Thus North Africa was a valuable possession for the finances of the empire. Whether the Roman nation generally gained or lost more by the assimilation of North Africa, is less ascertained. The dislike which the Italian felt from of old towards the African did not change after Carthage had become a Roman great city, and all Africa spoke Latin; if Severus Antoninus combined in himself the vices of three nations, his savage cruelty was traced to his African father, and the ship captain of the fourth century, who thought that “Africa was a fine country but the Africans were not worthy of it, for they were cunning and faithless, and there might be some good people among them, but not many,” was at least not thinking of the bad Hannibal, but was speaking out the feeling of the great public at the time. So far as the influence of African elements may be recognised in the Roman literature of the imperial period, we meet with specially unpleasant leaves in a book generally far from pleasant. The new life, which bloomed for the Romans out of the ruins of the nations extirpated by them, was nowhere full and fresh and beautiful; even the two creations of Caesar, the Celtic land and North Africa--for Latin Africa was not much less his work than Latin Gaul--remained structures of ruins. But the toga suited, at any rate, the new-Roman of the Rhone and the Garonne better than the “Seminumidians and Semigaetulians.” Doubtless Carthage remained in the numbers of its population and in wealth not far behind Alexandria, and was indisputably the second city of the Latin half of the empire, next to Rome the most lively, perhaps also the most corrupt, city of the West, and the most important centre of Latin culture and literature. Augustine depicts with lively colours how many an honest youth from the province went to wreck there amid the dissolute doings of the circus, and how powerful was the impression produced on him--when, a student of seventeen years of age, he came from Madaura to Carthage--by the theatre with its love-pieces and with its tragedy. There was no lack in the African of diligence and talent; on the contrary, perhaps more value was set upon the Latin and along with it the Greek instruction, and on its aim of general culture, in Africa than anywhere else in the empire, and the school-system was highly developed. The philosopher Appuleius under Pius, the celebrated Christian author Augustine, both descended from good burgess-families--the former from Madaura, the latter from the neighbouring smaller place Thagaste--received their first training in the schools of their native towns; then Appuleius studied in Carthage, and finished his training in Athens and Rome; Augustine went from Thagaste first to Madaura, then likewise to Carthage; in this way the training of youth was completed in the better houses throughout. Juvenal advises the professor of rhetoric who would earn money to go to Gaul or, still better, to Africa, “the nurse of advocates.” At a