Still the advantage was with the allies; for Attila, so late the fierce aggressor, was barricaded in his camp—tho’ grimly awaiting attack indeed, and prepared to resist to the end and die like a lion in his den.
Did the Romans know of that funeral pile? They may not, indeed, have known the peculiar manner in which Attila would seek death, but they knew that he would die by his own hand—if the worst came. Cato had done so and Varus and Brutus and Cassius and Hannibal and Anthony and Cleopatra—ad infinitum.
Addison, in his tragedy Cato, has graphically portrayed the conflicting thoughts and emotions in the mind of a man who feels that life cannot longer be borne and yet shrinks back from the horror and the dread unknown.
Cato had lost the battle of Utica. He had been true to Pompey, he had fought the last battle for the cause of Pompey—and lost. And Cæsar was indeed god of this world, and the morrow held no place on all this so vast earth for Cato; this lost-battle night must end it all. He read Plato’s discourse on the immortality of the soul, and in the lines of Addison, thus soliloquized:
“It must be so. Plato, thou reason’st well:
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread and inward horror
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself and startles at destruction?