[25] If I seem to have given fewer of the details of the battle itself than its importance would warrant, my excuse must be that Gibbon has enriched our language with a description of it too long for quotation and too splendidly for rivalry. I have not, however, taken altogether the same view of it that he has.
FOUNDATION OF VENICE
A.D. 452
THOMAS HODGKIN
JOHN RUSKIN
The foundation of Venice (Venetia) is an incident in the history of Attila's incursions, at the head of his Huns, into Italy after his defeat at the battle of Châlons-sur-Marne. Venetia was then a large and fertile province of Northern Italy, and fifty Venetian cities flourished in peace and safety under the protection of the Empire. After Attila's remorseless hordes had taken and destroyed Aquileia, near the head of the Adriatic, they swept, with resistless fury, through Venetia, whose cities were so utterly destroyed that their very sites could henceforth scarcely be identified. The inhabitants fled in large numbers to the shores of the Adriatic, where, at the extremity of the gulf, a group of a hundred islets is separated by shallows from the mainland of Italy. Here the Venetians built their city on what had hitherto been uncultivated and almost uninhabited sand-banks. Under such unfavorable circumstances was started the career of that wonderful city which afterward became "Queen of the Adriatic" and mother of art, science, and learning.
The two greatest authorities on Venice are Thomas Hodgkin, who made a life study of Italy and her invaders, and the immortal Ruskin, whose grandly descriptive articles were written in the atmosphere of Venice and the Adriatic Sea.
THOMAS HODGKIN
The terrible invaders, made wrathful and terrible by the resistance of Aquileia, streamed through the trembling cities of Venetia. Each earlier stage in the itinerary shows a town blotted out by their truly Tartar genius for destruction. At the distance of thirty-one miles from Aquileia stood the flourishing colony of Tulia Concordia, so named, probably, in commemoration of the universal peace which, four hundred and eighty years before, Augustus had established in the world. Concordia was destroyed, and only an insignificant little village now remains to show where it once stood. At another interval of thirty-one miles stood Altinum, with its white villas clustering round the curves of its lagoons, and rivalling Baiæ in its luxurious charms. Altinum was effaced as Concordia and as Aquileia. Yet another march of thirty-two miles brought the squalid invaders to Patavium, proud of its imagined Trojan origin, and, with better reason, proud of having given birth to Livy. Patavium, too, was levelled with the ground. True, it has not like its sister towns remained in the nothingness to which Attila reduced it. It is now
"Many-domed Padua proud,"