o have made
any real difference in the power of Placidia who, we may believe, not,
as Procopius asserts, by a cunning system of training by which she had
ruined his character, but rather by reason of her innate virility,
retained the reins of government in her own hands. Certainly she
ruled, the Augusta of the West, during the twelve years that remained
to her after her son's marriage. And when at last she died in Rome in
450, on the 27th November,[1] in the sixtieth year of her age, and a
few months after her nephew Theodosius II., and was borne in a last
triumph along the Via Flaminia, to be laid, seated in a chair of
cedar, in a sarcophagus of alabaster in the gorgeous mausoleum she had
prepared for herself beside the church of S. Croce in Ravenna, she
left Italy at least in a profound peace, so secure, as it seemed, that
the whole court had in that very year removed to Rome. It might appear
as though the barbarian had but awaited her passing to descend once
more upon the citadel of Europe.

[Footnote 1: Agnellus asserts that on the Ides of March in the year
following Placidia's death Ravenna suffered from a great fire, in
which many buildings perished, but he does not tell us what they
were.]

V

THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST

For more than ten years before the death of Placidia both East and
West had been aware of a new cloud in the north-east. This darkness
was the vast army of Huns, which, in the exodus from Asia proper,
under Attila, threatened to overrun the empire and to lay it waste. In
447, indeed, Attila fell upon the Adriatic and Aegean provinces of the
eastern empire and ravaged them till he was bought off with a shameful
tribute. His thoughts inevitably turned towards the capital, and it is
said, I know not with how much truth, that in the very year of their
death both Placidia and Theodosius received from this new barbarian an
insolent message which said: "Attila, thy master and mine, bids thee
prepare a palace for him."

Theodosius II., however, was succeeded upon the Eastern throne by his
sister Pulcheria who shared her government with the virile and bold
soldier Marcian. But upon Placidia's death, on the other hand, the
government of the West fell into the hands of her weak and sensual son
Valentinian III.

Placidia's greatest failure, indeed, was in the training and education
of her children. Valentinian was incapable and vicious, while Honoria,
who had inherited much of the ro