CHAPTER XXIV.

THE THORIA LEX; THE PROVINCE AFRICA.

THE Thoria Lex contained some regulations about the land in Africa.

The African territory of Carthage immediately before the second Punic war consisted of the following parts. The first division was Zeugis, or Zeugitana, which contained the capital Carthago, the still more antient Phoenician settlement of Utica and several other towns. The name Zeugis is a native term or a Phoenician word; but we cannot with certainty say what it meant. Zowan, Zagwan, or Zogwan, which is south of Tunis, and built, as Shaw describes it, on the northeast extremity of a mountain of the same name, seems to retain the element of the word Zeugis, and it may be the Mons Ziguensis of Victor, as Shaw suggests, and the Zeugitanus of Solinus. It is not possible to fix exactly the western limits of Zeugitana. It may have extended as far west as Hippo Regius (Bona) and the river Rubricatus (Sebous). The name Regius, 'royal,' indeed implies that Hippo was at some time in possession of the Numidian kings, and if it once belonged to Carthage, it must have been taken from her; but there is no evidence to show when Carthage lost this place. The Zeugitana of Carthage certainly extended west as far as the Tusca, and southward on the coast to Hadrumetum. The Zeugitana was a fertile country. The tract named Byzacium, which extended southward from Hadrumetum to the Smaller Syrtis, also contained fertile lands along the coast, and the Phoenician settlements Hadrumetum, the Smaller Leptis, Thapsus and Acholla. Along the

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coast of the Syrtis Minor were the trading towns which gave to this strip along the shore the name of Emporeia. The most eastern of the Emporeia was the Great Leptis.

The country west of the Carthaginian territory as far as the great river Mulucha (Mulwia) was possessed by people whom the Romans named Numidae or Numidians. The western and larger part of Numidia was occupied by the Massaesylii. Their western boundary was the Mulucha, the eastern boundary is generally said to have been the river Ampsaga, but we need not look for precision in fixing the limits of such barbarous people who had few towns. East of the Massaesylii, and extending to the Carthaginian border, were the Massylii. The Numidian Gala, chief of the Massylii, probably began to encroach on the Carthaginian territories in the second Punic war. Gala's son Massinissa, at the close of the second Punic war, recovered all his father's kingdom, from which he had been driven by the Carthaginians and Syphax, king of the Massaesylii. He also received the country of the Massaesylii after Syphax was taken prisoner by the Romans, who now acknowledged Massinissa as king of all Numidia. By a clause in the treaty of peace with Carthage it was declared that the Carthaginians must restore to Massinissa whatever buildings and land and cities once belonged to him or his ancestors, and were within the limits which the treaty assigned to the Carthaginians. After the end of the war Massinissa, relying on the friendship of the Romans, entered on a large part of the Carthaginian territory, which he claimed as having once been his own. The Carthaginians appealed to the Romans, who sent commissioners with instructions to favour Massinissa as much as they could, and thus Massinissa appropriated to himself the land that he claimed. He now set his greedy eyes on the rich country and cities on the coast of the Smaller Syrtis. He took possession of the open country, but the Carthaginians were able to protect the towns. There was again an appeal to Rome. The Carthaginians maintained that the country which Massinissa claimed was within the limits which Scipio had fixed to the Carthaginian territory at the end of the second Punic war. The Numidian king denied

this, and also maintained that Carthage had no real claims to any territory in Libya except that on which the city stood, and that even this had been granted by the natives at their request all the rest of their territory he said that the Carthaginians had usurped, and that it belonged to those who were the stronger. The Romans sent commissioners to the spot, and Scipio Africanus was one of them, but they left without making any decision. Finally Massinissa secured both the territory in dispute and the cities. The Carthaginians also paid him five hundred talents, the amount of the revenue which they had received in these parts from the time when the dispute began (Polybius, xxxii. 2; Livy, xxxiv. 62).

The quarrel between Massinissa and the Carthaginians still continued. The king claimed what Appian and Polybius call the Great Plains, probably some of the country about the river Bagradas, and also fifty cities of the tract which Appian names Tusca. There was no district, as it seems, which had this name, but there was a river Tusca, already mentioned, which entered the sea about halfway between Hippo Regius and Hippo Zarytus. If the names Bulla Regia and Zama Regia may be taken as indications of Massinissa's usurpations, he succeeded in wresting from the Carthaginians a large extent of country on both sides of the Bagradas. Fresh appeals of the Carthaginians to Rome brought commissioners again, among whom was Cato the Censor. Again the dishonest commissioners came to no decision between the contending parties; but the sight of the wealth of the country and its improved resources since the end of the second Punic war led them to form the resolution of utterly destroying the wealthy and still powerful city of Carthage. Old Cato was the man who confirmed the Roman Senate in this cruel resolve. It is said that P. Scipio Nasica, the father of the P. Scipio Nasica who led his partizans to the assault on Tiberius Gracchus, advised the Senate to let Carthage alone, to allow this rival to exist as a terror to Rome, which was now losing its primitive simplicity and the good habits of the old times. The advice, if it was really given, was singular for a Roman; but the event in a manner justified the foresight of Nasica.

Old Massinissa closed his long and restless life two years before the destruction of Carthage by the younger Scipio Africanus. On his death-bed he recommended his sons to follow Scipio's decision as to the partition of his kingdom. Scipio satisfied Massinissa's illegitimate children by giving them something in addition to what they had received from their father. He gave the kingdom to the three legitimate sons, Micipsa the eldest, Gulussa, and Manastabal, who held it undivided until by the death of his two brothers Micipsa had the whole. Thus the possessions of the Numidian kings shut in the Carthaginians on all sides, and left them only a small territory east of the Tusca river, now the Wad-al-Kebîr, which is the same name as the Guadalquivir of Spain, or the Great River, though the Tusca is not a large river. The Tusca is named Zaine on our maps, but Pellissier remarks that this name does not appear to be known to the people in those parts. This narrowed territory of Carthage contained perhaps not the whole of the old Zeugis or Zeugitana, and only a part of the Byzacium, as far as Thenae on the eastern coast. Thenae was opposite to the two islands Cercina and Cercinitis (the Kerkenah islands), and about eighty miles south of Hadrumetum, if the site of Hadrumetum is rightly placed at Susa. There are considerable ruins at a spot named Thina, which we may assume to be Thenae, for such obscure places keep their names. After the reduction of the Carthaginian territory to the form of a Roman province, Scipio made a great ditch and embankment at Thenae, as a boundary between the Roman province of Africa and the possessions of the Numidian kingdom. In Pliny's time this ditch was the boundary between the old province of Africa and the new province which was composed of part of King Juba's possessions. This Roman province of Africa, north of the ditch of Thenae, was the best part of the Carthaginian possessions, and Scipio and the ten commissioners took care to secure it for the Roman state.

After the destruction of Carthage all her territory according to Roman principles became the property of the Roman state; and the territory of all the towns which had remained faithful to Carthage was also forfeited. Some of the forfeited

lands were granted to those towns which had remained faithful to Rome. Utica, for instance, which was always jealous of Carthage, had joined the Romans in the beginning of the third Punic war, and she was rewarded with the rich country extending on each side of the Bagradas to Carthage on the east, and Hippo Zarytus on the west. It appears that Utica and all the other African towns which had been faithful to Rome retained their freedom, their territory, and their own town government. The rest of the towns within the Carthaginian territory were under a Roman governor whose head quarters were in Utica. For the purpose of the administration of justice the province was divided after Roman fashion into conventus or circuits, but we know only the names of two, the conventus of Hadrumetum, and the conventus of Zeugis which rests on the authority of Orosius. Some of these towns which had resisted the Romans lost part of their lands, and those which they were allowed to retain were charged with a fixed money payment, or stipendium' as the Romans named it. The 'stipendium' was considered a heavier imposition than the ordinary 'vectigalia,' or tenths of certain produce, because the 'stipendium' was payable whether the land produced any thing or not. There was also a poll-tax on every person, male and female. It appears however from Cicero that some of the African towns paid their tenths of grain, wine, and oil, instead of a fixed sum of money. Those persons who paid these tenths were named Vectigales, by which name they were distinguished from the Stipendiarii, who paid the 'stipendium.' These tenths were let by the censors at Rome to the associations of the farmers of the dues (publicani), who by their agents collected the tenths on the spot in Africa.

There was no doubt waste land enough in the neighbourhood of Carthage, and this was the part which Caius Gracchus intended to colonize in B.C. 122, eleven years before the date of the Thoria Lex.

The second part of the Thoria Lex relates to Africa. It begins with the nineteenth chapter and extends to the fiftieth chapter. The arrangements of Scipio and the ten senatorian commissioners were not touched by the Thoria