victory. In 260 B.C., when consul in command of the land forces in Sicily, he was appointed to supersede his colleague Cn. Cornelius Scipio Asina, commander of the fleet, who had been captured in the harbour of Lipara. Recognizing that the only chance of victory lay in fighting under conditions as similar as possible to those of a land engagement, he invented a system of grappling irons (corvi) and boarding bridges, and gained a brilliant victory over the Carthaginian fleet off Mylae on the north coast of Sicily. He was accorded a triumph and the distinction of being accompanied, when walking in the streets during the evening, by a torchbearer and a flute-player. A memorial column (columna rostrata), adorned with the beaks of the captured ships, was set up in honour of his victory. The inscription upon it (see Latin Language, section 3, “The Language as Recorded”) has been preserved in a restored form in pseudo-archaic language, ascribed to the reign of Claudius.
See Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, i. No. 195; Polybius i. 22; Diod. Sic. xvii. 44; Frontinus, Strat. ii. 3; Florus ii. 2; Cicero, De senectute, 13; Silius Italicus vi. 667; and Punic Wars.
DUISBURG, a town of Germany in the kingdom of Prussia, 15 m. by rail N. from Düsseldorf, between the Rhine and the Ruhr, with which rivers it communicates by a canal. It is an important railway centre. Pop. (1885) 47,519; (1900) 92,729; (1905), including many outlying townships then recently incorporated, 191,551. It has six Roman Catholic and six Protestant churches, among the latter the fine Gothic Salvatorkirche, of the 15th century. It is well furnished with schools, which include a school of machinery. Of modern erections, the concert hall, the law courts and a memorial fountain to the cartographer Gerhard Kremer (Mercator) are worthy of mention. There are important foundries, rolling mills for copper, steel and brass plates, chemical works, saw-milling, shipbuilding, tobacco, cotton, sugar, soap and other manufactures.
Duisburg was known to the Romans as Castrum Deutonis, and mentioned under the Frankish kings as Dispargum. In the 12th century it attained the rank of an imperial free town, but on being mortgaged in 1290 to Cleves it lost its privileges. At the beginning of the 17th century it was transferred to Brandenburg, and during the Thirty Years’ War was alternately occupied by the Spaniards and the Dutch. In 1655 the elector Frederick William of Brandenburg founded here a Protestant university, which flourished until 1802.
DUK-DUK, a secret society of New Britain or New Pomerania, Bismarck Archipelago, in the South Pacific. The society has religious and political as well as social objects. It represents a rough sort of law and order through its presiding spirit Duk-Duk, a mysterious figure dressed in leaves to its waist, with a helmet like a gigantic candle-extinguisher made of network. Upon this figure women and children are forbidden to look. Women, who are entitled in New Britain to their own earnings and work harder than men, are the special victims of Duk-Duk, who levies blackmail upon them if they are about during its visits. These are generally timed to coincide with the hours at which the women are out in the fields and therefore cannot help seeing the figure. Justice is executed, fines extorted, taboos, feasts, taxes and all tribal matters are arranged by the Duk-Duk members, who wear hideous masks or chalk their faces. In carrying out punishments they are allowed to burn houses and even kill people. Only males can belong to Duk-Duk, the entrance fees of which vary from 50 to 100 fathoms of dewarra (small cowrie shells strung on strips of cane). The society has its secret signs and ritual, and festivals at which the presence of a stranger would mean his death. Duk-Duk only appears with the full moon. The society is now much discredited and is fast dying out.
See “Duk-Duk and other Customs or Forms of Expression of the Melanesian’s Intellectual Life,” by Graf von Pfeil (Journ. of Anthrop. Instit. vol. 27, p. 181).
DUKE (corresponding to Fr. duc, Ital. duca, Ger. Herzog), the title of one of the highest orders of the European nobility, and of some minor sovereign princes. The word “duke,” which is derived from the Lat. dux, a leader, or general, through the Fr. duc (O. Fr. dusc, ducs, dus), originally signified a leader, and more especially a military chief, and in this latter sense was the equivalent of the A.S. heretoga (here, an army, and teon, from togen, to draw; Ger. ziehen, zog; Goth, tiuhan; Lat. ducere) and the old Ger. herizog. In this general sense the word survived in English literature until the 17th century, but is now obsolete.
The origin of modern dukes is twofold. The dux first appears in the Roman empire under the emperor Hadrian, and by the time of the Gordians has already a recognized place in the official hierarchy. He was the general appointed to the command of a particular expedition and his functions were purely military. In the 4th century, after the separation of the civil and military administrations, there was a duke in command of the troops quartered in each of the frontier provinces of the empire, e.g. the dux Britanniarum. The number of dukes continually increased, and in the 6th and 7th centuries there were duces at Rome, Naples, Rimini, Venice and Perugia. Gradually, too, they became charged with civil as well as military functions, and even exercised considerable authority in ecclesiastical administration. Under the Byzantine emperors they were the representatives in all causes of the central power. The Roman title of duke was less dignified than that of count (comes, companion) which implied an honourable personal relation to the emperor (see Count). Both titles were borrowed by the Merovingian kings for the administrative machinery of the Frank empire, and under them the functions of the duke remained substantially unaltered. He was a great civil and military official, charged to watch, in the interests of the crown, over groups of several comitatus, or countships, especially in the border provinces. The sphere of the dukes was never rigidly fixed, and their commission was sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary. Under the Carolingians the functions of the dukes remained substantially the same; but with the decay of the royal power in the 10th century, both dukes and counts gained in local authority; the number of dukes became for the time fixed, and finally title and office were made hereditary, the relation to the crown being reduced to that of more or less shadowy vassalage. (See Feudalism.)
Side by side with these purely official dukedoms, however, there had continued to exist, or had sprung up, either independently or in more or less of subjection to the Frank rulers, national dukedoms, such as those of the Alemanni, the Aquitanians, and, later, of the Bavarians and Thuringians. These were developed from the early Teutonic custom by which the herizog was elected by the nation as leader for a particular campaign, as in the case of the heretogas who had led the first Saxon invaders into Britain. Tacitus says of the ancient Germans reges ex nobilitate, duces ex virtute sumunt; i.e. they elected their dukes for their warlike prowess only, and as purely military chiefs, whereas their kings were chosen from a royal family of divine descent. Sometimes the dukes so chosen succeeded in making their power permanent without taking the style of king. To this national category belong, besides the great German dukedoms, the dukes of Normandy, and the Lombard dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, who traced their origin, not to an administrative office, but to the leadership of Teutonic war bands. With the development of the feudal system the distinction between the official and the national dukedoms was more and more obliterated. By the 13th and 14th centuries the title had become purely territorial, and implied no necessary overlordship over counts and other nobles, who existed side by side with the dukes as tenants-in-chief of the crown. From this time the significance of the ducal title varies widely in different countries. Whenever the crown got the better of the feudal spirit of independence, as in France or Naples, it sank from being a sovereign title to a mere social distinction, implying no political power, and not necessarily any territorial influence. In northern Italy and in Germany, on the other hand, where the crown had proved too weak to combat the forces of disruption, it came ultimately to imply independent sovereignty.
The abolition of the Holy Empire in 1806 removed even the shadow of vassalage from the German reigning dukes, who retain
