Punic culture survived well into late antiquity. Carthage was the second-largest city in the west, and possibly in the empire, by the second or third century, AD. Many of those people were still Punic, and the language and culture survived--Augustine could claim quite proudly to have inherited Punic culture. Moreover, Carthage was not the only important city of the Punic world. Utica, the capital of the new province of Africa, had been a Carthaginian subject city that defected to the Romans. Both Leptis Minor and Leptis Magna went over to the Romans after a period of tributary subjugation by the Carthaginians, and both were specially privileged with Roman friendship and support--in the Principate Leptis Magna was refounded as a colony and provided the Severans for the imperial throne