nd
eight comedies, which he had translated from Menander, and could not
survive an accident which must naturally afflict him in a sensible manner;
but this incident is not very well founded. Be this as it may, he died in
the year of Rome 594, under the consulship of Cneius Cornelius Dolabella,
and M. Fulvius, at the age of thirty-five years, and consequently he was
born anno 560.

It must yet be confessed, notwithstanding all we have said, that there
ever was a great scarcity of learned men in Carthage, since it hardly
furnished three or four writers of reputation in upwards of seven hundred
years. Although the Carthaginians held a correspondence with Greece and
the most civilized nations, yet this did not excite them to borrow their
learning, as being foreign to their views of trade and commerce.
Eloquence, poetry, history, seem to have been little known among them. A
Carthaginian philosopher was considered as a sort of prodigy by the
learned. What then would an astronomer or a geometrician have been
thought? I know not in what esteem physic, which is so highly useful to
life, was held at Carthage; or jurisprudence, so necessary to society.

As works of wit were generally had in so much disregard, the education of
youth must necessarily have been very imperfect and unpolished. In
Carthage, the study and knowledge of youth were for the most part confined
to writing, arithmetic, book-keeping, and the buying and selling goods; in
a word, to whatever related to traffic. But polite learning, history, and
philosophy, were in little repute among them. These were, in later years,
even prohibited by the laws, which expressly forbade any Carthaginian to
learn the Greek tongue, lest it might qualify them for carrying on a
dangerous correspondence with the enemy, either by letter or word of
mouth.(559)

Now what could be expected from such a cast of mind? Accordingly there was
never seen among them that elegance of behaviour, that ease and
complacency of manners, and those sentiments of virtue, which are
generally the fruits of a liberal education in all civilized nations. The
small number of great men which this nation has produced, must therefore
have owed their merit to the felicity of their genius, to the singularity
of their talents, and a long experience, without any great assistance from
cultivation and instruction. Hence it was, that the merit of the greatest
men of Carthage was sullied by great failings, low vices, and