A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

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542 Some Aspects of the Decline
VI.
An Example of the Moral Condition of the
Empire
Salvianus,
Providence oj
God, vii. 1 6.
Carthage
will serve
as an illustration.
Immoralities.
The statement
is
doubtless
excessive.
I will content myself with speaking of this city, the
queen and mother, as it were, of all the cities of Africa,
this city, the eternal rival of Rome, at first in arms, then
in courage, and finally in splendor and dignity! Carthage,
I say, the most formidable adversary of Rome, the Rome
as it were of Africa, which will suffice as an example and
as evidence, because she contains within herself everything
by which a state is
constituted and administered.
There are all the means which prepare for the civil professions,
there are the academies of liberal arts, there the
schools of the philosophers, there the gymnasia of languages
and manners.
There too are military forces and
the commanders of the soldiery, there the proconsular
office,
there a judge and permanent governor who rules
with the title of proconsul but with the power of a consul.
There are also all the official dignitaries who differ from
one another in name and rank, for every ward, for every
street, I may say,— procurators who govern every part
and division of so great a people.
I am content with this
city as an example for judging the rest; and we may readily
understand the character of the others, lacking as they
do careful police regulations, whereas the governors of
Carthage possess the utmost authority.
And here I almost repent of the promise I have just
made, to pass by all other excesses of the Africans and to
speak chiefly of their impurities and blasphemies. I see
a city overflowing with vices, I see a city seething with
every kind of wickedness, thronging with people, thronging
still more with iniquities, full of riches, but fuller of
sins, where men surpass one another in the vileness of