Upon the ruins of this rich and powerful city, which had so long and so obstinately disputed the supremacy of the masters of the world, had risen another that almost rivalled its predecessor in commercial importance and architectural splendor. Founded one hundred and one years after the triumph of Scipio, it yielded in prestige and luxury only to the great capitals of Italy and Egypt, and was justly regarded as one of the most valuable possessions of the Roman colonial empire. Its advantages of location, the agricultural wealth of the country, the settlement of many noble Italian families--fugitives from imperial oppression and barbarian violence--and the glorious example of former ages, soon raised the new metropolis to a position scarcely inferior to that of the old. Its edifices could vie with even the proudest monuments of the Eternal City; the wealth, intelligence, polished manners, and boundless excesses of its inhabitants made its name proverbial throughout antiquity. In the seventh century it divided with Alexandria the commerce of the Mediterranean, and was greatly its superior in rank, population, and power. The head of the civil magistracy of Africa, and the seat of a large military garrison, it almost monopolized the taste and refinement, the learning, the philosophy, and the jurisprudence, of the Western world. Universities with chairs of the liberal arts, academies which afforded instruction in every language and every science, flourished within its walls; its circus and its amphitheatre were crowded daily with the wit and beauty of the city, whose pleasure-loving society, unspeakably corrupt, had added to the dissolute habits inherited from Punic times the unnatural vices imported by patrician refugees and colonists from the orgies of decadent Rome. For perversity of disposition, for shameless effrontery, for perfidious disregard of faith and contempt of honor, and for brazen immodesty, the most debauched communities of the East and West, by universal consent, conferred upon the population of Carthage the unenviable distinction of unapproachable infamy. The Vandals had plundered its treasures and enslaved its people, but had spared its noble buildings, and exempted its walls from the destruction which had usually befallen those of other towns conquered by these barbarians. Such was the city which interposed a formidable and hitherto insuperable barrier to the enterprise of the Moslems; and whose transcendent influence has left its stamp upon the habits, the creeds, and the opinions of every subsequent age; to which ancient commerce was indebted for its development, and from which modern belief has derived some of the most popular of its dogmas; among them the doctrines of St. Augustine and the leading principles of patristic theology, that even now control ecclesiastical councils and prescribe the rules of Christian discipline.