time with his troops in
front of the town went into the desert, the Roman general preferred
to pursue him. This was precisely what Jugurtha intended in a
nocturnal assault, which was favoured by the difficulties of the
ground and the secret understanding which Jugurtha had with some in
the Roman army, the Numidians captured the Roman camp, and drove
the Romans, many of whom were unarmed, before them in the most
complete and disgraceful rout. The consequence was a capitulation,
the terms of which--the marching off of the Roman army under the yoke,
the immediate evacuation of the whole Numidian territory, and the
renewal of the treaty cancelled by the senate--were dictated by
Jugurtha and accepted by the Romans (in the beginning of 645).

Dissatisfaction in the Capital

This was too much to be borne. While the Africans were exulting and
the prospect--thus suddenly opened up--of such an overthrow of the
alien domination as had been reckoned scarcely possible was bringing
numerous tribes of the free and half-free inhabitants of the desert
to the standards of the victorious king, public opinion in Italy was
vehemently aroused against the equally corrupt and pernicious governing
aristocracy, and broke out in a storm of prosecutions which, fostered
by the exasperation of the mercantile class, swept away a succession
of victims from the highest circles of the nobility. On the proposal
of the tribune of the people Gaius Mamilius Limetanus, in spite of the
timid attempts of the senate to avert the threatened punishment, an
extraordinary jury-commission was appointed to investigate the high
treason that had occurred in connection with the question of the
Numidian succession; and its sentences sent the two former commanders-
in-chief Gaius Bestia and Spurius Albinus as well as Lucius Opimius,
the head of the first African commission and the executioner withal
of Gaius Gracchus, along with numerous other less notable men of the
government party, guilty and innocent, into exile. That these
prosecutions, however, were only intended to appease the excitement
of public opinion, in the capitalist circles more especially, by the
sacrifice of some of the persons most compromised, and that there was
in them not the slightest trace of a rising of popular indignation
against the government itself, void as it was of right and honour,
is shown very clearly by the fact that no one ventured to attack
the guiltiest of the guilty, the pruden