Rome, the great mother, welcomed all to her bosom, and it seems that all were glad to come. Little by little the African townships became Latin or Roman municipalities. Roman citizenship became the ambition and the pride of their inhabitants. No higher honour could be inscribed on a tombstone than _Civitatem Romanam consecutus_. And the Roman religion helped the process of consolidation. Olympus was no close borough. There was always room for another deity. We know, in fact, that the Romans were ever ready to welcome a fresh cult. It was the political, not the religious attitude of the Christians which brought them within the reach of the law and under the displeasure of the Emperors. So the Berbers’ gods were Romanized like themselves. Baal Ammon became Saturnus Augustus. The open sanctuaries gave way to closed temples of classical design. Human sacrifice was abandoned. And the Berbers learnt to raise shrines to the Roman allegorical deities, Concord, Fortune, Peace, and Victory; above all to worship the existing order in the divine person of the Emperor. His personal character had nothing whatever to do with this. The infamous Caracalla was the object of as much veneration as the philosopher saint Marcus Aurelius. At the beginning of the third century Africa gave many of its sons to the purple. Macrinus, who attained it by the murder of Caracalla, was a native of the district of Cæsarea. His successor, Elagabalus, of execrated memory, was the son of a former commandant of the Third Legion. And the Gordians, representing as they did the noblest blood in Rome, the blood of the Gracchi and of Trajan, came to the throne from the proconsulate of Africa. Concerning the younger Gordian Gibbon has left us a memorable sentence, which at once exhibits the antithetical bias of his style, and a certain sly humour of which he was master. “His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were intended for use rather than for ostentation.[9] The Roman people acknowledged in the features of the younger Gordian the resemblance of Scipio Africanus, recollected with pleasure that his mother was the granddaughter of Antoninus Pius, and rested the public hope on those latent virtues which had hitherto, as they fondly imagined, lain concealed in the luxurious indolence of a private life.” Footnote 9: “By each of his concubines the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions, though less numerous, were by no means contemptible.”—Note to Gibbon.