[Illustration:  FIG. 8.—­EMBLEM OF ANTIOCH.]

Behind it lay Egypt, with its irrigation and traffic canals kept in good order; with its monuments in far better preservation than now—­the pyramids, for example, being still coated with their smooth marble sides, and not to be mounted by the present steps, from which the marble has been torn; with its rich corn-lands, its convict mines and quarries, the Siberia of antiquity; with its string of towns along the Nile and its seven or, eight millions of inhabitants—­mostly speaking Coptic—­and full of strange superstitions and peculiar worship of animals.

Coming westward we reach the prosperous Cyrene, and then, by the rather out-of-the-world Bight of Tripoli, Africa proper, where once ruled mighty Carthage, the colony of Tyre, and where the Phoenician or Punic language still survived among the population of mixed Phoenicians and Berbers.  Here, too, are wide and luxuriant stretches of corn-land, upon which Rome depends only next, if next, to those of Alexandria.  Further west are the Berber tribes of Mauretania, governed by Rome but hardly yet fully assimilated into the Roman system.

[Illustration:  FIG. 9.—­EMBLEM OF ALEXANDRIA.]

In the Mediterranean Sea lie Crete, a place which had now become of little importance; Sicily, as much Greek as Roman, fertile in crops and possessed of many a splendid Greek temple and theatre; Sardinia, an unhealthy island infested by banditti, and employed as a sort of convict station, producing some amount of grain and minerals; and Corsica, which bore much the same character for savagery as it did in times comparatively recent, and which had little reputation for any product but its second-rate honey and its wax.  The Balearic Islands were chiefly noted for their excellence in the art of slinging for painters’ earth, and for breeding snails for the Roman table.

[Illustration:  FIG. 10.—­EMBLEM OF ROME.  From the Column of Antoninus at Rome.]

It remains to say that the feeling of local pride was very strong in the rival towns of the empire.  Each gloried in its distinguishing commerce and natural advantages, and the chosen emblems of the greater cities set forth their boasts with much artistic ingenuity.  Thus Antioch is symbolised by a female figure seated on a rock, crowned with a turreted diadem, and holding in her hand a bunch of ears of corn, while her foot is planted on the shoulder of a half-buried figure representing the river Orontes.  Alexandria, with her Horn of Plenty, her Egyptian fruits, and the representations of her elephants, asps, and panthers, as well as of her special deities, appears in relief upon a silver vessel found at Boscoreale near Pompeii and here reproduced.

Such in brief was the Roman Empire.  How all this empire was governed, what was meant by emperor, governor, taxation, and justice, is matter for other chapters.

CHAPTER IV