Note 296 — Chapter XIII · THE AFRICAN PROVINCES.

More clearly than by the Latin inscriptions found in Africa, which begin too late to illustrate the state of things before the second century A.D., this is shown by the four contracts of patronatus from the time of Tiberius, quoted in next note, concluded by two small places of the proconsular province Apisa maius and Siagu, and two others nowhere else mentioned, probably adjacent, Themetra and Thimiligi; according to which the statement of Strabo (xvii. 3, 15, p. 833) that at the beginning of the last war the Carthaginian territory numbered 300 towns, appears not at all incredible. In each of those four smaller places there were sufetes; even where the old and new Punic inscriptions name magistrates, there are regularly two sufetes. That these are comparatively frequent in the proconsular province, and elsewhere can only be pointed out in Calama, serves to show how much more strongly the Phoenician urban organisation was developed in the former.