nobleman’s seat in the territory of Cirta there has recently been brought to light a private bath of the later imperial period equipped with princely magnificence, the mosaic pavement of which depicts how matters went on once at the castle; the palaces, the extensive hunting-park with the hounds and stags, the stables with the noble race-horses, occupy no doubt most of the space, but there is not wanting also the “scholar’s corner” (_filosofi locus_), and beside it the noble lady sitting under the palms. [Sidenote: Scholasticism.] But the black spot of the African literary character is just its scholasticism. It does not begin till late; before the time of Hadrian and of Pius the Latin literary world exhibits no African name of repute, and subsequently the Africans of note were throughout, in the first instance, schoolmasters, and came as such to be authors. Under those emperors the most celebrated teachers and scholars of the capital were native Africans, the rhetor Marcus Cornelius Fronto from Cirta, instructor of the princes at the court of Pius, and the philologue Gaius Sulpicius Apollinaris from Carthage. For that reason there prevailed in these circles sometimes the foolish purism that forced back the Latin into the old-fashioned paths of Ennius and of Cato, whereby Fronto and Apollinaris made their repute, sometimes an utter oblivion of the earnest austerity innate in Latin, and a frivolity producing a worse imitation of bad Greek models, such as reaches its culmination in the--in its time much admired--“Ass-romance” of that philosopher of Madaura. The language swarmed partly with scholastic reminiscences, partly with unclassical or newly coined words and phrases. Just as in the emperor Severus, an African of good family and himself a scholar and author, his tone of speech always betrayed the African, so the style of these Africans, even those who were clever and from the first trained in Latin, like the Carthaginian Tertullian, has regularly something strange and incongruous, with its diffuseness of petty detail, its minced sentences, its witty and fantastic conceits. There is a lack of both the graceful charm of the Greek and of the dignity of the Roman. Significantly we do not meet in the whole field of Africano-Latin authorship a single poet who deserves to be so much as named. [Sidenote: Christian literature in Africa.]