“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.