515-526) mentions a religious madman on the Isle of Gorgona.
For such profane remarks, Rutilius and his accomplices are styled, by
his commentator, Barthius, rabiosi canes diaboli. Tillemont (Mem.
Eccles com. xii. p. 471) more calmly observes, that the unbelieving poet
praises where he means to censure.]

[Footnote 47: Orosius, l. vii. c. 36, p. 564. Augustin commends two of
these savage saints of the Isle of Goats, (epist. lxxxi. apud Tillemont,
Mem. Eccles. tom. xiii. p. 317, and Baronius, Annal Eccles. A.D. 398 No.
51.)]

[Footnote 48: Here the first book of the Gildonic war is terminated. The
rest of Claudian's poem has been lost; and we are ignorant how or where
the army made good their landing in Afica.]

Gildo was prepared to resist the invasion with all the forces of Africa.
By the liberality of his gifts and promises, he endeavored to secure the
doubtful allegiance of the Roman soldiers, whilst he attracted to
his standard the distant tribes of Gaetulia and Aethiopia. He proudly
reviewed an army of seventy thousand men, and boasted, with the rash
presumption which is the forerunner of disgrace, that his numerous
cavalry would trample under their horses' feet the troops of Mascezel,
and involve, in a cloud of burning sand, the natives of the cold regions
of Gaul and Germany. [49] But the Moor, who commanded the legions of
Honorius, was too well acquainted with the manners of his countrymen,
to entertain any serious apprehension of a naked and disorderly host of
Barbarians; whose left arm, instead of a shield, was protected only
by mantle; who were totally disarmed as soon as they had darted their
javelin from their right hand; and whose horses had never He fixed his
camp of five thousand veterans in the face of a superior enemy, and,
after the delay of three days, gave the signal of a general engagement.
[50] As Mascezel advanced before the front with fair offers of peace
and pardon, he encountered one of the foremost standard-bearers of the
Africans, and, on his refusal to yield, struck him on the arm with his
sword. The arm, and the standard, sunk under the weight of the blow;
and the imaginary act of submission was hastily repeated by all the
standards of the line. At this the disaffected cohorts proclaimed
the name of their lawful sovereign; the Barbarians, astonished by the
defection of their Roman allies, dispersed, according to their custom,
in tumultuary flight; and Mascezel obtained the of an easy, an