We said above that, from its geographical position, the Peninsula would necessarily be the final-halting-place in ancient times of all the masters of the Mediterranean as they pushed westward. There we should find their farthest outposts. Thus in Spain we have, at first dimly seen, successive colonies of Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks. There it was that Carthaginians and Romans met to dispute the supremacy of the Mediterranean and of the civilized world. When, after a long occupation, during which it Latinized Spain more completely than any other country except Italy, the Roman Empire fell, successive waves of barbarian destroyers swept across the land, Sueves, Alans, Vandals, Visigoths, in wild confusion and internecine strife, wrecked the civilization which they could neither appreciate nor understand. The last of these races, the Visigoths, who ruled the longest, strove hard to found an empire from 450 to 710, but without success. The real power which held society together then, and which wrought what little order and law still existed, was the Church, and not the State. The Councils of the Church were the true legislative assemblies, and the real representatives of the people in those times. Yet, with all the power of the Church to uphold it, the Visigothic Empire remained so weak that it fell at the first shock of the Mohammedan Arabs. The Moors or Arabs landed in Spain in the year 711. In ten years they had conquered all of the Peninsula that they cared to hold; in eleven years more, 732, they had been defeated at Poictiers by Charles Martel, and had withdrawn for ever from France, except from the district of Narbonne. This rich province they held for many years, and it would seem to them to be more than an equivalent for the bare and humid mountains of Galicia and the Asturias, or the higher Pyrenees, which alone in the Peninsula were exempt from their sway. The Arabs and the Moors of Barbary are the last great race that has occupied Spain. Jews and a few Gipsies are the only peoples that have entered since. A few remnants of Berber tribes, isolated from their countrymen by the rapid advance of the Christian army in the tenth and eleventh centuries, like the Maragatos of Astorga, have remained in North-Western Spain, and doubtful remains of other peoples are found here and there, but none of these are in sufficient numbers to influence the nation as a whole. No country was more completely Romanized than Spain. In fact, after the Augustan age we might almost say that the best Latin writers were Spaniards born; Seneca, Quintilian, Lucian, and Martial were all natives of Spain. Hosius, the champion of Latin Christianity in the early part of the fourth century, was a Spaniard. The names of many of the towns are still Roman. Yet the Arabs have left almost a deeper mark upon the toponymy of the country. Look at the map of Spain, and we see, even up to the Pyrenees, how many Arabic names