Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/141

 determined by a point of religion. The Vandals were odious in the eyes of the ecclesiastics of the East, Arian heretics who had gained the upper hand over an orthodox Christian population; and a fanatical bishop, indignant at the failure of the deliberations, hurried from his see in Asia Minor to the Imperial Court. There he represented to the Emperor that in a divine vision he had been ordered to reprimand him for being deterred by vain fears from his righteous purpose of upholding the Church. God had spoken to him in definite language, and said, "Tell the Emperor that I will be with him and will reduce Africa under his dominion." Justinian was convinced immutably, and made all haste with his preparations so that the expedition might be ready to start in the proximate summer (533).

The country which Justinian was now about to invade, a vast and fertile region sufficiently spacious to form a separate empire, has always within the historic period been the seat of a prosperous, though fluctuating civilization, yet never of indigenous growth. Successively Phoenician, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Mohammedan, and French, during the long tract of three thousand years, the numerous native population has invariably been a subsidiary and more or less disorderly element of the political entity. At one of the most picturesque moments of antiquity we are presented with the scene of Caius Marius sitting as an exile amid the ruins of Carthage. That incident occurred more than half a century after the destruction of the city (146 ) owing to the sub-*