“He has a royal contempt for mere tinsel and glitter. While his courtiers prank themselves in the borrowed splendours of the vanquished, he still wears his old Scythian skins and tanned leather. While they emulate the banquets of the Imperial court, he lives on the simplest, roughest food. It is said he never eats bread, but only meat, and that often half raw.”
“An independence of cookery which scarcely disproves his likeness to the beasts,” interposed Fabricius, with a grave smile; to which Marius made no retort.
“I saw Attila among his sons,” he said, “at a banquet, accompanied by wild music, with panegyrics on him and his victorious warriors and chiefs, no doubt as harmonious and satisfactory to the Huns as the strains of Greece or the rhetoric of our Sidonius Apollinaris to our Emperor. But Attila did not seem to heed them. All the time his heart and thoughts seemed set on a young lad, his youngest son, as he kept caressing his curly hair with his hand, and jesting with the child who will, he hopes, succeed him.
“And then came the strange, grotesque pomp of his enthronement in the Imperial palace at Milan, the palace from which Constantine issued the edict proclaiming Christianity the religion of the Empire, and where the great Theodosius listened to Ambrose.
“There is a painting on the palace walls which greatly offended Attila, representing the Scythian (or some barbarian) chieftains crouching in homage (and some of them stretched vanquished and slain) before the two golden thrones of the two Emperors of the East and West. As an expiation he commanded a Roman or Greek artist, not to paint this picture out, but, leaving it to satirize to itself, to paint opposite to it another picture representing the two Emperors of East and West, laden with sacks full of the gold coin of the tribute to the Huns, humbly emptying them at the feet of Attila. Happily for me, my mother, I have not the genius of thy forefathers, and could not paint; otherwise a difficult dilemma might have been set before me. But all the time I was in the camp of the Huns, and at the court of Attila, I could not but observe an uneasiness and uncertainty and vague dread ever growing and gathering over the rude warriors, and even over Attila himself. They seemed satiated with slaughter, and in some dim way under a spell, afraid of losing their plunder, afraid of the avenging power of the civilization they were ruining, afraid of the ancient names of Italy and Rome, haunted by the fate of Alaric, our Rome’s last conqueror. Not a few of the bravest even ventured to suggest that the host should return beyond the Danube to enjoy their spoils and employ the captives they had already won.
“And then,” he concluded, “as you all know, came the embassy from suppliant Rome. Every ambition of Attila’s for the recognition of his power and glory was gratified in this appeal for mercy from the humbled Empire, from the helpless City which had so long been mistress of the nations. Leo was at the head of the procession, simple and stately, representative of the great Christian Church.
“Never to my dying day can I forget that confronting of the worshippers of the scimitar, the conquerors by force, and the disciple of the Crucified, the conqueror by the Cross;—one more great incident in the long warfare between the forces of division and of peace, of good and evil, as real as that in which ‘Satan as lightning fell from heaven,’ and perhaps not more silent.
“On one side the great barbaric host of the mighty king who had conquered and devastated Europe from the Euxine to the Baltic, in all its savage pomp and pride; on the other, the little company of peace-makers, led by our Leo, his tall, slight figure arrayed in the pontifical robes, his abundant silvery hair flowing down from beneath the silken, gold-embroidered mitre, the purple chasuble, the pallium with the small red cross on the shoulder and the large red cross on the breast, Roman courage and dignity blended with sacred majesty in his look and bearing. For some minutes there was a hush of expectation and suspense; then followed the brief speech between Attila and Leo. What was said has not been told. Some report, as no doubt you have heard, that Attila said he could fight with men, but not with the wolf and the lion (Lupus and Leo). But I believe and am sure that, whatever he said, Attila felt he was face to face with a courage nobler than his own, with a Power to save mightier than his to destroy—felt indeed that he could fight with men, but not with God.
“And so it was that Leo won the day. The countless hosts of the destroyers went back with Attila to their own place among their wildernesses; the little embassy of the peace-makers went back with Leo to Rome. And Rome is saved.”
