alliance between the Goths and the empire.
The services of Ataulfus were accepted against the barbarians who were
harrying the provinces beyond the Alps, and the king, with Galla
Placidia a willing captive, began his retreat from Campania into Gaul.
His troops occupied the cities of Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux,
and in spite of the protests and resistance of the harassed
provincials soon extended their quarters from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic.

To hold the Goth to his friendship and to secure his absence from
Italy nothing remained but to accord him the hand of Placidia; and in
the year 414 at Narbonne their marriage was solemnised.[2]

[Footnote 2: Olympiodorus and Idatius say the marriage took place at
Narbonne, but Jornandes, _op cit_. c. 31, asserts that it took place
at Forli before Ataulfus left Italy. Perhaps there were two
ceremonies, or perhaps the ceremony at Narbonne was but the
celebration of an anniversary.]

With the retreat of the Goth and the treaty sealed by the marriage of
Placidia, the sister of Honorius, and the Gothic king, Italy secured
herself a peace and a repose which endured for some forty-two years,
only broken by the raid of Heraclian from Africa in 413.

But Ataulfus did not long survive his marriage. Having crossed the
Pyrenees and surprised in the name of Honorius the city of Barcelona,
he was assassinated in the palace there, and in the tumult which
followed, Singeric, the brother of his enemy and a stranger to the
royal race, was hailed as king. This revolution made Placidia once
more a fugitive, and we see the daughter of Theodosius "confounded
among a crowd of vulgar captives, compelled to march on foot above
twelve miles before the horse of a barbarian, the assassin of a
husband whom Placidia loved and lamented." On the seventh day of his
reign, however, Singeric was himself assassinated and Wallia, who then
became king of the Goths, after repeated representations backed at
last by the despatch of an army surrendered the princess to her
brother in exchange for 600,000 measures of wheat.

That must have been a strange home-coming for Placidia. Bought and
sold twice over, twice a fugitive, the companion of the rude Goth, she
is the most pathetic figure in all that terrible fifth century, and
never does she appear more pitiful than on her return from the camps
and the triumphs of the barbarians to the decadent splendour and the
corruption of the imperial court of Ravenn