. She sent across the
seas to Africa, to Genseric the Vandal, the cruel tyrant and persecutor.
He must come and be her champion, as Attila had been Honoria's. And he
came, with Vandals, Moors, naked Ausurians from the Atlas. The wretched
Romans, in their terror, tore Maximus in pieces; but it was too late.
Eudoxia met Genseric at the gates in royal robes and jewels. He stript
her of her jewels on the spot, and sacked Rome; and that was her reward.

This is the second sack. More dreadful far than the first--455 is its
date. Then it was that the statues, whose fragments are still found,
were hurled in vain on the barbarian assailants. Not merely gold and
jewels, but the art-treasures of Rome were carried off to the Vandal
fleet, and with them the golden table and the seven-branched candlestick
which Titus took from the Temple of Jerusalem.

How had these things escaped the Goths forty years before? We cannot
tell. Perhaps the Gothic sack, which only lasted five days, was less
complete than this one, which went on for fourteen days of unutterable
horrors. The plunderers were not this time sturdy honest Goths; not even
German slaves, mad to revenge themselves on their masters: they were
Moors, Ausurian black savages, and all the pirates and cut-throats of the
Mediterranean.

Sixty thousand prisoners were carried off to Carthage. All the statues
were wrecked on the voyage to Africa, and lost for ever.

And yet Rome did not die. She lingered on; her Emperor still calling
himself an Emperor, her senate a senate; feeding her lazy plebs, as best
she could, with the remnant of those revenues which former Emperors had
set aside for their support--their public bread, public pork, public oil,
public wine, public baths,--and leaving them to gamble and quarrel, and
listen to the lawyers in rags and rascality, and to rise and murder ruler
after ruler, benefactor after benefactor, out of base jealousy and fear
of any one less base than themselves. And so 'the smoke of her torment
went up continually.'

But if Rome would not die, still less would she repent; as it is
written--'The remnant of the people repented not of their deeds, but
gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven.'

As the century runs on, the confusion becomes more and more dreadful.
Anthemius, Olybrius, Orestes, and the other half-caste Romans with Greek
names who become quasi-emperors and get murdered; Ricimer the Sueve, the
king-m