but all its great buildings date from the Middle Ages. Only a few broken friezes and a few inscriptions in its museum exist as memorials of the classical Patavium.
As the Huns marched on Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, all opened their gates at their approach, for the terror which they inspired was on every heart. In these towns, and in Milan and Pavia (Ticinum), which followed their example, the Huns enjoyed doubtless to the full their wild revel of lust and spoliation, but they left the buildings unharmed, and they carried captive the inhabitants instead of murdering them.
The valley of the Po was now wasted to the heart's content of the invaders. Should they cross the Apennines and blot out Rome as they had blotted out Aquileia from among the cities of the world? This was the great question that was being debated in the Hunnish camp, and, strange to say, the voices were not all for war. Already Italy began to strike that strange awe into the hearts of her northern conquerors which so often in later ages has been her best defence. The remembrance of Alaric, cut off by a mysterious death immediately after his capture of Rome, was present in the mind of Attila, and was frequently insisted upon by his counsellors, who seem to have had a foreboding that only while he lived would they be great and prosperous.
While this discussion was going forward in the barbarian camp, all voices were hushed, and the attention of all was aroused by the news of the arrival of an embassy from Rome. What had been going on in that city it is not easy to ascertain. The Emperor seems to have been dwelling there, not at Ravenna. Aetius shows a strange lack of courage or of resource, and we find it difficult to recognize in him the victor of the Mauriac plains. He appears to have been even meditating flight from Italy, and to have thought of persuading Valentinian to share his exile. But counsels a shade less timorous prevailed. Some one suggested that possibly even the Hun might be satiated with havoc, and that an embassy might assist to mitigate the remainder of his resentment. Accordingly ambassadors were sent in the once mighty name of "the Emperor and the Senate and People of Rome" to crave for peace, and these were the men who were now ushered into the camp of Attila.
The envoys had been well chosen to satisfy that punctilious pride which insisted that only men of the highest dignity among the Romans should be sent to treat with the lord of Scythia and Germany. Avienus, who had, two years before, worn the robes of consul, was one of the ambassadors. Trigetius, who had wielded the powers of a prefect, and who, seventeen years before, had been despatched upon a similar mission to Genseric the Vandal, was another. But it was not upon these men, but upon their greater colleague, that the eyes of all the barbarian warriors and statesmen were fixed. Leo, bishop of Rome, had come, on behalf of his flock, to sue for peace from the idolater.
The two men who had thus at last met by the banks of the Mincio are certainly the grandest figures whom the fifth century can show to us, at any rate since Alaric vanished from the scene.
Attila we by this time know well enough; adequately to describe Pope Leo I, we should have to travel too far into the region of ecclesiastical history. Chosen pope in the year 440, he was now about half way through his long pontificate, one of the few which have nearly rivalled the twenty-five years traditionally assigned to St. Peter. A firm disciplinarian, not to say a persecutor, he had caused the Priscillianists of Spain and the Manichees of Rome to feel his heavy hand. A powerful rather than subtle theologian, he had asserted the claims of Christian common-sense as against the endless refinements of oriental speculation concerning the nature of the Son of God. Like an able Roman general he had traced, in his letters on the Eutychian controversy, the lines of the fortress in which the defenders of the Catholic verity were thenceforward to intrench themselves and from which they were to repel the assaults of Monophysites on the one hand and of Nestorians on the other. These lines had been enthusiastically accepted by the great council of Chalcedon—held in the year of Attila's Gaulish campaign—and remain from that day to this the authoritative utterance of the Church concerning the mysterious union of the Godhead and the manhood in the person of Jesus Christ.
And all these gifts of will, of intellect, and of soul were employed by Leo with undeviating constancy, with untired energy, in furthering his great aim, the exaltation of the dignity of the popedom, the conversion of the admitted primacy of the bishops of Rome into an absolute and world-wide spiritual monarchy. Whatever our opinions may be as to the influence of this spiritual monarchy on the happiness of the world, or its congruity with the character of the Teacher in whose words it professed to root itself, we cannot withhold a tribute of admiration for the high temper of this Roman bishop, who in the ever-deepening degradation of his country still despaired not, but had the courage and endurance to work for a far-distant future, who, when the Roman was becoming the common drudge and footstool of all nations, still remembered the proud words "Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento!" and under the very shadow of Attila and Genseric prepared for the city of Romulus a new and spiritual dominion, vaster and more enduring than any which had been won for her by Julius or by Hadrian.
Such were the two men who stood face to face in the summer of 452 upon the plains of Lombardy. The barbarian King had all the material power in his hand, and he was working but for a twelvemonth. The pontiff had no power but in the world of intellect, and his fabric was to last fourteen centuries. They met, as has been said, by the banks of the Mincio. Jordanes tells us that it was "where the river is crossed by many wayfarers coming and going." Some writers think that these words point to the ground now occupied by the celebrated fortress of Peschiera, close to the point where the Mincio issues from the Lake of Garda. Others place the interview at Governolo, a little village hard by the junction of the Mincio and the Po. If the latter theory be true, and it seems to fit well with the route which would probably be taken by Attila, the meeting took place in Vergil's country, and almost in sight of the very farm where Tityrus and Meliboeus chatted at evening under the beech-tree.
Leo's success as an ambassador was complete. Attila laid aside all the fierceness of his anger and promised to return across the Danube, and to live thenceforward at peace with the Romans. But in his usual style, in the midst of reconciliation he left a loophole for a future wrath, for "he insisted still on this point above all, that Honoria, the sister of the Emperor, and the daughter of the Augusta Placidia, should be sent to him with the portion of the royal wealth which was her due; and he threatened that unless this was done he would lay upon Italy a far heavier punishment than any which it had yet borne."