wards of the city were named from the various deities whose altars they contained. West of the Kothon was the temple of Apollo, and adjoining it the shrine of Melcareth, or Hercules--whose precincts no woman was suffered to enter, and whose priests, assuming the vow of chastity, went barefoot and with shaven crowns--stood side by side with the fragrant gardens within whose mystic groves were celebrated, amidst indescribable orgies, the licentious rites of the Phœnician Astarte. Nearer the sea was the grand temple of the African Baal, the Moloch of the Hebrews, surrounded by a labyrinth and covered with three concentric domes, which, open above like that of the Pantheon at Rome, permitted the rays of the sun at high meridian to descend upon the brazen image of the god. The other edifices of the African capital were, in richness and splendor, eminently worthy of its temples and its citadel. The vast commerce of Carthage placed at its command the resources of all antiquity. No labor or expense was spared in architectural decoration. On the façade of its theatre, which rose for seven stories in tiers of graceful arches, were sculptured the forms of animals, the effigies of famous artisans, the figures of military commanders, and symbolical representations of the elements, the seasons, and the winds. The circus, inferior in extent only to that of Rome, was supported by fluted columns of such enormous size that twelve men could sit with ease upon the edge of one of their capitals towering a hundred feet above the arena. In the principal square, the reservoir, fed by the great aqueduct, was surrounded by balustrades and arches. All of these public works were of white marble, which glittered like crystal under the rays of a southern sun. The taste which designed them was the result of three thousand years of civilization. Every nation of the ancient world had contributed its share to their symmetry, their value, their magnificence. The beauty of the material was enhanced a thousand-fold by the incomparable elegance of the sculpture and the ornamentation. The Megara, a suburb of Carthage, contained the country-seats and palaces of the nobility, some of them built, like the houses of Venice, upon piles and arches in the sea. It was an immense park seamed with canals and rivulets, whose waters were conveyed by conduits from the mountains sixty miles away. The reservoirs of the Megara, so extensive that they now constitute an Arab village, were constructed in the same substantial manner as the cisterns of the Byrsa. On a promontory above them was the necropolis, where the ashes of the dead were deposited in countless niches hewn in the living rock.