here 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 Utica.
Its frontier did not need any regular defence, as the allied Numidian
kingdom everywhere separated it from the inhabitants of the desert.
In the matter of taxes Rome dealt on the whole with moderation.
Those communities which from the beginning of the war had taken part
with Rome--viz. Only the maritime towns of Utica, Hadrumetum, Little
Leptis, Thapsus, Achulla, and Usalis, and the inland town of Theudalis--
retained their territory and became free cities; which was