ABSTRACT
The previous inhabitants of north-west Africa had already discovered that corn grew readily enough in the broad river valleys of Tunisia and on the Great Plains of northern Algeria and the far west, and both the Africans and the Phoenicians had learnt to improve on nature by crop rotation and irrigation where it was needed. Pliny the Elder reported that the country was so fertile that one grain would produce a stalk bearing a hundred and fifty new grains (and three times that figure had been known, it was claimed). As an average yield, this was clearly over-optimistic; all the same, African harvests were prodigious. By Caesar's day, Africa Nova alone produced nearly fifty thousand tons of grain every year. Now, with the extension of Roman rule, there was the prospect of far more: and a century after Caesar north-west Africa's cornlands provided two-thirds of the wheat the population of Rome required.
