nobili Romani e i Gotti; and
afterward, i Romani suggirono e i Gotti lasciarono Carthagine. (Leo
African. for. 72, recto) I know not from what Arabic writer the African
derived his Goths; but the fact, though new, is so interesting and so
probable, that I will accept it on the slightest authority.]

The weight of the confederate navy broke the chain that guarded the
entrance of the harbour; the Arabs retired to Cairoan, or Tripoli; the
Christians landed; the citizens hailed the ensign of the cross, and
the winter was idly wasted in the dream of victory or deliverance. But
Africa was irrecoverably lost: the zeal and resentment of the commander
of the faithful[159] prepared in the ensuing spring a more numerous
armament by sea and land; and the patrician in his turn was compelled
to evacuate the post and fortifications of Carthage. A second battle
was fought in the neighbourhood of Utica; and the Greeks and Goths were
again defeated; and their timely embarkation saved them from the sword
of Hassan, who had invested the slight and insufficient rampart of their
camp. Whatever yet remained of Carthage was delivered to the flames, and
the colony of Dido[160] and Cesar lay desolate above two hundred years,
till a part, perhaps a twentieth, of the old circumference was repeopled
by the first of the Fatimite caliphs. In the beginning of the sixteenth
century, the second capital of the West was represented by a mosque, a
college without students, twenty-five or thirty shops, and the huts
of five hundred peasants, who, in their abject poverty, displayed the
arrogance of the Punic senators. Even that paltry village was swept away
by the Spaniards whom Charles the Fifth had stationed in the fortress of
the Goletta. The ruins of Carthage have perished; and the place might be
unknown if some broken arches of an aqueduct did not guide the footsteps
of the inquisitive traveller.[161]

[A. D. 698-709.] The Greeks were expelled, but the Arabians were not
yet masters of the country. In the interior provinces the Moors or
Berbers,[162] so feeble under the first Cesars, so formidable to the
Byzantine princes, maintained a disorderly resistance to the religion
and power of the successors of Mahomet. Under the standard of their
queen Cahina, the independent tribes acquired some degree of union and
discipline; and as the Moors respected in their females the character of
a prophetess, they attacked the invaders with an enthusiasm similar to
th