Read "The Greatest Story in the World, Period 2" by Horace G. Hutchinson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
We left the Vandals in 450 established in possession of all the / African shore that had belonged to the Western Empire. The place of / chief importance that fell into their hands was Carthage, that city / from which so much trouble had come to Rome several centuries before. / And just as had happened before, so it happened again now. The / Carthaginian, descendants of those famous sea-rovers, the / Phœnicians, had made Carthage, with its fine harbour, the / headquarters of a fleet which went raiding and marauding all over the / Mediterranean Sea. So too, now, the king of the Vandals assembled a / great fleet which acted in just the same piratical way. Its first / act was to defeat, so completely as practically to destroy it, the / fleet of the Western Empire, and thereafter it became the terror of / the Mediterranean, and its act of final and most unbearable insolence / was when it came into the Tiber and the Vandals attacked and sacked / Rome itself. This was in 455.
It is only a few years before, that we heard of the Goths "sacking" / Rome. We may begin to ask ourselves what exactly is meant by this / "sacking"; for we may wonder that there was very much left, after a / while, to sack.