Very soon after the end of the second Punic war, quarrels already began. Masinissa put forth impudent claims to the oldest Phœnician settlements, to the rich coast of Bysacene which the Carthaginians had possessed from the very first. Polybius says that those districts had belonged to Carthage as early as in the days of the Roman kings. This was so barefaced, that the Romans had not the hardihood to declare for him openly. Scipio Africanus went over as Roman commissioner and umpire. The facts were so glaring, that he could not possibly decide for Masinissa; yet he did not scruple with unjustifiable policy to refuse to give sentence, and thus Carthage and Masinissa remained at enmity with each other, and the Carthaginians must have felt convinced, that any active resistance would involve them in a war with the Romans: they were therefore obliged to confine themselves to the defensive. Their position was a most unhappy one; just like that of the states with which Napoleon had made peace in order to bring on their ruin, in which cases he set everything like truth at defiance. Unluckily for Carthage, Masinissa reigned upwards of fifty years after the peace of Scipio, and during the whole of his life played his game with Rome so cleverly, that her sad condition grew worse and worse. Already before the war with Perseus, soon after the death of Philip, they complained bitterly of Masinissa, who wrested from them one district after another. The Romans for the sake of appearances sent over arbitrators, who, however, allowed the affair to drag on and never decided anything. And the plot thickened so much, that at last it came to a war between Carthage and Masinissa, the date of which cannot be stated with chronological precision,--very likely, not quite so close upon the breaking out of the third Punic war.[56] The territory of Carthage at that time was about as much as modern Tunis, and the western part of Tripoli; Masinissa, by his continual conquests, was the lord of one of the mightiest kingdoms which the world then knew, and was much stronger than the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians had gathered together a considerable army under Hasdrubal, one of their generals; but their former disasters had not made them more warlike: they did not what Macchiavell had wished for his own native city, not having yet come to the conviction that they ought ever to rely on their own bravery, and likewise to lighten the lot of their own subjects: had it not been for this, the war might, after all, have taken quite a different turn. They had amended none of the faults of their military system, and they still carried on the war by means of mercenaries. Hasdrubal went out to meet Masinissa with an army of fifty thousand men; but he was quite an incapable general, and though the battle was not decisively lost, he looked upon himself as beaten, and retreated without securing his connexion with Carthage: he was, therefore, cut