Early in the following year he crossed the Alps, descended into Italy, and after capturing and totally destroying the city of Aquileia, marched Romewards. He never reached the city, indeed. Not far from Mantua he was met by three ambassadors, one of them the bishop of Rome known as Leo the Great. They brought the offer of a complete submission. The Emperor no longer refused the condition which he had before peremptorily rejected. The Hunnish king was to have the hand of the Princess Honoria, and with her, as Gibbon epigrammatically puts it, "an immense ransom or dowry." The marriage never took place, for Attila died in the following year, but he had inflicted on Rome a humiliation even greater than that which she had suffered at the hand of Alaric.
One more event I must record, because in a way it completes this great period of history. In 475 a youth who bore the name of Romulus and the nickname of Augustulus was raised to the throne by his father Orestes, who secured for a time control of such armies as still obeyed the Empire. In the following year Orestes was defeated and slain, and his son permitted to abdicate. Italy passed into the hands of Odoacer, king of the Heruli. The Old World had passed away and the New had begun.
FOOTNOTES:
[49] See p. 349.
[50] When the Emperor Theodosius died (394 A.D.) his two sons Honorius and Arcadius became emperors of the West and East respectively.
[51] He succeeded to the throne in 434 in partnership with his brother, and by this brother's death, or murder, as some said, became the ruler of the nation in 445.
EPILOGUE
I take it for granted that none of my readers doubt the existence of a definite purpose—some may prefer to call it a tendency—in human history. Writers on this subject have often been accused of dwelling too much on war. But war is the ultimate expression of human will, and war, with all its horrors and losses, has worked, we are glad to believe, for the general good. The fittest among the nations have survived. We cannot estimate the loss which mankind would have suffered if the great military monarchies of the East had crushed out of existence the insignificant tribe which was to be the world's teacher in righteousness. Something of the same kind may be seen in what is called secular history.
Greece struggled bravely, against what must have seemed almost hopeless odds, to preserve herself from Persian domination. If the eleven thousand "Men of Marathon" had been trodden under foot by the hosts of Persia, the Athens of the fifth century, with its free political life and unrivalled intellectual development, would not have existed. A sterile despotism, without literature or art, would have taken its place, and the world would have been incalculably the poorer for the exchange.
What is true of the struggle between Greece and Persia is true also of the great conflict, lasting for more than two centuries, in which the Sicilian Greeks, with now and then a little help from the motherland, held their own against Carthage. Persia and Carthage, though differing much from each other, were equally hostile to the essential principles of Western civilisation.