Edecon accepted the invitation. Awaiting him he found Vigilas with Chrysaphius, and after supper heard apparently without astonishment the following amazing proposal. After swearing him to secrecy, Chrysaphius explained that he proposed to him the assassination of Attila. “If you but succeed in this and gain our frontiers,” said he, “there will be no limit to our gratitude, you shall be loaded with honours and riches.”
The Hun was ready in appearance at least to agree, but he insisted that he would need money for bribery, not much, but at least fifty pounds’ weight of gold. This he explained he could not carry back with him as Attila was wont upon the return of his ambassadors to exact a most strict account of the presents they had received, and so great a weight of gold could not escape the notice of his own companion and servants. He suggested then that Vigilas should accompany him home under the pretext of returning the fugitives and that at the right moment he should find the money necessary for the project. Needless to say, Chrysaphius readily agreed to all that Edecon proposed. He does not seem either to have been ashamed to make so Hunnish a proposal or to have suspected for a moment that Edecon was deceiving him. He laid all before Theodosius, won his consent and the approval of Martial his minister.
Together they decided to send an embassy to Attila, to which the better to mask their intentions Vigilas should be attached as interpreter. This embassy they proposed to make as imposing as possible, and to this end they appointed as its chief a man of a high, but not of consular rank, and of the best reputation. In this they showed a certain ability, for as it seemed to them if their plot failed they could escape suspicion by means of the reputation of their ambassador. The man they chose was called Maximin, and he fortunately chose as his secretary Priscus, the Sophist, to whose pen we are indebted for an account of all these things. He asserts, and probably with truth, that neither Maximin nor he himself was aware of the plot of assassination. They conceived themselves to be engaged in a serious mission and were the more impressed by its importance in that its terms were far less subservient to the Hun than had been the custom in recent times. Attila was told that henceforth he must not evade the obligations of his treaties nor invade at all the Imperial territories. And with regard to the fugitives he was informed that beside those already surrendered seventeen were now sent but that there were no more. So ran the letter. But Maximin was also to say that the Hun must look for no ambassador of higher rank than himself since it was not the Imperial custom towards the Barbarians; on the contrary, Rome was used to send to the North any soldier or messenger who happened to be available. And since he had now destroyed Sardica his proposal to meet there any ambassador of consular rank was merely insolent. If indeed the Hun wished to remove the differences between Theodosius and himself he should send Onegesius as ambassador. Onegesius was the chief minister of Attila.
Such were the two missions, the one official, the other secret, which set out together from Constantinople.
The great journey seems to have been almost wholly uneventful as far as Sardica, 350 miles from Constantinople, which was reached after a fortnight of travel. They found that town terribly pillaged but not destroyed, and the Imperial embassy bought sheep and oxen, and having prepared dinner invited Edecon and his colleagues to share it with them, for they were still officially within the Empire. But within those ruins, even among the ambassadors, peace was impossible. Priscus records the ridiculous quarrel which followed. The Huns began to magnify the power of Attila,—was not his work around them? The Romans knowing the contents of the letter they bore sang the praises of the Emperor. Suddenly Vigilas, perhaps already drunk, asserted that it was not right to compare men with the gods, nor Attila with Theodosius, since Attila was but a man. Only the intervention of Maximin and Priscus prevented bloodshed, nor was harmony restored till Orestes and Edecon had received presents of silk and jewels. Even these gifts were not made altogether without an untoward incident. For Orestes in thanking Maximin exclaimed that he, Maximin, was not like those insolent courtiers of Constantinople “who gave presents and invitations to Edecon, but none to me.” And when Maximin, ignorant of the Chrysaphian plot, demanded explanations, Orestes angrily left him. Already the plan of assassination was beginning to fester.
The ambassadors went on from ruined Sardica to desolate Naissus (Nisch) utterly devoid of inhabitants, full only of horror and ruins. They crossed a plain sown with human bones whitening in the sun, and saw the only witness to the Hunnish massacre of the inhabitants—a vast cemetery. “We found,” Priscus tells us, “a clean place above the river where we camped and slept.”
Close to this ruined town was the Imperial army, commanded by Agintheus, under whose eagles five of the seventeen refugees to be surrendered had taken refuge. The Roman general, however, was obliged to give them up. Their terror as they went on in the ambassadorial train towards the Danube may well be imagined.
The great river at length came in sight; its approaches lined and crowded with Huns, the passages served by the Barbarians in dug-outs, boats formed out of the hollowed trunks of trees. With these boats the whole Barbarian shore was littered as though in readiness for the advance of an army. Indeed, as it appeared Attila was in camp close by, and intent on hunting within the Roman confines to the south of the river, a means certainly of reconnaissance as habitually used by the Huns as commerce has been for the same end by the Germans.
We do not know with what feelings Maximin and Priscus saw all this and crossed the great river frontier at last and passed into Barbary. To their great chagrin, for they had made the way easy for the Hunnish ambassadors on the road through the Imperial provinces, Edecon and Orestes now left them brusquely enough. For several days they went on alone but for the guides Edecon had left them, till one afternoon they were met by two horsemen who informed them that they were close to the camp of Attila who awaited them. And indeed upon the morrow they beheld from a hill-top the Barbarian tents spread out innumerable at their feet, and among them that of the King. They decided to camp there on the hill; but a troop of Huns at once rode up and ordered them to establish themselves in the plain. “What,” cried they, “will you dare to pitch your tents on the heights when that of Attila is below?”
They were scarce established in their appointed place when to their amazement Edecon and Orestes and others appeared and asked their business, the object of their embassy. The astonished ambassadors looked at one another in amaze. When the question was repeated Maximin announced that he could not disclose his mission to any other than Attila to whom he was accredited. Scotta, the brother of Onegesius, then announced angrily that Attila had sent them and they must have an answer. When Maximin again refused the Huns galloped away.