But this limited recognition of the Phoenician language did not long subsist. There is no document for the public use of Phoenician from the time after Tiberius, and it hardly survived the time of the first dynasty.[292] How and when the change set in we do not know; probably the government, perhaps Tiberius or Claudius, spoke the decisive word and accomplished the linguistic and national annexation of the African Phoenicians as far as it could be done by state authority. In private intercourse the Phoenician held its ground still for a long time in Africa, longer apparently than in the motherland; at the beginning of the third century ladies of genteel houses in Great Leptis spoke so little Latin or Greek, that there was no place for them in Roman society; even at the end of the fourth there was a reluctance to appoint clergymen in the environs of Hippo Regius (Bona), who could not make themselves intelligible in Punic to their countrymen; these termed themselves at that time still Canaanites, and Punic names and Punic phrases were still current. But the language was banished from the school[293] and even from written use, and had become a popular dialect; and even this probably only in the region of the old Phoenician civilisation, particularly the old Phoenician places on the coast that stood aloof from intercourse on a large scale.[294] When the Arabs came to Africa they found as language of the country doubtless that of the Berbers, but no longer that of the Poeni;[295] with the Carthagino-Roman civilisation the two foreign languages disappeared, while the old native one still lives in the present day. The civilised foreign dominions changed; the Berbers remained like the palm of the oasis and the sand of the desert. [Sidenote: The Latin language.] The heritage of the Phoenician language fell not to Greek, but to Latin. This was not involved in the natural development. In Caesar’s time the Latin and the Greek were alike in North Africa foreign languages, but as the coins of Leptis already show, the latter by far more diffused than the former; Latin was spoken then only by the officials, the soldiers, and the Italian merchants. It would have at that time been probably easier to introduce the Hellenising of Africa than the Latinising of it. But it was the converse that took place. Here the same will prevailed, which did not allow the Hellenic germs to spring up in Gaul, and which incorporated Greek Sicily into the domain of Latin speech; the same will, which drew the boundaries between the Latin West and the Greek East, assigned Africa to the former. [Sidenote: The Phoenician urban organisation.]