o as to put an end in legal form to the existence of
the city, and to curse the soil and site for ever, that neither
house nor cornfield might ever reappear on the spot. The command was
punctually obeyed. The ruins burned for seventeen days: recently,
when the remains of the Carthaginian city wall were excavated, they
were found to be covered with a layer of ashes from four to five feet
deep, filled with half-charred pieces of wood, fragments of iron,
and projectiles. Where the industrious Phoenicians had bustled and
trafficked for five hundred years, Roman slaves henceforth pastured
the herds of their distant masters. Scipio, however, whom nature
had destined for a nobler part than that of an executioner, gazed
with horror on his own work; and, instead of the joy of victory,
the victor himself was haunted by a presentiment of the retribution
that would inevitably follow such a misdeed.

Province of Africa

There remained the work of arranging the future organization of
the country. The earlier plan of investing the allies of Rome with
the transmarine possessions that she acquired was no longer viewed
with favour. Micipsa and his brothers retained in substance their
former territory, including the districts recently wrested from the
Carthaginians on the Bagradas and in Emporia; their long-cherished
hope of obtaining Carthage as a capital was for ever frustrated;
the senate presented them instead with the Carthaginian libraries.
The Carthaginian territory as possessed by the city in its last days--
viz. The narrow border of the African coast lying immediately opposite
to Sicily, from the river Tusca (near Thabraca) to Thaenae (opposite
to the island of Karkenah)--became a Roman province. In the interior,
where the constant encroachments of Massinissa had more and more
narrowed the Carthaginian dominions and Bulla, Zama, and Aquae
already belonged to the kings, the Numidians retained what they
possessed. But the careful regulation of the boundary between the
Roman province and the Numidian kingdom, which enclosed it on three
sides, showed that Rome would by no means tolerate in reference
to herself what she had permitted in reference to Carthage; while
the name of the new province, Africa, on the other hand appeared
to indicate that Rome did not at all regard the boundary now marked
off as a definitive one. The supreme administration of the new
province was entrusted to a Roman governor, who had his seat at Ut