, the former as well as the latter led the Berber tribes, inclined at any rate to agriculture, towards fixed settlements. Even in the time of Herodotus the Libyans westward of the bay of Gabes were no longer nomads, but peacefully cultivated the soil; and the Numidian rulers carried civilisation and agriculture still farther into the interior. Nature, too, was here more favourable for husbandry than in the western part of North Africa; the middle depression between the northern and the southern range is indeed here not quite absent, but the salt lakes and the steppe proper are less extensive than in the two Mauretanias. The military arrangements were chiefly designed to plant the troops in front of the mighty Aurasian mountain-block, the Saint Gotthard of the southern frontier-range, and to check the irruption of the non-subject tribes from the latter into the pacified territory of Africa and Numidia. For that reason Augustus placed the stationary quarters of the legion at Theveste (Tebessa), on the high plateau between the Aures and the old province; even to the north of it, between Ammaedara and Althiburus, Roman forts existed in the first imperial period. Of the details of the warfare we learn little; it must have been permanent, and must have consisted in the constant repelling of the border-tribes, as well as in not less constant pillaging raids into their territory.

War against Tacfarinas.Only as to a single occurrence of this sort has information in some measure accurate come to us; namely, as to the conflicts which derive their name from the chief leader of the Berbers, Tacfarinas. They assumed unusual proportions; they lasted eight years (17–24), and the garrison of the province otherwise consisting of a legion was on that account reinforced during the years 20–22 by a second despatched thither from Pannonia. The war had its origin from the great tribe of the Musulamii on the south slope of the Aures, against whom already under Augustus Lentulus had conducted an expedition, and who now under his successor chose that Tacfarinas as their leader. He was an African Arminius, a native Numidian, who had served in the Roman army, but had then deserted and made himself a name at the head of a band of robbers. The insurrection extended eastwards as far as the Cinithii on the Little Syrtis and the Garamantes in Fezzan, westwards over a great part of Mauretania, and became dangerous through the fact that Tacfarinas equipped a portion of his men after the Roman fashion on foot and on horseback, and gave them Roman training; these gave steadiness to the light bands of the insurgents, and rendered possible regular combats and sieges. After long exertions, and after the senate had been on several occasions induced to disregard the legally prescribed ballot in filling up this important post of command, and to select fitting men instead of the usual generals of the type of Cicero, Quintus Iunius Blaesus in the first instance made an end of the insurrection by a combined operation, inasmuch as he sent the left flank column against the Garamantes, and with the right covered the outlets from the Aures towards Cirta, while he advanced in person with the main army into the territory of the Musulamii and permanently occupied it (year 22). But the bold partisan soon afterwards renewed the struggle, and it was only some years later that the proconsul Publius Cornelius Dolabella, after he had nipped in the bud the threatened revolt of the just chastised Musulamii by the execution of all the leaders, was able with the aid of the troops of the king of Mauretania to force a battle in his territory near Auzia (Aumale), in which Tacfarinas lost his life. With the fall of the leader, as is usual in national wars of insurrection, this movement had an end.[281]

Later conflicts.From later times detailed accounts of a like kind are lacking; we can only follow out in some measure the general course of the Roman work of pacification. The tribes to the south of Aures were, if not extirpated, at any rate ejected and transplanted into the northern districts; so in particular the Musulamii themselves,[282] against whom an expedition was once more conducted under Claudius. The demand made by Tacfarinas to have settlements assigned to him and his people within the civilised territory, to which Tiberius, as was reasonable, only replied by redoubling his exertions to annihilate the daring claimant, was supplementarily after a certain measure fulfilled in this way, and probably contributed materially to the consolidation of the Roman government. The camps more and more enclosed the Aurasian mountain-block. The garrisons were pushed farther forward into the interior; the headquarters themselves moved under Trajan away from Theveste farther to the west; the three considerable Roman settlements on the northern slope of the Aures, Mascula (Khenschela), at the egress of the valley of the Arab and thereby the key to the Aures mountains, a colony at least already under Marcus and Verus; Thamugadi, a foundation of Trajan’s; and Lambaesis, after Hadrian’s day the headquarters of the African army, formed together a settlement comparable to the great military camps on the Rhine and on the Danube, which, laid out on the lines of communication from the Aures to the great towns of the north and the coast Cirta (Constantine), Calama (Gelma), and Hippo regius (Bonah), secured the peace of the latter. The intervening steppe-land was, so far as it could not be gained for cultivation, at least intersected by secure routes of communication. On the west side of the Aures a strongly occupied chain of posts which followed the slope of the mountains from Lambaesis over the oases Calceus Herculis (el Kantara) and Bescera (Beskra), cut off the connection with Mauretania. Even the interior of the mountains subsequently became Roman; the war, which was waged under the emperor Pius in Africa, and concerning which we have not accurate information, must have brought the Aurasian mountains into the power of the Romans. At that time a military road was carried through these mountains by a legion doing garrison duty in Syria and sent beyond doubt on account of this war to Africa, and in later times we meet at that very spot traces of Roman garrisons and even of Roman towns, which reach down to Christian times; the Aurasian range had thus at that time been occupied, and continued to be permanently occupied. The oasis Negrin, situated on its southern slope, was even already under or before Trajan furnished by the Romans with troops, and still somewhat farther southward on the extreme verge of the steppe at Bir Mohammed ben Jûnis are found the ruins of a Roman fort; a Roman road also ran along the southern base of this range. Of the mighty slope which falls from the table-land of Theveste, the watershed between the Mediterranean and the desert, in successive stages of two to three hundred mètres down to the latter, this oasis is the last terrace; at its base begins, in sharp contrast towards the jagged mountains piled up behind, the sand desert of Suf, with its yellow rows of dunes similar to waves, and the sandy soil moved about by the wind, a huge wilderness, without elevation of the ground, without trees, fading away without limit into the horizon. Negrin was certainly of old, as it still is in our time, the standing rendezvous and the last place of refuge of the robber chiefs as well as of the natives defying foreign rule—a position commanding far and wide the desert and its trading routes. Even to this extreme limit reached Roman occupation and even Roman settlement in Numidia.

Roman civilisation in Mauretania.Mauretania was not a heritage like Africa and Numidia. Of its earlier condition we learn nothing; there cannot have been considerable towns even on the coast here in earlier times, and neither Phoenician stimulus nor sovereigns after the type of Massinissa effectively promoted civilisation in this quarter. When his last descendants exchanged the Numidian crown for the Mauretanian, the capital, which changed its name Iol into Caesarea, became the residence of a cultivated and luxurious court, and a seat of seafaring and of traffic. But how much less this possession was esteemed by the government than that of the neighbouring province, is shown by the difference of the provincial organisation; the two Mauretanian armies were together not inferior in number to the Africano-Numidian,[283] but here governors of equestrian rank and imperial soldiers of the class of peregrini sufficed. Caesarea remained a considerable commercial town; but in the province the fixed settlement was restricted to the northern mountain-range, and it was only in the eastern portion that larger inland towns were to be found. Even the fertile valley of the most considerable river of this province, the Shelîf, shows weak urban development; further to the west in the valleys of the Tafna and the Malua it almost wholly disappears, and the names of the divisions of cavalry here stationed serve partly in place of local designations. The province of Tingi (Tangier) even now embraced nothing but this town with its immediate territory and the stripe of the coast along the Atlantic Ocean as far as Sala, the modern Rebât, while in the interior Roman settlement did not even reach to Fez. No land-route connects this province with that of Caesarea; the 220 miles from Tingi to Rusaddir (Melilla) they traversed by water, along the desolate and insubordinate coast of the Riff. Consequently for this province the communication with Baetica was nearer than that with Mauretania; and if subsequently, when the empire was divided into larger administrative districts, the province of Tingi fell to Spain, that measure was only the outward carrying out of what in reality had long subsisted. It was for Baetica what Germany was for Gaul; and, far from lucrative as it must have been, it was perhaps instituted and retained for the reason that its abandonment would even then have brought about an invasion of Spain similar to that which Islam accomplished after the collapse of the Roman rule.