Esto perpetua

by Hilaire Belloc

|The Great Arch|

It is all alone. The wind blows through it off the mountains. Every winter the frost opens some new little crack, and every generation or so a stone falls. But in two thousand years not so much has been ruined by time, but that the impression of Rome remains: its height, its absoluteness, and its strength. And this example is but one of very many that a man might choose as he wandered up and down the high steppes and through the gorges of the hills.

|The Berbers|

As he so wanders, he is taken with a strong desire to grasp the whole place at one view as it stood just before the barbarians came, and to see what the Vandals saw: to look up the valley from the rock of Cirta with the temples on the edge of either precipice and to see the towns re-arise. There are men who have felt this desire in Italy, but in Africa it is a much stronger desire, and since Africa is strange and very empty, perhaps by watching long enough at night that desire might be fulfilled.

Rome not only governed, but also made, Africa. The foundations on which the Maghreb is laid, and to which it must return, are Roman; the Berber race was no conscious part of us. I have said that it did not know itself until the Romans came, and when they came the Berbers slipped into the Roman unity more slowly and with more political friction, (but with less rebellion and therefore less proof of ill-ease,) than did the Gauls. There is no more symbolic picture in the history of the Maghreb than the picture of Scipio clothing in the Roman dress that Massinissa, his ally, the king of the nomads who rode without stirrups or bridle.

|The Arabs|

The Berbers were not destined to preserve their Roman dignity. Something barbaric in them, something of the boundaries, of the marches, planted in these men (though they were, and still are, of our own kind) a genius for revolt. Let it be noted that in Africa every heresy arose. That Africa admitted the Vandals by treason, and that even when Africa accepted Islam, sect upon sect divided its history. Africa has always stood to the rest of the Empire as a sort of ne’er-do-weel: a younger son perpetually asking for adventure and rejecting discipline. To this the Roman horror of the sea lent a peculiar aid. Like Britain, Africa was cut off from the mainland. Like Britain, Africa was destined in the disruption of the Empire to lose the Roman idiom and the traditions of orderly life; but with this difference, that Britain was reconquered by the religion and the manner of Europe within three generations of its loss: Africa was finally invaded, not by dull barbarians staring at the City and humble before her name, but by a brilliant cavalcade which galloped, driven forward by high convictions. The Arabs came in the seventh century, like a sort of youth contemptuous of the declining head of Rome. Barbary, then, I repeat, was swept into the Arabian language and religion in one cavalry charge, and that language and religion not only became immediately the masters of its people, but had twelve hundred years in which to take root and make a soil.

For about five hundred years, from a little after the birth of Our Lord to the close of the sixth century, our culture had been universal among the Berbers. In the last three centuries the Faith was dominant. But rebellion was in them, and when the Arabs came the whole edifice suddenly crumbled.

Asia, which had first sailed in by sea and had been destroyed, or rather obliterated, when Carthage fell, came in now from the desert; Asia was like an enemy who is driven out of one vantage, and then, after a breathing-space, makes entry by another. But in such a struggle the periods of success and failure are longer than those of sieges, and even than the lives of kingdoms. The Maghreb, our test of sovereignty, had admitted the Phœnician for some six or seven hundred years. It had been thoroughly welded into Rome for five hundred. The Vandals came, and did no more than any other wandering tribe: they stirred the final anarchy a little; they were at once absorbed. But the tenacity by which Gaul, Britain, Spain and the Rhine were to slough off the memories of decay and to attain their own civilisation again after the repose of the Dark Ages—that tenacity was not in the nature of Barbary.