s been her best defence. The remembrance of
Alaric, cut off by a mysterious death immediately after his capture of
Rome, was present in the mind of Attila, and was frequently insisted
upon by his counsellors, who seem to have had a foreboding that only
while he lived would they be great and prosperous.

While this discussion was going forward in the barbarian camp, all
voices were hushed, and the attention of all was aroused by the news of
the arrival of an embassy from Rome. What had been going on in that city
it is not easy to ascertain. The Emperor seems to have been dwelling
there, not at Ravenna. Aetius shows a strange lack of courage or of
resource, and we find it difficult to recognize in him the victor of the
Mauriac plains. He appears to have been even meditating flight from
Italy, and to have thought of persuading Valentinian to share his
exile. But counsels a shade less timorous prevailed. Some one suggested
that possibly even the Hun might be satiated with havoc, and that an
embassy might assist to mitigate the remainder of his resentment.
Accordingly ambassadors were sent in the once mighty name of "the
Emperor and the Senate and People of Rome" to crave for peace, and these
were the men who were now ushered into the camp of Attila.

The envoys had been well chosen to satisfy that punctilious pride which
insisted that only men of the highest dignity among the Romans should be
sent to treat with the lord of Scythia and Germany. Avienus, who had,
two years before, worn the robes of consul, was one of the ambassadors.
Trigetius, who had wielded the powers of a prefect, and who, seventeen
years before, had been despatched upon a similar mission to Genseric the
Vandal, was another. But it was not upon these men, but upon their
greater colleague, that the eyes of all the barbarian warriors and
statesmen were fixed. Leo, bishop of Rome, had come, on behalf of his
flock, to sue for peace from the idolater.

The two men who had thus at last met by the banks of the Mincio are
certainly the grandest figures whom the fifth century can show to us, at
any rate since Alaric vanished from the scene.

Attila we by this time know well enough; adequately to describe Pope Leo
I, we should have to travel too far into the region of ecclesiastical
history. Chosen pope in the year 440, he was now about half way through
his long pontificate, one of the few which have nearly rivalled the
twenty-five years traditionally assigned t