turdays and Sundays he regularly opened a small
window, and gave audience to the crowd of suppliants who successively
flowed from every part of the Christian world. The eunuch of Theodosius
approached the window with respectful steps, proposed his questions
concerning the event of the civil war, and soon returned with a
favorable oracle, which animated the courage of the emperor by the
assurance of a bloody, but infallible victory. The accomplishment of
the prediction was forwarded by all the means that human prudence could
supply. The industry of the two master-generals, Stilicho and Timasius,
was directed to recruit the numbers, and to revive the discipline of
the Roman legions. The formidable troops of Barbarians marched under
the ensigns of their national chieftains. The Iberian, the Arab, and the
Goth, who gazed on each other with mutual astonishment, were enlisted in
the service of the same prince; and the renowned Alaric acquired,
in the school of Theodosius, the knowledge of the art of war, which he
afterwards so fatally exerted for the destruction of Rome.

The emperor of the West, or, to speak more properly, his general
Arbogastes, was instructed by the misconduct and misfortune of Maximus,
how dangerous it might prove to extend the line of defence against a
skilful antagonist, who was free to press, or to suspend, to contract,
or to multiply, his various methods of attack. Arbogastes fixed
his station on the confines of Italy; the troops of Theodosius were
permitted to occupy, without resistance, the provinces of Pannonia, as
far as the foot of the Julian Alps; and even the passes of the mountains
were negligently, or perhaps artfully, abandoned to the bold invader.
He descended from the hills, and beheld, with some astonishment, the
formidable camp of the Gauls and Germans, that covered with arms and
tents the open country which extends to the walls of Aquileia, and the
banks of the Frigidus, or Cold River. This narrow theatre of the war,
circumscribed by the Alps and the Adriatic, did not allow much room for
the operations of military skill; the spirit of Arbogastes would have
disdained a pardon; his guilt extinguished the hope of a negotiation;
and Theodosius was impatient to satisfy his glory and revenge, by the
chastisement of the assassins of Valentinian. Without weighing the
natural and artificial obstacles that opposed his efforts, the emperor
of the East immediately attacked the fortifications of his