audian, in a poem devoted to the praise of
Serena, has portrayed her excellences of mind and person as being of the
most attractive quality. To her devotion to her husband the modern
historian pays this tribute: "The arts of calumny might have been
successful, if the tender and vigilant Serena had not protected her
husband against his domestic foes, while he vanquished in the field the
enemies of the empire."

The daughter of Serena, whose name was Maria, was made the wife of
Honorius when that emperor was in his fourteenth year. Claudian wrote an
epithalamium and some fescennine verses for the occasion, after the
ancient manner; nothing else of this kind could ever have been quite so
ridiculously conventional, for, on the authority of Zosimus, we learn
that Maria died a virgin after she had been ten years a wife. The
debility of her husband's constitution rendered the continence, which
the ecclesiastic of that time so greatly admired, uncommonly easy.
Honorius sat on the Roman throne through a period of twenty-eight years,
with little more influence or effect upon the history of his time than
would have been exerted if his place had been filled by a wooden image.

In the meantime, those commotions had taken place in the interior of
Asia which were to result in the flooding and overthrowing of the Roman
Empire by hordes of migrating barbarians. The most formidable of these
were the Huns, a Mongol race which had roamed the steppes from time
immemorial. The Huns were the more terrible because of their extreme
ugliness. Their appearance was a fearful visitation for the women of the
civilized nations which they overran. These hardy and vicious savages
suddenly swarmed out from their own country, and, driving the Ostrogoths
before them, with devastating persistence rolled, a human wave, to the
westward. The Goths were between "the devil and the deep sea." But,
while the Huns were an irresistible force, the Romans were not an
immovable body. Steadily the Goths gained ground westward with the Huns
surging after them. Rome was doomed. The effeminating arts of
civilization prepared a prey for the necessities of virile barbarism. A
brave ruler like Theodosius, who was not of the enervated Roman race,
might stem the tide for a while; but the disintegration of the Empire
was as inevitable as is that of a pile of lumber when caught in the
flooding of a river.

In the year 402, Alaric the Goth for the first time broke into the
Wes