Corsica and Sardinia were classed together as a province, not as parts of Italy. Corsica was for the most part a mountainous wilderness, in which Romans hunted the natives with dogs to sell them as slaves.5 Sardinia provided slaves, silver, copper, iron, and grain; it had a thousand miles of road and one excellent harbor, Carales (Cagliari). Sicily had been reduced to an almost purely agricultural province as one of the “frumentary supports” of Rome; its arable soil was largely taken up with latifundia devoted to cattle raising, and manned by slaves so poorly clothed and fed that they periodically revolted and escaped to form robber bands. The island had in Augustus’ days some 750,000 souls. (In 1930 it had 3,972,000.) Of its sixty-five cities the most flourishing were Catania, Syracuse, Tauromenium (Taormina), Messana, Agrigentum, and Panormus (Palermo). Syracuse and Tauromenium had magnificent Greek theaters, still in use today. Despite Verres’ depredations Syracuse was so full of impressive architecture, famous sculptures, and historic sites that professional guides prospered on the tourist trade,6 and Cicero considered it the finest city in the world. Most well-to-do urban families had farms or orchards in the suburbs, and the whole Sicilian countryside was fragrant with fruit trees and vineyards, as it is today.
All that Sicily lost through Roman domination Africa gained. It gradually replaced Sicily as an unwilling granary for Rome; but in return Roman soldiers, colonists, businessmen, and engineers made it blossom into a hardly credible affluence. Doubtless the new conquerors had found certain regions thriving when they came; between the mountains that frowned upon the Mediterranean, and the Atlas range that kept out the Sahara, ran a semitropical valley sufficiently watered by the Bagradas (Medjerda) River, and two months of rain, to repay the patient husbandry that Mago had taught and Masinissa had enforced. But Rome improved and expanded what she found. Her engineers built dams across the rivers that flowed down from the southern hills; they gathered the surplus water in reservoirs in the rainy season, and poured it into irrigation canals in the hot months when the streams ran dry.7 Rome asked no heavier taxes than native chiefs had levied, but her legion and fortifications gave better protection against nomad raiders from the mountains; mile by mile new soil was won from desert or savagery for cultivation and settlement. The valley produced so much olive oil that when in our seventh century the Arabs came, they were amazed to find that they could ride from Tripoli to Tangier without ever moving from the shade of olive trees.8 Towns and cities multiplied, architecture exalted them, and literature found new voice. The ruins of Roman forums, temples, aqueducts, and theaters on now arid wastes reveal the reach and wealth of Roman Africa. Those fields decayed and became dead sand not through a change in climate but through a change in government—from a state that gave economic security, order, and discipline to one that allowed chaos and negligence to ruin the roads, reservoirs, and canals.
At the head of this restored prosperity was the resurrected city of Carthage. After the battle of Actium Augustus took up the frustrated project of Caius Gracchus and Caesar and sent to Carthage as colonists some of the soldiers whose fidelity and victories he wished to reward with land. The geographical advantages of the site, the perfect harbor, the fertile Bagradaa delta, the excellent roads opened or reopened by Roman engineers, soon enabled Carthage to recapture from Utica the export and import trade of the region; within a century of its refounding it had become the largest city in the western provinces. Rich merchants and landowners built mansions on the historic Byrsa, or villas in the flowering suburbs, while peasants driven from the soil by the competition of latifundia joined prolétaires and slaves in slums whose fetid poverty would welcome the egalitarian gospel of Christianity. Houses rose to six or seven stories, public buildings gleamed with marble, and statuary of good Greek style abounded in the streets and squares. Temples were built again to the old Carthaginian gods, and Melkart enjoyed till our second century the sacrifice of living children.9 The people rivaled the Romans in their passion for luxuries, cosmetics, jewelry, dyed hair, chariot races, and gladiatorial games. Among the sights of the city were the great public baths presented by Marcus Aurelius. There were lecture halls, schools of rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, and law; Carthage ranked only after Athens and Alexandria as a university town. Here Apuleius and Tertullian came to study everything, and Saint Augustine marveled at the pranks and immorality of the students, whose favorite philanthropy was to break into a lecture room and dismiss both the professor and his class.10
Carthage was the capital of the province called “Africa,” now eastern Tunisia. South of it commerce bedecked the eastern coast with cities whose ancient wealth was reviving after twelve centuries when war struck them in our time: Hadrumetum (Sousse), Leptis Minor, Thapsus, and Tacapae (Gabes). Farther east on the Mediterranean lay a district named Tripolis from its federation of three cities: Oea (Tripoli), founded by the Phoenicians in 900 B.C.., Sabrata, and Leptis Magna (Lebda). In this last city the Emperor Septimius Severus was born (A.D. 146); he rewarded it with a basilica and municipal bath whose ruins astonish the traveler or warrior today. Paved roads busy with camel caravans connected these ports with the towns of the interior: Sufetula, now a tiny village with the remains of a great Roman temple; Thysdrus (El Djem), which had an amphitheater seating 60,000; and Thugga (Dougga), whose ruined theater attests, by its graceful Corinthian columns, the wealth and taste of its citizens.
North of Carthage was her ancient mother and implacable rival, Utica (Utique). We catch a hint of its Roman opulence when we learn that in 46 B.C.. 300 Roman bankers and wholesalers had branch offices there.11 Its territory reached northward to Hippo Diarrhytus, now Bizerte; thence a road led along the coast westward to Hippo Regius (Bone), soon to be Augustine’s episcopal see. South and inland lay Cirta (Constantine), capital of the province of Numidia. Westward lay Thamugadi (Timgad), almost as well preserved as Pompeii, with paved and colonnaded streets, covered drains, an elegant arch, a forum, senate house, basilica, temples, baths, theater, library, and many private homes. On the pavement of the forum is a checkerboard engraved with the words, Venari, lavari, ludere, ridere, hoc est vivere—“to hunt, bathe, play, and laugh, this is to live.”12 Thamugadi was founded about A.D. 117 by the Third Legion, sole guard of the African provinces. About 123 the legion took up more permanent headquarters a few miles to the west, and raised the city of Lambaesis (Lambèse). The soldiers married and settled there, and lived in their homes more than in the camp; but even their praetorium was a stately and ornate edifice, whose baths were as fine as any in Africa. Outside the camp they helped to build a capitol, temples, triumphal arches, and an amphitheater where struggle and death might mitigate the monotony of their peaceful lives.
That a single legion could protect all north Africa from the marauding tribes of the interior was made possible by a network of roads, military in purpose but commercial in result, binding Carthage with the Atlantic, and the Sahara with the Mediterranean. The main road went westward through Cirta to Caesarea, capital of Mauretania (Morocco). Here King Juba II taught civilization to the Mauri or Moors from whom the province took its ancient and modern names. Son of the Juba who had died at Thapsus, he had been taken as a child to grace Caesar’s triumph in Rome; he was spared, remained as a student, and became one of the most learned scholars of his time. Augustus made him client king of Mauretania and bade him spread among his people the classic culture he had so zealously acquired. He succeeded, being favored with a long reign of forty-eight years; his subjects marveled that a man could write books and yet rule so well. His son and heir was brought to Rome and starved to death by Caligula. Claudius annexed the kingdom and divided it into two provinces: Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana, named from its capital Tingis—our Tangier.
In these African cities there were many schools, open to the poor as well as to the rich. We hear of courses in stenography,13 and Juvenal calls Africa nutricula causidicorum—the nurse of barristers.14 It produced in this period one minor and one major author—Fronto and Apuleius; only in its Christian heyday would African literature lead the world. Lucius Apuleius was a strange and picturesque character, far more than Montaigne “undulant and diverse.” Born at Madaura of high family (A.D. 124), he studied there, at Carthage, and in Athens, spent a large inheritance recklessly, wandered from city to city and from faith to faith, had himself initiated into various religious mysteries, played with magic, wrote many works on subjects ranging from theology to tooth powder, lectured at Rome and elsewhere on philosophy and religion, returned to Africa, and married at Tripoli a lady considerably richer than himself in both purse and years. Her friends and heirs-apparent sued to annul the marriage, charging that he had persuaded the widow by magic arts; he defended himself before the court in an Apologia that has come down to us in refurbished form. He won his case and bride, but the people persisted in believing him a magician, and their pagan posterity sought to belittle Christ by recounting the miracles of Apuleius. He spent the remainder of his days at Madaura and Carthage, practicing law and medicine, letters and rhetoric. Most of his writings were on scientific and philosophical subjects; his native city raised a monument to him labeled Philosophus Platonicus; and he would be chagrined, if he could return, to find himself remembered only for his Golden Ass.
It is a work akin to the Satyricon of Petronius and even more bizarre. Originally entitled Metamorphoseon Libri XI—Eleven Books of Transformations—it expanded fantastically a story that Lucius of Patras had told of a man changed into an ass. It is a loose concatenation of adventures, descriptions, and extraneous episodes, seasoned with magic, horror, ribaldry, and deferred piety. The Lucius of the tale tells how he wandered into Thessaly, amused himself with various maidens, and sensed everywhere around him an atmosphere of sorcery.
As soon as night was past and a new day began to spring, I fortuned to awake, and rose out of my bed as half amazed, and indeed desirous to know and see some strange and marvelous things. . . . Neither was there anything which I saw that I did believe to be the same which it was indeed, but everything seemed to me transformed into other shapes by the wicked power of enchantment, in so much that I thought the stones against which I might stumble were indurate and turned from men into that figure, and that the birds which I heard chirping, and the trees and the running waters were changed into such feathers and leaves and fountains. And further I thought that the statues and images would by and by move, and that the walls would talk, and the kine and other brute beasts would speak and tell strange news, and that immediately I should hear some oracle from heaven and from the ray of the sun.15
Ready now for any adventure, Lucius rubs himself with a magic ointment, meanwhile mightily wishing to be changed into a bird; but as he rubs he becomes a perfect ass. Thenceforth the story records the tribulations of an ass with “the sense and understanding of a man.” His single consolation lies in his “long ears, whereby I might hear all things that were even afar off.” He will be restored to human shape, he is told, if he can find and eat a rose. He achieves this consummation after a long Asineid of vicissitudes. Disenamored of life, he turns first to philosophy, then to religion, and composes a prayer of thanksgiving to Isis astonishingly like a Christian apostrophe to the Mother of God.16 He shaves his head, is received into the third order of Isiac initiates, and paves a road back to earth by revealing a dream in which Osiris, “greatest of the gods,” bids him go home and practice law.
Few books embrace so much nonsense, but fewer still have phrased it so pleasantly. Apuleius tries every manner of style and manages each successfully; he loves most a rich and fanciful verbiage ornate with alliteration and assonance, picturesque slang and archaic speech, sentimental diminutives, rhythmic and sometimes poetic prose. An Oriental warmth of coloring accompanies here an Oriental mysticism and sensuality. Perhaps Apuleius wished to suggest, from the background of his experience, that sensual indulgence is an intoxicating ferment which changes us into beasts, and that we can become human again only through the rose of wisdom and piety. He is at his best in the incidental stories caught by his powerful and perambulating ears; so an old woman comforts a kidnaped maiden by recounting the romance of Cupid and Psyche—17 how the son of Venus fell in love with a pretty maid, gave her every joy but that of seeing him, aroused his mother to cruel jealousy, and came to a happy ending in the skies. No artist’s brush in many an effort, has bettered the hoar shrew’s tongue in telling the ancient tale.