Character and culture of the people.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 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.
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.
Christian literature in Africa.It was not till the Christian period that it became otherwise. In the development of Christianity Africa plays the very first part; if it arose in Syria, it was in and through Africa that it became the religion for the world. As the translation of the sacred books from the Hebrew language into the Greek, and that into the popular language of the most considerable Jewish community out of Judaea, gave to Judaism its position in the world, so in a similar way for the transference of Christianity from the serving East to the ruling West the translation of its confessional writings into the language of the West became of decisive importance; and this all the more, inasmuch as these books were translated, not into the language of the cultivated circles of the West, which early disappeared from common life and in the imperial age was everywhere a matter of scholastic attainment, but into the decomposed Latin already preparing the way for the structure of the Romance languages—the Latin of common intercourse at that time familiar to the great masses. If Christianity was by the destruction of the Jewish church-state released from its Jewish basis ([p. 229]), it became the religion of the world by the fact, that in the great world-empire it began to speak the universally current imperial language; and those nameless men, who since the second century Latinised the Christian writings, performed for this epoch just such a service, as at the present day, in the heightened measure required by the enlarged horizon of the nations, is carried out in the footsteps of Luther by the Bible Societies. And these men were in part Italians, but above all Africans.[307] In Africa to all appearance the knowledge of Greek, which is able to dispense with translations, was far more seldom to be met with than at least in Rome; and, on the other hand, the Oriental element, that preponderated particularly in the early stages of Christianity, here found a readier reception than in the other Latin-speaking lands of the West. Even as regards the polemic literature called especially into existence by the new faith, since the Roman church at this epoch belonged to the Greek circle ([p. 226]), Africa took the lead in the Latin tongue. The whole Christian authorship down to the end of this period is, so far as it is Latin, African; Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage, Arnobius from Sicca, Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius Felix, were, in spite of their classic Latin, Africans, and not less the already mentioned somewhat later Augustine. In Africa the growing church found its most zealous confessors and its most gifted defenders. For the literary conflict of the faith Africa furnished by far the most and the ablest combatants, whose special characteristics, now in eloquent discussion, now in witty ridicule of fables, now in vehement indignation, found a true and mighty field for their display in the onslaught on the old gods. A mind—intoxicated first by the whirl of a dissolute life, and then by the fiery enthusiasm of faith—such as utters itself in the Confessions of Augustine, has no parallel elsewhere in antiquity.
APPENDIX: ROMAN BRITAIN
(Chapter V. Vol. I. pp. 170–194)
Mommsen’s sketch of Roman Britain has often been called deficient and inaccurate. As a general judgment, this is wholly unjust. The sketch has real and distinct merits. When first issued in 1885, it marked a great advance towards a right conception of its subject. It differed conspicuously, and all for the better, from the other sketches of Roman Britain which were then current and accepted, Hübner’s papers since collected in his Römische Herrschaft in Westeuropa, Wright’s Celt, Roman, and Saxon, Scarth’s Roman Britain. To-day it is perhaps the best existing account of the conquest and military administration of the province, and it contains much which no one—least of all, our English archaeologists—can afford to neglect. On the other hand, it is undeniably not one of the best sections in the volume to which it belongs, and it treats some parts of its theme, notably the civil life and civilisation, very shortly. One may be pardoned for taking the occasion of its republication in English dress, to make a few additions and corrections which may interest English readers, while they fill some gaps and take note of some recent discoveries.
The accounts of the Claudian invasion and the early years of the conquest (pp. 172–9) are, in their broad outlines, beyond reasonable doubt. But details can perhaps be added or altered. The army which started in A.D. 43 in three corps (τριχῇ νεμηθέντες, Dio, 60, 20) may well have landed in the three harbours afterwards used by the Romans in Kent, Lymne, Dover, and Richborough—the last named being the principal port for passengers to and from Britain throughout the Roman period. The difficult river crossed shortly afterwards by Plautius may be the Medway near Rochester, where in after years the Roman road from the Kentish ports to London had its bridge. The subsequent course of the invading armies is not easy to trace. But it would seem that, when they had won London and Colchester, they advanced from this base-line in three separate corps to the conquest of the South and Midlands. The left wing, the Second Legion Augusta under Vespasian, overran the south as far (probably) as South Wales and Exeter (Suet. Vesp. 4; Tac. Agric. 13; Hist. iii. 44; tile of Legio ii. Aug. at Seaton, Archæological Journal, xlix. 180). The centre, the Fourteenth and Twentieth Legions, crossed the Midlands to Wroxeter and Chester (tile of Legio xx. at Whittlebury, Vict. Hist. of Northants, i. 215; inscriptions at Wroxeter and Chester). The right wing, the Ninth, moved up the east side of Britain to Lincoln (tile of Legio ix. at Hilly Wood, on the road towards Lincoln, Vict. Hist. of Northants, i. 214; inscriptions at Lincoln). These three lines of advance led direct to the positions of the fortresses where we find the legions presently posted. They agree also with the three main groups of Roman roads which radiate from London: (1) the south-west route to Silchester, and thence by branches to Winchester, Exeter, Bath, South Wales; (2) the Midland "Watling Street," by St. Albans to Wroxeter and Chester; (3) the eastern route to Colchester, Cambridge, and Castor near Peterborough, to Lincoln.[308]
In any case there can be little doubt that by A.D. 47 or 48—within four or five years of the first landing—the Roman troops had reached the basins of the Humber and the Severn, as Mommsen observes (p. 176). This much is plain from the fact that Ostorius, who came out in 47, had at once to deal with the Iceni of Norfolk, the Decangi of Flintshire, the Brigantes of Yorkshire, the Silures of Monmouthshire (Tac. Ann. xii. 31). But the difficult corruption of Tacitus (ibid.), cuncta castris antonam et Sabrinam fluvios cohibere parat, is probably to be emended (with Dr. H. Bradley, Academy, April and May 1883) cuncta cis Trisantonam, i.e. the Roman frontier at the moment was, roughly, Severn and Trent. This is preferable both to Mommsen’s suggestion (given above, p. 176 note) and to mine (Journ. Phil. xvii. 268). The older and more violent remedy, Avonam inter et Sabrinam, though revived in the text of the second edition of Furneaux’s Tacitus (1907), is pretty certainly wrong; indeed, it is not Latin.