On the first day of June 411, at Carthage, the resplendent imperial metropolis of all Africa – second only to Rome as the great city of empire in the West – two bitterly hostile groups of Christians met in a confrontation that was intended finally to settle the differences between them. As if to heighten the sense of occasion, the First of June was also a traditional day of midsummer festivity. If this were not enough, the city had also experienced the upheavals created by the flotsam and jetsam of refugees who had fled across the sea to Africa to escape Alaric's armed incursions, driven by the panic caused by the “barbarian” plundering of Rome and Italy. The great interest stoked by the heat of controversy meant that the only public venue large enough to contain the numbers on either side were the monumental Gargilian Baths, the Thermae Gargilianae, in the center of the city. The baths had been selected by the government not just to provide a place sufficiently large for the meeting, but also to furnish a public venue equal to the grandeur of the occasion. Often, as with debates between sectarian factions in the past in Africa, the town baths were the only structures large enough to provide a numerous and interested crowd with reasonable conditions of shade and acoustics. The atmosphere in such baths might be imagined as a humid hothouse that was hardly conducive to reasonable and rational debate. But in fact the rooms of the great Gargilian Baths in which the bishops congregated in 411 were – so we are assured – cool, bright, and spacious. The reason was that the bishops and the government officials met not in the thermae proper, but in the secretarium, a large general-purpose building that was attached to the baths as a place of public assembly. From the late 390s, it had been one of the principal aims of the Catholic Church to compel the dissidents to a combined meeting of both sides. Seeing nothing to gain from such a common meeting, the dissidents had consistently rejected the self-interested overtures from their sectarian enemies. But now it was happening, under compulsion.