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 *jugating animosity of Rome, but about thirty years previously a decree for the colonization of the deserted site had passed the Senate, and one of the Gracchi had actually conducted a party of six thousand settlers to rebuild and re-people the Punic capital. Official sanction, however, was shortly withdrawn from the enterprise owing to a recrudescence of superstition, or rather, perhaps, to a shift of political power, and for nearly a century the district was abandoned to decay before an earnest effort was made to restore it to affluence and order. The actual rebuilding of Carthage was due to the initiative of Julius Caesar and the action of Augustus; and the resuscitated city rose to importance so rapidly that in the time of the elder Severus it was regarded as second only to Rome. A Proconsul, the only deputy of that rank in the Western Empire, governed the province in which it was situated, and was held to be a magistrate of superior consequence to the Vicar of Africa, under whom five lesser governors controlled the country,[1] with the exception of the westernmost district, which was in administrative conjunction with Spain. The seven provinces of Africa thus constituted extended for fifteen hundred miles in a straight line along the basin of the Mediterranean and included the modern divisions of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Southwards, the uncertain delimitations of the Atlas mountains