The Gaetulian wars.Beyond the limit of fixed settlement herewith indicated,—the line of frontier tolls and of frontier posts—and in various non-civilised districts enclosed by it, the land in the two Mauretanias during the Roman times remained doubtless with the natives, but they came under Roman supremacy; there would be claimed from them, as far as possible, taxes and war-services, but the regular forms of taxation and of levy would not be applied in their case. For example, the tribe of Zimizes, which was settled on the rocky coast to the west of Igilgili (Jijeli) in eastern Mauretania, and so in the heart of the domain of the Roman power, had assigned to it a fortress designed to cover the town of Igilgili, to be occupied on such a footing that the troops were not allowed to pass beyond the radius of 500 paces round the fort.[284] They thus employed these subject Berbers in the Roman interest, but did not organise them in the Roman fashion, and hence did not treat them as soldiers of the imperial army. Even beyond their own province the irregulars from Mauretania were employed in great numbers, particularly as horsemen in the later period,[285] while the same did not hold of the Numidians.
How far the field of the Roman power went beyond the Roman towns and garrisons and the end of the imperial roads, we are not able to say. The broad steppe-land round the salt-lakes to the west of Lambaesis, the mountain-region from Tlemsen till towards Fez, including the coast of the Riff, the fine corn-country on the Atlantic Ocean southward from Sala as far as the high Atlas, the civilisation of which in the flourishing time of the Arabs vied with the Andalusian, lastly, the Atlas range in the south of Algeria and Morocco and its southern slopes, which afforded for pastoral people abundant provision in the alternation of mountain and steppe pastures, and developed the most luxuriant fertility in the numerous oases—all these regions remained essentially untouched by the Roman civilisation; but from this it does not follow that they were in the Roman time independent, and still less that they were not at least reckoned as belonging to the imperial domain. Tradition gives us but slight information in this respect. We have already mentioned ([p. 313]) that the proconsuls of Africa helped to make the Gaetulians—that is, the tribes in southern Algeria—subject to king Juba; and the latter constructed purple dyeworks at Madeira ([p. 338], note). After the end of the Mauretanian dynasty and the introduction of the immediate Roman administration, Suetonius Paullinus crossed, as the first Roman general, the Atlas ([p. 313]), and carried his arms as far as the desert-river Ger, which still bears the same name, in the south-east of Morocco. His successor, Gnaeus Hosidius Geta, continued this enterprise, and emphatically defeated the leader of the Mauri Salabus. Subsequently several enterprising governors of the Mauretanian provinces traversed these remote regions, and the same holds true of the Numidian, under whose command, not under the Mauretanian, was placed the frontier-range stretching southward behind the province of Caesarea;[286] yet nothing is mentioned from later times of war-expeditions proper in the south of Mauretania or Numidia. The Romans can scarcely have taken over the empire of the Mauretanian kings in quite the same extent as these had possessed it; but yet the expeditions that were undertaken after the annexation of the country were probably not without lasting consequences. At least a portion of the Gaetulians submitted, as the auxiliary troops levied there prove, even to the regular conscription during the imperial period; and, if the native tribes in the south of the Roman provinces had given serious trouble to the Romans, the traces of it would not have been wholly wanting.[287] Probably the whole south as far as the great desert passed as imperial land,[288] and even the effective dependence extended far beyond the domain of Roman civilisation, which, it is true, does not exclude frequent levying of contributions and pillaging raids on the one side or the other.
Incursions of the Moors into Spain.
The pacified territory experienced attack, properly so called, chiefly from the inhabitants of the shore settled around and along the Riff, the Mazices, and the Baquates; and this indeed took place, as a rule, by sea, and was directed chiefly against the Spanish coast (I. 67). Accounts of inroads of the Moors into Baetica run through the whole imperial period,[289] and show that the Romans, in consequence of the absence of energetic offensive, found themselves here permanently on a defensive, which indeed did not involve a vital danger for the empire, but yet brought constant insecurity and often sore harm over rich and peaceful regions. The civilised territories of Africa appear to have suffered less under the Moorish attacks, probably because the headquarters of Numidia, immediately on the Mauretanian frontier, and the strong garrisons on the west side of the Aures, did their duty. But on the collapse of the imperial Quinquegentiani.power in the third century the invasion here also began; the feud of Five Peoples, as it was called, which broke out about the time of Gallienus, and on account of which twenty years later the emperor Maximianus went personally to Africa, arose from the tribes beyond the Shott on the Numido-Mauretanian frontier, and affected particularly the towns of Eastern Mauretania and of Western Numidia, such as Auzia and Mileu.[290]
Continuance of the Berber language.We come to the internal organisation of the country. In respect of language, that which belonged properly to the people was treated like the Celtic in Gaul and the Iberian in Spain; here in Africa all the more, as the earlier foreign rule had already set the example in that respect, and certainly no Roman understood this popular idiom. The Berber tribes had not merely a national language, but also a national writing ([p. 305]); but never, so far as we see, was use made of it in official intercourse, at least it was never put upon the coins. Even the native Berber dynasties formed no exception to this, whether because in their kingdoms the more considerable towns were more Phoenician than Libyan, or because the Phoenician civilisation prevailed so far generally. The language was written indeed also under Roman rule, in fact most of the Berber votive or sepulchral inscriptions proceed certainly from the imperial period; but their rarity proves that it attained only to limited written use in the sphere of the Roman rule. It maintained itself as a popular language above all naturally in the districts, to which the Romans came little or not at all, as in the Sahara, in the mountains of the Riff of Morocco, in the two Kabylias; but even the fertile and early cultivated island of the Tripolis, Girba (Jerba), the seat of the Carthaginian purple manufacture, still at the present day speaks Libyan. Taken on the whole, the old popular idiom in Africa defended itself better than among the Celts and the Iberians.
Continuance of the Phoenician language.The language which prevailed in North Africa, when it became Roman, was that of the foreign rule which preceded the Roman. Leptis, probably not the Tripolitan, but that near Hadrumetum, was the only African town which marked its coins with a Greek legend, and thus conceded to this language an at least secondary position in public intercourse. The Phoenician language prevailed at that time so far as there was a civilisation in North Africa, from Great Leptis to Tingi, most thoroughly in and around Carthage, but not less in Numidia and Mauretania.[291] To this language of a highly developed although foreign culture certain concessions were made on the change in the system of administration. Perhaps already under Caesar, certainly under Augustus and Tiberius, as well the towns of the Roman province, such as Great Leptis and Oea, as those of the Mauretanian kingdom, like Tingi and Lix, employed in official use the Phoenician language, even those which like Tingi had become Roman burgess-communities. Nevertheless they did not go so far in Africa as in the Greek half of the empire. In the Greek provinces of the empire the Greek language prevailed, as in business intercourse generally, so particularly in direct intercourse with the imperial government and its officials; the coin of the city organised after the Greek fashion names also the emperor in Greek. But in the African the coin, even if it speaks in another language, names the emperor or the imperial official always in Latin. Even on the coins of the kings of Mauretania the name of the Greek queen stands possibly in Greek, but that of the king—also an imperial official—uniformly in Latin, even where the queen is named beside him. That is to say, even the government did not admit the Phoenician in its intercourse with the communities and individuals in Africa, but it allowed it for internal intercourse; it was not a third imperial language, but a language of culture recognised in its own sphere.
But this limited recognition of the Phoenician language did not long subsist. There is no document for the public use of Phoenician from the time after Tiberius, and it hardly survived the time of the first dynasty.[292] How and when the change set in we do not know; probably the government, perhaps Tiberius or Claudius, spoke the decisive word and accomplished the linguistic and national annexation of the African Phoenicians as far as it could be done by state authority. In private intercourse the Phoenician held its ground still for a long time in Africa, longer apparently than in the motherland; at the beginning of the third century ladies of genteel houses in Great Leptis spoke so little Latin or Greek, that there was no place for them in Roman society; even at the end of the fourth there was a reluctance to appoint clergymen in the environs of Hippo Regius (Bona), who could not make themselves intelligible in Punic to their countrymen; these termed themselves at that time still Canaanites, and Punic names and Punic phrases were still current. But the language was banished from the school[293] and even from written use, and had become a popular dialect; and even this probably only in the region of the old Phoenician civilisation, particularly the old Phoenician places on the coast that stood aloof from intercourse on a large scale.[294] When the Arabs came to Africa they found as language of the country doubtless that of the Berbers, but no longer that of the Poeni;[295] with the Carthagino-Roman civilisation the two foreign languages disappeared, while the old native one still lives in the present day. The civilised foreign dominions changed; the Berbers remained like the palm of the oasis and the sand of the desert.
The Latin language.The heritage of the Phoenician language fell not to Greek, but to Latin. This was not involved in the natural development. In Caesar’s time the Latin and the Greek were alike in North Africa foreign languages, but as the coins of Leptis already show, the latter by far more diffused than the former; Latin was spoken then only by the officials, the soldiers, and the Italian merchants. It would have at that time been probably easier to introduce the Hellenising of Africa than the Latinising of it. But it was the converse that took place. Here the same will prevailed, which did not allow the Hellenic germs to spring up in Gaul, and which incorporated Greek Sicily into the domain of Latin speech; the same will, which drew the boundaries between the Latin West and the Greek East, assigned Africa to the former.
The Phoenician urban organisation.In a similar sense the internal organisation of the country was regulated. It was based, as in Italy on the Latin and in the East on the Hellenic urban community, so here on the Phoenician. When the Roman rule in Africa began, the Carthaginian territory at that time consisted predominantly of urban communities, for the most part small, of which there were counted three hundred, each administered by its sufetes;[296] and the republic had made no change in this respect. Even in the kingdoms the towns formerly Phoenician had retained their organisation under the native rulers, and at least Calama—an inland town of Numidia hardly of Phoenician foundation—had demonstrably the same Phoenician municipal constitution; the civilisation which Massinissa gave to his kingdom must have consisted essentially in his transforming the villages of the agricultural Berbers into towns after the Phoenician model. The same will hold good of the few older urban communities which existed in Mauretania before Augustus. So far as we see, the two annually changing sufetes of the African communities coincide in the main with the analogous presidents of the community in the Italian municipal constitution; and that in other respects, e.g. in the common councils among the Carthaginians formed after a fashion altogether divergent from the Italian (ii. 16)ii. 15., the Phoenician urban constitution of Roman Africa has preserved national peculiarities, does not at least admit of proof.[297] But the fact itself that the contrast, if even but formal, of the Phoenician town to the Italian was retained was, like the permission of the language, a recognition of the Phoenician nationality and a certain security for its continuance even under Roman rule. That it was recognised in the first instance as the regular form of administration of the African territory, is proved by the establishment of Carthage by Caesar primarily as a Phoenician city as well under the old sufetes[298] as in a certain measure with the old inhabitants, seeing that a great, perhaps the greatest part of the new burgesses was taken from the surrounding townships, again also under the protection of the great goddess of the Punic Carthage, the queen of heaven Astarte, who at that time marched in with her votaries anew into her old abode. It is true that in Carthage itself this organisation soon gave place to the Italian colonial constitution, and the protecting patroness Astarte became the—at least in name—Latin Caelestis. But in the rest of Africa and in Numidia the Phoenician urban organisation probably remained throughout the first century the predominant one, in so far as it pertained to all communities of recognised municipal rights and lacking Roman or Latin organisation. Abolished in the proper sense it doubtless was not, as in fact sufetes still occur under Pius; but by degrees they everywhere make way for the duoviri, and the changed principle of government entails in this sphere also its ultimate consequences.
Transformation of the Phoenician towns into Italian.The transformation of Phoenician urban rights into Italian began under Caesar. The old Phoenician town of Utica, predecessor and heiress of Carthage—as some compensation for the severe injury to its interests by the restoration of the old capital of the country—obtained, as the first Italian organisation in Africa, perhaps from the dictator Caesar, Latin rights, certainly from his successor Augustus the position of a Roman municipium. The town of Tingi received the same rights, in gratitude for the fidelity which it had maintained during the Perusine war ([p. 311]). Several others soon followed; yet the number of communities with Roman rights in Africa down to Trajan and Hadrian remained limited.[299] Thenceforth there were assigned on a great scale—although, so far as we see, throughout by individual bestowal—to communities hitherto Phoenician municipal or else colonial rights; for the latter too were subsequently as a rule conferred merely in a titular way without settlement of colonists. If the dedications and memorials of all sorts, that formerly appeared but sparingly in Africa, present themselves in abundance from the beginning of the second century, this was doubtless chiefly the consequence of the adoption of numerous townships into the imperial union of the towns with best rights.