Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/491

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 469 idly wasted in the dream of victory or deliverance. But Africa was irrecoverably lost : the zeal and resentment of the com- mander of the faithful ^^' prepared in the ensuing spring a more numerous armament by sea and land ; and the patrician in his turn was compelled to evacuate the post and fortifications of Carthage. A second battle was fought in the neighbourhood of Utica : the Greeks and Goths were again defeated ; and their timely embarkation saved them from the sword of Hassan, who had invested the slight and insufficient rampart of their camp. Whatever yet remained of Carthage was delivered to the flames, and the colony of Dido ^ and Caesar lay desolate above two hun- dred years, till a part, perhaps a twentieth, of the old circumfer- ence was repeopled by the first of the Fatimite caliphs. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the second capital of the West was represented by a mosch, a college without students, twenty-five or thirty shops, and the huts of five hundred peasants, who, in their abject poverty, displayed the arrogance of the Punic senators. Even that paltry village was swept away by the Spaniards whom Charles the Fifth had stationed in the fortress of the Goletta. The ruins of Carthage have perished ; and the place might be unknown, if some broken arches of an aqueduct did not guide the footsteps of the inquisitive traveller. ^^^^ The Greeks were expelled, but the Arabians were not yet Final con- masters of the country. In the interior provinces, the Moors or Africa" a.d. Berbers,^'^^ so feeble under the first Caesars, so formidable to the ^8" This commander is styled by Nicephorus Bao-iAev? Sapa/tTji'cir, a vague though not improper definition of the caUph. Theophanes introduces the strange appella- tion of UpuiToa-vixfiovko';, which his interpreter Goar explains by Visir Azem. They may approach the truth, in assigning the active part to the minister, rather than the prince ; but they forgot that the Ommiades had only a kateb, or secretary, and that the office of Vizir was not revived or instituted till the 132nd year of the Hegira (d'Herbelot. p. 912). ^'^^ According to Solinus (1. 27 [Jeg. c. 30], p. 36, edit. Salmas.), the Carthage of Dido stood either 677 or 737 years : a various reading, which proceeds from the difference of Mss. or editions (Salmas. Plinian. Exercit. torn. i. p. 228). The former of these accounts, which gives 823 years before Christ, is more consistent with the well-weighed testimony of Velleius Paterculus ; but the latter is preferred by our chronologists (Marsham, Canon. Chron. p. 398) as more agreeable to the Hebrew and Tyrian annals. '^9 Leo African, fol. 71, verso; 72, recto. Marmol, torn ii. p. 445-447. Shaw, p. 80. 1^0 The history of the word Barbar may be classed under four periods, i. In the time of Homer, when the Greeks and Asiatics might probably use a common idiom, the imitative sound of Barbar was applied to the ruder tribes, whose pro- nunciation was most harsh, whose grammar was most defective. Kdpe? i3apPap6itiiovoi (Iliad ii. 867, with the Oxford scholiast Clarke's Annotation, and Henry Stephens's Greek Thesaurus, torn. i. p. 720). 2. From the time, at least, of Herodotus, it