As waters symbolize “peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues,” the sea into which the mountain is cast, is a people already agitated by previous commotions. The ships and fish in the sea, must necessarily symbolize agents sustaining a relation to the Roman Sea, analogous to the relation of such to the literal sea. They are those who live upon, and are supported by, the people:—the rulers and the officers of state. The symbol of a burning mountain fitly represents the armed invaders under Genseric. In the year 429, with fifty thousand effective men he landed on the shores of Africa, established an independent government in that part of the Roman empire, and from thence, harassed the southern shores of Europe and the intermediate islands, by perpetual incursions. Says Gibbon:—“The Vandals, who, in twenty years, had penetrated from the Elbe to Mount Atlas, were united under the command of their warlike king; and he reigned with equal authority over the Alarici, who had passed within the term of human life, from the cold of Scythia, to the excessive heat of an African climate. “The Vandals and Alarici, who followed the successful standard of Genseric, had acquired a rich and fertile territory, which stretched along the coast from Tangiers to Tripoli; but their narrow limits were pressed and confined on either side by the sandy desert and the Mediterranean. The discovery and conquest of the black nations that might dwell beneath the torrid zone, could not tempt the rational ambition of Genseric; but he cast his eyes towards the sea; he resolved to create a new naval power, and his bold enterprise was executed with steady and active perseverance. The woods of Mount Atlas afforded an inexhaustible nursery of timber; his new subjects were skilled in the art of navigation and ship-building; he animated his daring Vandals to embrace a mode of warfare which would render every maritime country accessible to their arms; the Moors and Africans were allured by the hope of plunder; and, after an interval of six centuries, the fleet that issued from the port of Carthage again claimed the empire of the Mediterranean. The success of the Vandals, the conquest of Sicily, the sack of Palermo, and the frequent descents on the coast of Lucania, awakened and alarmed the mother of Valentinian, and the sister of Theodosius.”