Egypt reaches on the south, as was already remarked, as far as the barrier which the last cataract, not far from Syene (Assouan), opposes to navigation. Beyond Syene begins the stock of the Kesch, as the Egyptians call them, or, as the Greeks translated it, the dark-coloured, the Aethiopians, probably akin to the Axomites to be afterwards mentioned, and, although perhaps sprung from the same root as the Egyptians, at any rate confronting them in historical development as a foreign people. Further to the south follow the Nahsiu of the Egyptians, that is, the Blacks, the Nubians of the Greek, the modern Negroes. The kings of Egypt had in better times extended their rule far into the interior, or at least emigrant Egyptians had established for themselves here dominions of their own; the written monuments of the Pharaonic government go as far as above the third cataract to Dongola, where Nabata (near Nûri) seems to have been the centre of their settlements; and considerably further up the stream, some six days’ journey to the north of Khartoum, near Shendy, in Sennaar, in the neighbourhood of the long forgotten Aethiopian town Meroe, are found groups of temples and pyramids, although destitute of writing. When Egypt became Roman, all this development of power was long a matter of the past; and beyond Syene there ruled an Aethiopian stock under queens, who regularly bore the name or the title Candace,246 and resided in that once Egyptian Nabata in Dongola; a people at a low stage of civilisation, predominantly shepherds, in a position to bring into the field an army of 30,000, but equipped with shields of ox-hides, armed mostly not with swords, but with axes or lances and iron-mounted clubs, predatory neighbours, not a match for the Romans in combat. In the year 730 or 731 24, 23 B.C. these invaded the Roman territory—as they asserted, because the presidents of the nearest nomes had injured them—as the Romans thought, because the Egyptian troops were then to a large extent occupied in Arabia, and they hoped to be able to plunder with immunity. War with queen Candace.In reality they overcame the three cohorts who covered the frontier, and dragged away the inhabitants from the nearest Egyptian districts—Philae, Elephantine, Syene—as slaves, and the statues of the emperor, which they found there, as tokens of victory. But the governor, who just then took up the administration of the province, Gaius Petronius, speedily requited the attack; with 10,000 infantry and 800 cavalry he not merely drove them out, but followed them along the Nile into their own land, defeated them emphatically at Pselchis (Dekkeh), and stormed their stronghold Premis (Ibrim), as well as the capital itself, which he destroyed. It is true that the queen, a brave woman, renewed the attack next year and attempted to storm Premis, where a Roman garrison had been left; but Petronius brought seasonable relief, and so the Aethiopian queen determined to send envoys and to sue for peace. The emperor not merely granted it, but gave orders to evacuate the subject territory, and rejected the proposal of his governor to make the vanquished tributary. This event, otherwise not important, is remarkable in so far as just then the definite resolution of the Roman government became apparent, to maintain absolutely the Nile valley as far as the river was navigable, but not at all to contemplate taking possession of the wide districts on the upper Nile. Only the tract from Syene, where under Augustus the frontier-troops were stationed, as far as Hiera Sycaminos (Maharraka), the so-called Twelve-mile-land (Δωδεκάσχοινος), while never organised as a nome and never viewed as a part of Egypt, was yet regarded as belonging to the empire; and at least under Domitian the posts were even advanced as far as Hiera Sycaminos.247 On that footing substantially the matter remained. The Oriental expedition planned by Nero (p. 61) was certainly intended to embrace Aethiopia; but it did not go beyond the preliminary reconnoitring of the country by Roman officers as far as Meroe. The relations with the neighbours on the Egyptian southern frontier down to the middle of the third century must have been on the whole of a peaceful kind, although there were not wanting minor quarrels with that Candace and with her successors, who appear to have maintained their position for a considerable time, and subsequently perhaps with other tribes, that attained to ascendency beyond the imperial bounds.
The Blemyes.It was not till the empire was unhinged in the period of Valerian and Gallienus, that the neighbours broke over this boundary. We have already mentioned (p. 250) that the Blemyes settled in the mountains on the south-east frontier, formerly obeying the Aethiopians, a barbarous people of revolting savageness, who even centuries later had not abandoned human sacrifices, advanced at this epoch independently against Egypt, and by an understanding with the Palmyrenes occupied a good part of upper Egypt, and held it for a series of years. The vigorous emperor Probus drove them out; but the inroads once begun did not cease,248 and the emperor Diocletian resolved to draw back the frontier. The narrow “Twelve-mile-land” demanded a strong garrison, and brought in little to the state. The Nubians, who roamed in the Libyan desert, and were constantly visiting in particular the great Oasis, agreed to give up their old abodes and to settle in this region, which was formally ceded to them; at the same time fixed annual payments were made to them as well as to their eastern neighbours the Blemyes, nominally in order to compensate them for guarding the frontier, in reality beyond doubt to buy off their plundering expeditions, which nevertheless of course did not cease. It was a retrograde step—the first, since Egypt became Roman.
Aethiopian commercial traffic.Of the mercantile intercourse on this frontier little is reported from antiquity. As the cataracts of the upper Nile closed the direct route by water, the traffic between the interior of Africa and the Egyptians, particularly the trade in ivory, was carried on in the Roman period more by way of the Abyssinian ports than along the Nile; but it was not wanting also in this direction.249 The Aethiopians who dwelt in numbers beside the Egyptians on the island of Philae were evidently mostly merchants, and the border-peace that here prevailed must have contributed its part to the prosperity of the frontier-towns of upper Egypt and of Egyptian trade generally.
The Egyptian east coast and general commerce.The east coast of Egypt presented to the development of general traffic a problem difficult of solution. The thoroughly desolate and rocky shore was incapable of culture proper, and in ancient as in later times a desert.250 On the other hand the two seas, eminently important for the development of culture in the ancient world, the Mediterranean and the Red or Indian, approach each other most closely at the two most northern extremities of the latter, the Persian and the Arabian gulfs; the former receives into it the Euphrates, which in the middle of its course comes near to the Mediterranean; the latter is only a few days’ march distant from the Nile, which flows into the same sea. Hence in ancient times the commercial intercourse between the East and the West took preponderantly either the direction along the Euphrates to the Syrian and Arabian coast, or it made its way from the east coast of Egypt to the Nile. The traffic routes from the Euphrates were older than those by way of the Nile; but the latter had the advantage of the stream being better for navigation and of the shorter land-transport; the getting rid of the latter by preparing an artificial water-route was in the case of the Euphrates excluded, in that of Egypt found in ancient as in modern times difficult doubtless, but not impossible. Accordingly nature itself prescribed to the land of Egypt to connect the east coast with the course of the Nile and the northern coast by land or water routes; and the beginnings of such structures go back to the time of those native rulers who first opened up Egypt to foreign countries and to traffic on a great scale. The sea route to India.Following in the traces apparently of older structures of the great rulers of Egypt, Sethi I. and Rhamses II., king Necho, the son of Psammetichus (610–594 B.C.) began the building of a canal, which, branching off from the Nile in the neighbourhood of Cairo, was to furnish a water-communication with the bitter lakes near Ismailia, and through these with the Red Sea, without being able, however, to complete the work. That in this he had in view not merely the control of the Arabian Gulf and the commercial traffic with the Arabians, but already brought within his horizon the Persian and the Indian seas, and the more remote East, is probable, for this reason, that the same ruler suggested the only circumnavigation of Africa executed in antiquity. Beyond doubt thus thought king Darius I., the lord of Persia as well as of Egypt; he completed the canal, but, as his memorial-stones found on the spot mention, he caused it to be filled up again, probably because his engineers feared that the water of the sea, admitted into the canal, would overflow the fields of Egypt.
The Egyptian eastern ports.The rivalry of the Lagids and the Seleucids, which dominated the policy of the post-Alexandrine period generally, was at the same time a contest between the Euphrates and the Nile. The former was in possession, the latter the pretender; and in the better time of the Lagids the peaceful offensive was pursued with great energy. Not only was that canal undertaken by Necho and Darius, now named the “river of Ptolemaeus,” opened for the first time to navigation by the second Ptolemy Philadelphus († 247 B.C.); but comprehensive harbour-structures were carried out at the points of the difficult east coast that were best fitted for the security of the ships and for the connection with the Nile. Above all, this was done at the mouth of the canal leading to the Nile, at the townships of Arsinoe, Cleopatris, Clysma, all three in the region of the present Suez. Further downward, besides several minor structures, arose the two important emporia, Myos Hormos, somewhat above the present Kosêr, and Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes, nearly in the same latitude with Syene on the Nile as well as with the Arabian port Leuce Come, the former distant six or seven, the latter eleven days’ march from the town Coptos, near which the Nile bends farthest to the eastward, and connected with this chief emporium on the Nile by roads constructed across the desert and provided with large cisterns. The goods traffic of the time of the Ptolemies probably went less through the canal than by these land routes to Coptos.
Abyssinia.Beyond that Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes, the Egypt proper of the Lagids did not extend. The settlements lying farther to the south, Ptolemais “for the chase” below Suâkim, and the southmost township of the Lagid kingdom, the subsequent Adulis, at that time perhaps named “Berenice the Golden” or “near Saba,” Zula not far from the present Massowah, by far the best harbour on all this coast, were not more than coast-forts and had no communication by land with Egypt. These remote settlements were beyond doubt either lost or voluntarily abandoned under the later Lagids, and at the epoch when the Roman rule began, the Trogodytic Berenice was on the coast, like Syene in the interior, the limit of the empire.
The kingdom of the Axomites.In this region, never occupied or early evacuated by the Egyptians, there was formed—whether at the end of the Lagid epoch or in the first age of the empire—an independent state of some extent and importance, that of the Axomites,251 corresponding to the modern Habesh. It derives its name from the town Axômis, the modern Axum, situated in the heart of this Alpine country eight days’ journey from the sea, in the modern country of Tigre; the already-mentioned best emporium on this coast, Adulis in the bay of Massowah, served it as a port. The original population of the kingdom of Axômis, of which tolerably pure remnants still maintain themselves at the present day in individual tracts of the interior, belonged from its language, the Agau, to the same Hamitic cycle with the modern Bego, Sali, Dankali, Somali, Galla; to the Egyptian population this linguistic circle seems related in a similar way as the Greeks to the Celts and Slaves, so that here doubtless for research an affinity may subsist, but for their historical existence rather nothing but contrast. But before our knowledge of this country so much as begins, superior Semitic immigrants belonging to the Himyaritic stocks of southern Arabia must have crossed the narrow gulf of the sea and rendered their language as well as their writing at home there. The old written language of Habesh, extinct in popular use since the seventeenth century, the Ge’ez, or as it is for the most part erroneously termed, the Aethiopic,252 is purely Semitic,253 and the still living dialects, the Amhara and the Tigriña, are so also in the main, only disturbed by the influence of the older Agau.
Its extent and development.As to the beginnings of this commonwealth no tradition has been preserved. At the end of Nero’s time, and perhaps already long before, the king of the Axomites ruled on the African coast nearly from Suâkim to the Straits of Bab el Mandeb. Some time afterwards—the epoch cannot be more precisely defined—we find him as a frontier-neighbour of the Romans on the southern border of Egypt, and on the other coast of the Arabian Gulf in warlike activity in the territory intervening between the Roman possession and that of the Sabaeans, and so coming into immediate contact towards the north with the Roman territory also in Arabia; commanding, moreover, the African coast outside of the Gulf perhaps as far as Cape Guardafui. How far his territory of Axômis extended inland is not clear; Aethiopia, that is, Sennaar and Dongola, at least in the earlier imperial period, hardly belonged to it; perhaps at this time the kingdom of Nabata may have subsisted alongside of the Axomitic. Where the Axomites meet us, we find them at a comparatively advanced stage of development. Under Augustus the Egyptian commercial traffic increased not less with these African harbours than with India. The king had the command not merely of an army, but, as his very relations to Arabia presuppose, also of a fleet. A Greek merchant, who was present in Adulis, terms king Zoskales, who ruled in Vespasian’s time in Axômis, an upright man and acquainted with Greek writing; one of his successors has set up on the spot a memorial-writing composed in current Greek which told his deeds to the foreigners; he even names himself in it a son of Ares—which title the kings of the Axomites retained down to the fourth century—and dedicates the throne, which bears that memorial inscription, to Zeus, to Ares, and to Poseidon. Already in Zoskales’s time that foreigner names Adulis a well organised emporium; his successors compelled the roving tribes of the Arabian coast to keep peace by land and by sea, and restored a land communication from their capital to the Roman frontier, which, considering the nature of this district primarily left dependent on communication by sea, was not to be esteemed of slight account. Under Vespasian brass pieces, which were divided according to need, served the natives instead of money, and Roman coin circulated only among the strangers settled in Adulis; in the later imperial period the kings themselves coined. The Axomite ruler withal calls himself king of kings, and no trace points to Roman clientship; he practises coining in gold, which the Romans did not allow, not merely in their own territory but even within the range of their power. There was hardly another land in the imperial period beyond the Romano-Hellenic bounds which had appropriated to itself Hellenic habits with equal independence and to an equal extent as the state of Habesh. That in the course of time the popular language, indigenous or rather naturalised from Arabia, gained the upper hand and dispossessed the Greek, is probably traceable partly to Arabian influence, partly to that of Christianity and the revival connected with it of the popular dialects, such as we found also in Syria and Egypt; and it does not exclude the view that the Greek language in Axomis and Adulis in the first and second centuries of our era had a similar position to what it had in Syria and Egypt, so far as it is allowable to compare small and great.
Rome and the Axomites.Of political relations of the Romans to the state of Axomis hardly anything is mentioned from the first three centuries of our era, to which our narrative is confined. With the rest of Egypt they took possession also of the ports of the east coast down to the remote Trogodytic Berenice, which on account of that remoteness was in the Roman period placed under a commandant of its own.254 Of extending their territory into the inhospitable and worthless mountains along the coast there was never any thought; nor can the sparse population, standing at the lowest stage of development, in the immediately adjoining region have ever given serious trouble to the Romans. As little did the Caesars attempt, as the early Lagids had done, to possess themselves of the emporia of the Axomitic coast. There is express mention only of the fact that envoys of the Axomite kings negotiated with the emperor Aurelian. But this very silence, as well as the formerly indicated independent position of the ruler,255 leads to the inference that here the recognised frontier was permanently respected on both sides, and that a relation of good neighbourhood subsisted, which proved advantageous to the interests of peace and especially of Egyptian commerce. That the latter, especially the important traffic in ivory, in which Adulis was the chief entrepot for the interior of Africa, was carried on predominantly from Egypt and in Egyptian vessels, cannot—considering the superior civilisation of Egypt—be subject to any doubt even as regards the Lagid period; and in Roman times this traffic probably only increased in amount, without undergoing further change.
The west coast of Arabia.Far more important for Egypt and the Roman empire generally than the traffic with the African south was that which subsisted with Arabia and the coasts situated farther to the east. The Arabian peninsula remained aloof from the sphere of Hellenic culture. It would possibly have been otherwise had king Alexander lived a year longer; death swept him away amidst the preparations for sailing round and occupying the already-explored south coast of Arabia, setting out from the Persian Gulf. But the voyage which the great king had not been able to enter on was never undertaken by any Greek after him. From the most remote times, on the other hand, a lively intercourse had taken place between the two coasts of the Arabian Gulf over its moderately broad waters. In the Egyptian accounts from the time of the Pharaohs the voyages to the land of Punt, and the spoils thence brought home in frankincense, ebony, emeralds, leopards’ skins, play an important part. It has been already (p. 148) mentioned that subsequently the northern portion of the Arabian west coast belonged to the territory of the Nabataeans, and with this came into the power of the Romans. This was a desolate beach;256 only the emporium Leuce Come, the last town of the Nabataeans and so far also of the Roman empire, was not merely in maritime intercourse with Berenice lying opposite, but was also the starting-point of the caravan-route leading to Petra and thence to the ports of southern Syria, and in so far, one of the centres of the traffic between the East and the West (p. 151). The adjoining regions on the south, northward and southward of the modern Mecca, corresponded in their natural character to the opposite Trogodyte country, and were, like this, neither politically nor commercially of importance, nor yet apparently united under one sceptre, but occupied by roving tribes. But at the south end of this gulf was the home of the only Arabic stock, which attained to greater importance in the pre-Islamic period. The Greeks and the Romans name these Arabs in the earlier period after the people most prominent at that time Sabaeans, in later times after another tribe usually Homerites, as, according to the new Arabic form of the latter name, now for the most part Himjarites.
The state of the Homerites.The development of this remarkable people had reached a considerable stage long before the beginning of the Roman rule over Egypt.257 Its native seat, the Arabia Felix of the ancients, the region of Mocha and Aden, is surrounded by a narrow plain along the shore intensely hot and desolate, but the healthy and temperate interior of Yemen and Hadramaut produces on the mountain-slopes and in the valleys a luxuriant vegetation, and the numerous mountain-waters permit in many respects with careful management a garden-like cultivation. We have even at the present day an expressive testimony to the rich and peculiar civilisation of this region in the remains of city-walls and towers, of useful buildings, particularly aqueducts, and temples covered with inscriptions, which completely confirm the description of ancient authors as to the magnificence and luxury of this region; the Arabian geographers have written books concerning the strongholds and castles of the numerous petty princes of Yemen. Famous are the ruins of the mighty embankment which once in the valley of Mariaba dammed up the river Dana and rendered it possible to water the fields upwards,258 and from the bursting of which, and the migration alleged to have been thereby occasioned of the inhabitants of Yemen to the north, the Arabs for long counted their years. But above all this district was one of the original seats of wholesale traffic by land and by sea, not merely because its productions, frankincense, precious stones, gum, cassia, aloes, senna, myrrh, and numerous other drugs called for export, but also because this Semitic stock was, just like that of the Phoenicians, formed by its whole character for commerce; Strabo says, just like the more recent travellers, that the Arabs are all traders and merchants. The coining of silver is here old and peculiar; the coins were at first modelled after Athenian dies, and later after Roman coins of Augustus, but on an independent, probably Babylonian basis.259 From the land of these Arabians the original frankincense-routes led across the desert to the marts on the Arabian gulf, Aelana and the already-mentioned Leuce Come, and the emporia of Syria, Petra and Gaza;260 these routes of the land-traffic, which along with those of the Euphrates and the Nile, furnish the means of intercourse between East and West from the earliest times, may be conjectured to be the proper basis of the prosperity of Yemen. But the sea-traffic likewise soon became associated with them; the great mart for this was Adane, the modern Aden. From this the goods went by water, certainly in the main in Arabian ships, either to those same marts on the Arabian gulf and so to the Syrian ports, or to Berenice and Myos Hormos, and from thence to Coptos and Alexandria. We have already stated that the same Arabs likewise at a very early time possessed themselves of the opposite coast, and transplanted their language, their writing and their civilisation to Habesh. If Coptos, the Nile-emporium for the eastern traffic, had just as many Arab as Egyptian inhabitants, if even the emerald-mines above Berenice (near Jebel Zebâra) were worked by the Arabs, this shows that in the Lagid state itself they had the trade up to a certain degree in their hands; and its passive attitude in respect to the traffic on the Arabian Sea, whither at most an expedition against the pirates was once undertaken,261 is the more readily intelligible, if a state well organised and powerful at sea ruled these waters. We meet the Arabs of Yemen even beyond their own sea. Adane remained down to the Roman imperial times a mart of traffic on the one hand with India, on the other with Egypt, and, in spite of its own unfavourable position on the treeless shore, rose to such prosperity that the name of “Arabia Felix” had primary reference to this town. The dominion, which in our days the Imam of Muscat in the south-east of the peninsula has exercised over the islands of Socotra and Zanzibar and the African east coast from Cape Guardafui southward, pertained in Vespasian’s time “from of old” to the princes of Arabia; the island of Dioscorides, that same Socotra, belonged then to the king of Hadramaut, Azania, that is, the coast of Somal and further southward, to one of the viceroys of his western neighbour, the king of the Homerites. The southernmost station on the east African coast which the Egyptian merchants knew of, Rhapta in the region of Zanzibar, was leased from this sheikh by the merchants of Muza, that is nearly the modern Mocha, “and they send thither their trading-ships, mostly manned by Arabian captains and sailors, who are accustomed to deal and are often connected by marriage with the natives, and are acquainted with the localities and the languages of the country.” The cultivation of the soil and industry went hand in hand with commerce; in the houses of rank in India, Arabian wine was drunk alongside of the Falernian from Italy and the Laodicene from Syria; and the lances and shoemakers’ awls, which the natives of the coast of Malabar purchased from the foreign traders were manufactured at Muza. Thus this region, which moreover sold much and bought little, became one of the richest in the world.
How far its political development kept pace with the economic, cannot be determined for the pre-Roman and earlier imperial period; only this much seems to result both from the accounts of the Occidentals and from the native inscriptions, that this south-west point of Arabia was divided among several independent rulers with territories of moderate size. There subsisted in that quarter, alongside of the more prominent Sabaeans and Homerites, the already-mentioned Chatramotitae in the Hadramaut, and northward in the interior the Minaeans, all under princes of their own.
With reference to the Arabians of Yemen the Romans pursued the very opposite policy to that adopted towards the Axomites. Augustus, for whom the non-enlargement of the empire was the starting-point of the imperial government, and who allowed almost all the plans of conquest of his father and master to drop, made an exception of the south-west coast of Arabia, and here took aggressive measures of his own free will. This was done on account of the position which this group of peoples occupied at that time in Indo-Egyptian commercial intercourse. In order to bring the province of his dominions, which was politically and financially the most important, up, in an economic aspect, to the level which his predecessors in rule had neglected to establish or had allowed to decline, he needed above all to obtain inter-communication between Arabia and India on the one hand and Europe on the other. The Nile-route for long competed successfully with the Arabian and the Euphrates routes; but Egypt played in this respect, as we saw, a subordinate part at least under the later Lagids. A trading rivalry subsisted not with the Axomites, but doubtless with the Arabians; if the Egyptian traffic was to be converted from a passive into an active, from indirect into direct, the Arabs had to be overthrown; and this it was that Augustus desired and the Roman government in some measure achieved.
Expedition of Gallus.In the sixth year of his reign in Egypt (end of 729)25 B.C. Augustus despatched a fleet, fitted out expressly for this expedition, of 80 warships and 130 transports, and the half of the Egyptian army, a corps of 10,000 men, without reckoning the contingents of the two nearest client kings, the Nabataean Obodas and the Jew Herod, against the states of Yemen, in order either to subjugate or at least to ruin them,262 while at the same time the treasures there accumulated were certainly taken into account. But the enterprise completely miscarried, and that from the incapacity of the leader, the governor of Egypt at the time, Gaius Aelius Gallus.263 Since the occupation and the possession of the desolate coast from Leuce Come downwards to the frontier of the enemy’s territory was of no consequence at all, it was necessary that the expedition should be directed immediately against the latter, and that the army should be conducted from the most southern Egyptian port at once into Arabia Felix.264 Instead of this the fleet was got ready at the most northerly, that of Arsinoe (Suez), and the army was landed at Leuce Come, just as if it were the object to prolong as much as possible the voyage of the fleet and the march of the troops. Besides, the war-vessels were superfluous, since the Arabians possessed no war-fleet, the Roman sailors were unacquainted with the navigation on the Arabian coast, and the transports, although specially built for this expedition, were unsuited for their purpose. The pilots had difficulty in finding their way between the shallows and the rocks, and even the voyage in Roman waters from Arsinoe to Leuce Come cost many vessels and men. Here the winter was passed; in the spring of 730 the campaign in the enemy’s country began. The Arabians offered no hindrance, but Arabia undoubtedly did so. Wherever the double axes and the slings and bows came into collision with the pilum and the sword, the natives dispersed like chaff before the wind; but the diseases, which are endemic in the country, scurvy, leprosy, palsy, decimated the soldiers worse than the most bloody battle, and all the more as the general did not know how to move rapidly forward the unwieldy mass of his army. Nevertheless the Roman army arrived in front of the walls of Mariaba, the capital of the Sabaeans first affected by the attack. But, as the inhabitants closed the gates of their powerful walls still standing,265 and offered energetic resistance, the Roman general despaired of solving the problem proposed to him; and, after he had lain six days in front of the town, he entered on his retreat, which the Arabians hardly disturbed in earnest, and which was accomplished with comparative rapidity under the pressure of need, although with a severe loss in men.
Further enterprises against the Arabs.It was a bad miscarriage; but Augustus did not abandon the conquest of Arabia. It has already been related (p. 39) that the journey to the East, which the crown-prince Gaius entered upon in the year 753 1 B.C., was to terminate at Arabia; it was this time contemplated after the subjugation of Armenia to reach, in concert with the Parthian government or in case of need after the overthrow of their armies, the mouth of the Euphrates, and from thence to take the sea-route which the admiral Nearchus had once explored for Alexander, towards Arabia Felix.266 These hopes ended in another but not less unfortunate way, through the Parthian arrow which struck the crown-prince before the walls of Artageira. With him was buried the plan of Arabian conquest for all the future. The great peninsula remained through the whole imperial period—apart from the stripes of coast on the north and north-west—in possession of that freedom from which Islam, the executioner of Hellenism, was in its own time to issue.
Injury to Arabian commerce.But the Arabian commerce was at all events broken down partly by the measures, to be explained further on, of the Roman government for protecting the Egyptian navigation, partly by a blow struck by the Romans against the chief mart of Indo-Arabian traffic. Whether under Augustus himself, possibly among the preparations for the invasion to be carried out by Gaius, or under one of his immediate successors, a Roman fleet appeared before Adane and destroyed the place; in Vespasian’s time it was a village, and its prosperity was gone. We know only the naked fact,267 but it speaks for itself. A counterpart to the destruction of Corinth and of Carthage by the republic, it, like these, attained its end, and secured for the Romano-Egyptian trade the supremacy in the Arabian gulf and in the Indian Sea.
Later fortunes of the Homerites.The prosperity, however, of the blessed land of Yemen was too firmly founded to succumb to this blow; politically it was even perhaps in this epoch only that it more energetically rallied its resources. Mariaba, at the time when the arms of Gallus failed before its walls, was perhaps no more than the capital of the Sabaeans; but already at that time the tribe of the Homerites, whose capital Sapphar lay somewhat to the south of Mariaba, also in the interior, was the strongest in Arabia Felix. A century later we find the two united under a king of the Homerites and of the Sabaeans reigning in Sapphar, whose rule extends as far as Mocha and Aden, and, as was already said, over the island of Socotra and the coast of Somal and Zanzibar; and at least from this time we may speak of a kingdom of the Homerites. The desert northwards from Mariaba as far as the Roman frontier did not at that time belong to it, and was under no regular authority at all;268 the principalities of the Minaei and of the Chatramotitae continued also to be under sovereigns of their own. The eastern half of Arabia formed constantly a part of the Persian empire (p. 13), and never was under the sceptre of the rulers of Arabia Felix. Even now therefore the bounds were narrow and probably remained so; little is known as to the further development of affairs.269 In the middle of the fourth century the kingdom of the Homerites was united with that of the Axomites, and was governed from Axomis270—a subjection, however, which was subsequently broken off again. The kingdom of the Homerites, as well as the united Axomitico-Homeritic, stood as independent states in intercourse and treaty with Rome during the later imperial period.
Commercial intercourse of the Homerites.In commerce and navigation the Arabians of the south-west of the peninsula occupied, if no longer the place of supremacy, at any rate a prominent position throughout the whole imperial period. After the destruction of Adane, Muza became the commercial metropolis of this region. The representation formerly given is still in the main appropriate for the time of Vespasian. The place is described to us at this time as exclusively Arabian, inhabited by ship-owners and sailors, and full of stirring mercantile life; the Muzaites with their own ships navigate the whole east coast of Africa and the west coast of India, and not merely carry the goods of their own country, but bring also the purple stuffs and gold embroideries prepared according to Oriental taste in the workshops of the West, and the fine wines of Syria and Italy, to the Orientals, and in turn to the western lands the precious wares of the East. In frankincense and other aromatics Muza and the emporium of the neighbouring kingdom of Hadramaut, Cane to the east of Aden, must always have retained a sort of practical monopoly; these wares, used in antiquity very much more than at present, were produced not only on the southern coast of Arabia, but also on the African coast from Adulis as far as the “promontory of spices,” Cape Guardafui, and from thence the merchants of Muza fetched them and brought them into general commerce. On the already mentioned island of Dioscorides there was a joint trading settlement of the three great seafaring nations of these seas, the Hellenes, that is, the Egyptians, the Arabians, and the Indians. But of relations to Hellenism, such as we found on the opposite coast among the Axomites (p. 283), we meet no trace in the land of Yemen; if the coinage is determined by Occidental types (p. 287 f.), these were current throughout the East. Otherwise writing and language and the exercise of art, so far as we are able to judge, developed themselves here just as independently as commerce and navigation; and certainly this co-operated in producing the result that the Axomites, while they subjected to themselves the Homerites in a political point of view, subsequently reverted from the Hellenic path into the Arabic (p. 283).
Land routes and harbours in Egypt.In the same spirit as for the relations to southern Africa and to the Arabian states, and in a more pleasing way, provision was made in Egypt itself for the routes of commercial intercourse, in the first instance by Augustus, and beyond doubt by all its intelligent rulers. The system of roads and harbours established by the earlier Ptolemies in the footsteps of the Pharaohs had, like the whole administration, fallen into sad decay amidst the troubles of the last Lagid period. It is not expressly mentioned that Augustus put again into order the land and water routes and the ports of Egypt; but that it was done, is none the less certain. Coptos remained through the whole imperial period the rendezvous of this traffic.271 From a recently found document we gather that in the first imperial period the two routes leading thence to the ports of Myos Hormos and of Berenice were repaired by the Roman soldiers and provided at the fitting places with the requisite cisterns.272 The canal which connected the Red Sea with the Nile, and so with the Mediterranean Sea, was in the Roman period only of secondary rank, employed chiefly perhaps for the conveyance of blocks of marble and porphyry from the Egyptian east coast to the Mediterranean; but it remained navigable throughout the imperial period. The emperor Trajan renewed and probably also enlarged it—perhaps it was he who placed it in communication with the still undivided Nile near Babylon (not far from Cairo), and thereby increased its water-supply—and assigned to it the name of Trajan’s or the emperor’s river (Augustus amnis), from which in later times this part of Egypt was named (Augustamnica).
Piracy.Augustus exerted himself also in earnest for the suppression of piracy on the Red and Indian Seas; the Egyptians long even after his death thanked him, that through his efforts piratical sails disappeared from the sea and gave way to trading vessels. No doubt what was done in that respect was far from enough. The facts that, while the government doubtless from time to time set naval squadrons to work in these waters, it did not station there a standing war-fleet; and that the Roman merchantmen regularly took archers on board in the Indian Sea to repel the attacks of the pirates, would be surprising, if a comparative indifference to the insecurity of the sea had not everywhere—here, as well as on the Belgian coast, and on those of the Black Sea—clung like a hereditary sin to the Roman imperial government or rather to the Roman government in general. It is true that the governments of Axomis and of Sapphar were called by their geographical position still more than the Romans at Berenice and Leuce Come to check piracy, and it may be partly due to this consideration that the Romans remained, upon the whole, on a good understanding with these weaker but indispensable neighbours.
Growth of the Egyptian active traffic to the East.We have formerly shown that the maritime intercourse of Egypt, if not with Adulis (p. 284), at any rate with Arabia and India at the epoch which immediately preceded the Roman rule, was not carried on in the main through the medium of Egyptians. It was only through the Romans that Egypt obtained the great maritime traffic to the East. “Not twenty Egyptian ships in the year,” says a contemporary of Augustus, "ventured forth under the Ptolemies from the Arabian gulf; now 120 merchantmen annually sail to India from the port of Myos Hormos alone." The commercial gain, which the Roman merchant had been obliged hitherto to share with the Persian or Arabian intermediary, flowed to him in all its extent after the opening up of direct communication with the more remote East. This result was probably brought about in the first instance by the circumstance that the Egyptian ports were, if not directly barred, at any rate practically closed, by differential custom-dues against Arabian and Indian transports;273 only by the hypothesis of such a navigation-act in favour of their own shipping could this sudden revolution of commercial relations be explained. But the traffic was not merely violently transformed from a passive into an active one; it was also absolutely increased, partly in consequence of the increased inquiry in the West for the wares of the East, partly at the expense of the other routes of traffic through Arabia and Syria. For the Arabian and Indian commerce with the West the route by way of Egypt more and more proved itself the shortest and the cheapest. The frankincense, which in the olden time went in great part by the land-route through the interior of Arabia to Gaza (p. 288, note 2), came afterwards for the most part by water through Egypt. The Indian traffic received a new impulse about the time of Nero, when a skilled and courageous Egyptian captain, Hippalus, ventured, instead of making his way along the long stretch of coast, to steer from the mouth of the Arabian Gulf directly through the open sea for India; he knew the monsoon, which thenceforth the mariners, who traversed this route after him, named the Hippalus. Thenceforth the voyage was not merely materially shortened, but was less exposed to the land and sea pirates. To what extent the secure state of peace and the increasing luxury raised the consumption of Oriental wares in the West, may be discerned in some measure from the complaints, which were in the time of Vespasian loudly expressed, regarding the enormous sums which went out of the empire for that purpose. The whole amount of the purchase-money annually paid to the Arabians and the Indians is estimated by Pliny at 100,000,000 sesterces (= £1,100,000), for Arabia alone at 55,000,000 sesterces (= £600,000), of which, it is true, a part was covered by the export of goods. The Arabians and the Indians bought doubtless the metals of the West, iron, copper, lead, tin, arsenic, the Egyptian articles mentioned formerly (p. 254), wine, purple, gold and silver plate, also precious stones, corals, saffron, balm; but they had always far more to offer to foreign luxury than to receive for their own. Hence the Roman gold and silver money went in considerable quantities to the great Arabian and Indian emporia. In India it had already under Vespasian so naturalised itself that the people there preferred to use it. Of this Oriental traffic the greatest part went to Egypt; and if the increase of the traffic benefited the government-chest by the increased receipts from customs, the need for building ships and making mercantile voyages of their own elevated the prosperity of private individuals.
While thus the Roman government limited its rule in Egypt to the narrow space which is marked off by the navigableness of the Nile, and, whether in pusillanimity or in wisdom, at any rate never attempted with consistent energy to conquer either Nubia or Arabia, it strove as energetically after the possession of the Arabian and the Indian wholesale traffic, and attained at least an important limitation of the competitors. As the unscrupulous pursuit of commercial interests characterised the policy of the republic, so not less did it mark that of the principate, especially in Egypt.
Romano-Indian commercial intercourse.We can only determine approximately how far the direct Roman maritime traffic went towards the East. In the first instance it took the direction of Barygaza (Barôtch on the Gulf of Cambay above Bombay), which great mart must have remained through the whole imperial period the centre of the Egyptio-Indian traffic; several places in the peninsula of Gujerat bear among the Greeks Greek designations, such as Naustathmos and Theophila. In the Flavian period, in which the monsoon-voyages had already become regular, the whole west coast of India was opened up to the Roman merchants as far down as the coast of Malabar, the home of the highly-esteemed and dear-priced pepper, for the sake of which they visited the ports of Muziris (probably Mangaluru) and Nelcynda (in Indian doubtless Nilakantha from one of the surnames of the god Shiva, probably the modern Nîlêswara); somewhat farther to the south at Kananor numerous Roman gold coins of the Julio-Claudian epoch have been found, formerly exchanged against the spices destined for the Roman kitchens. On the island Salice, the Taprobane of the older Greek navigators, the modern Ceylon, in the time of Claudius a Roman official, who had been driven thither from the Arabian coast by storms, had met with a friendly reception from the ruler of the country, and the latter, astonished, as the report says, at the uniform weight of the Roman pieces of money in spite of the diversity of the emperor’s heads, had sent along with the shipwrecked man envoys to his Roman colleague. Thereby in the first instance it was only the sphere of geographical knowledge that was enlarged; it was not till later apparently that navigation was extended as far as that large and productive island, in which on several occasions Roman coins have come to light. But coins are found only by way of exception beyond Cape Comorin and Ceylon,274 and hardly has even the coast of Coromandel and the mouth of the Ganges, to say nothing of the Further Indian peninsula and China, maintained regular commercial intercourse with the Occidentals.
Chinese silk was certainly already at an early period sold regularly to the West, but, as it would appear, exclusively by the land-route, and through the medium partly of the Indians of Barygaza, partly and chiefly of the Parthians; the Silk-people or the Seres (from the Chinese name of silk Sr) of the Occidentals were the inhabitants of the Tarim-basin to the north-west of Thibet, whither the Chinese brought their silk, and the Parthian intermediaries jealously guarded the traffic thither. By sea, certainly, individual mariners reached accidentally or by way of exploration at least to the east coast of Further India and perhaps still farther; the port of Cattigara known to the Romans at the beginning of the second century A.D. was one of the Chinese coast-towns, perhaps Hang-chow-foo at the mouth of the Yang-tse-kiang. The report of the Chinese annals that in 166 A.D. an embassy of the emperor Antun of Ta-(that is Great) Tsin (Rome) landed in Ji-nan (Tonkin), and thence by the land-route arrived at the capital Lo-yang (or Ho-nan-foo on the middle Hoang-ho) to the emperor Hwan-ti, may warrantably be referred to Rome and to Marcus Antoninus. This event, however, and what the Chinese authorities mention as to a similar appearance of the Romans in their country in the course of the third century, can hardly be understood of public missions, since as to these Roman statements would hardly have been wanting; but possibly individual captains may have passed with the Chinese court as messengers of their government. These connections had perceptible consequences only in so far as the earlier tales regarding the procuring of silk gradually gave way to better knowledge.
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.
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.