e Christian missionaries, without approaching
the person or the palace of the monarch, successfully labored in the
propagation of the gospel. The pastoral tribes, who were ignorant of the
distinction of landed property, must have disregarded the use, as well
as the abuse, of civil jurisprudence; and the skill of an eloquent
lawyer could excite only their contempt or their abhorrence. The
perpetual intercourse of the Huns and the Goths had communicated the
familiar knowledge of the two national dialects; and the Barbarians were
ambitious of conversing in Latin, the military idiom even of the Eastern
empire. But they disdained the language and the sciences of the
Greeks; and the vain sophist, or grave philosopher, who had enjoyed
the flattering applause of the schools, was mortified to find that his
robust servant was a captive of more value and importance than himself.
The mechanic arts were encouraged and esteemed, as they tended to
satisfy the wants of the Huns. An architect in the service of Onegesius,
one of the favorites of Attila, was employed to construct a bath; but
this work was a rare example of private luxury; and the trades of the
smith, the carpenter, the armorer, were much more adapted to supply a
wandering people with the useful instruments of peace and war. But the
merit of the physician was received with universal favor and respect:
the Barbarians, who despised death, might be apprehensive of disease;
and the haughty conqueror trembled in the presence of a captive, to whom
he ascribed, perhaps, an imaginary power of prolonging or preserving his
life. The Huns might be provoked to insult the misery of their slaves,
over whom they exercised a despotic command; but their manners were
not susceptible of a refined system of oppression; and the efforts of
courage and diligence were often recompensed by the gift of freedom. The
historian Priscus, whose embassy is a source of curious instruction,
was accosted in the camp of Attila by a stranger, who saluted him in the
Greek language, but whose dress and figure displayed the appearance of a
wealthy Scythian. In the siege of Viminiacum, he had lost, according
to his own account, his fortune and liberty; he became the slave
of Onegesius; but his faithful services, against the Romans and the
Acatzires, had gradually raised him to the rank of the native Huns; to
whom he was attached by the domestic pledges of a new wife and several
children. The spoils of war had resto