solutely without an army to give her strongest cities a
chance of resisting the desolation of Attila. Rome was without a force
raised to save it from the pitiless robbery of Genseric. Without escort,
and defended only by his spiritual character, Leo went forth to appeal
before Attila for mercy to a heathen Mongol. There is no record of what
passed at that interview. Only the result is known. The conqueror, who had
swept with remorseless cruelty the whole country from the Euxine to the
Adriatic Sea, who was now bent upon the seizure of Italy itself, and in his
course had just destroyed Aquileia, was at Mantua marching upon Rome. His
intention was proclaimed to crown all his acts of destruction with that of
Rome. This was the dowry which he proposed to take for the hand of the last
great emperor's granddaughter, proffered to him by the hapless Honoria
herself. At the word of Leo the Scourge of God gave up his prey: he turned
back from Italy, and relinquished Rome, and Leo returned to his seat. In
the course of the next three years he confirmed, at the eastern emperor's
repeated request, the doctrinal decrees of the great Council; but he
humbled likewise the arrogance of Anatolius, and not all the loyalty of
Marcian, not all the devotion of the empress and saint Pulcheria, could
induce him to exalt the bishop of the eastern capital at the expense of the
Petrine hierarchy. But during those same three years he saw, in Rome
itself, Honoria's brother, the grandson of Theodosius, destroy his own
throne, and thereupon the murderer of an emperor compel his widow to
accept him in her husband's place, in the first days of her sorrow. He
saw, further, that daughter of Theodosius and Eudoxia, when she learnt that
the usurper of her husband's throne was likewise his murderer, call in the
Vandal from Carthage to avenge her double dishonour. This was the Rome
which awaited, trembling and undefended, the most profligate of armies, led
by the most cruel of persecutors. Once more St. Leo, stripped of all human
aid, went forth with his clergy on the road to the port by which Genseric
was advancing, to plead before an Arian pirate for the preservation of the
capital of the Catholic faith. He saved his people from massacre and his
city from burning, but not the houses from plunder. For fourteen days Rome
was subject to every spoliation which African avarice could inflict. Again,
no record of that misery has been kept; but the hand of Genseric was