population and of the soil
allowed a leader, who had once secured the sympathies of the
nation, to protract the war in endless guerilla conflicts, or even
to let it sleep for a time in order to revive it at the right moment
with renewed vigour?

War in the Desert
Mauretanian Complications

When Metellus again took the field in 647, Jugurtha nowhere held
his ground against him; he appeared now at one point, now at another
far distant; it seemed as if they would as easily get the better of
the lions as of these horsemen of the desert. A battle was fought,
a victory was won; but it was difficult to say what had been
gained by the victory. The king had vanished out of sight in
the distance. In the interior of the modern beylik of Tunis,
close on the edge of the great desert, there lay on an oasis
provided with springs the strong place Thala;(14) thither Jugurtha
had retired with his children, his treasures, and the flower of his
troops, there to await better times. Metellus ventured to follow the
king through a desert, in which his troops had to carry water along
with them in skins forty-five miles; Thala was reached and fell after
a forty days' siege; but the Roman deserters destroyed the most
valuable part of the booty along with the building in which they
burnt themselves after the capture of the town, and--what was of more
consequence--king Jugurtha escaped with his children and his chest.
Numidia was no doubt virtually in the hands of the Romans; but,
instead of their object being thereby gained, the war seemed only
to extend over a field wider and wider. In the south the free
Gaetulian tribes of the desert began at the call of Jugurtha a
national war against the Romans. In the west Bocchus king of
Mauretania, whose friendship the Romans had in earlier times
despised, seemed now not indisposed to make common cause with his
son-in-law against them; he not only received him in his court, but,
uniting to Jugurtha's followers his own numberless swarms of horsemen,
he marched into the region of Cirta, where Metellus was in winter
quarters. They began to negotiate: it was clear that in the
person of Jugurtha he held in his hands the real prize of the
struggle for Rome. But what were his intentions--whether to sell
his son-in-law dear to the Romans, or to take up the national war
in concert with that son-in-law--neither the Romans nor Jugurtha
nor perhaps even the king himself knew; and he was in no hurry
to aban