At length the story of crime reached its climax. The Emperor invited the great general who had saved his empire into his palace; and then, professing to be indignant with him at urging too vehemently his son’s suit for his Imperial bride, suddenly plunged his sword into the heart of his guest and deliverer; the only occasion, it was bitterly said, on which he had the courage to use a sword. The wretched courtiers followed his example; Aetius fell, pierced and mangled with many wounds. His friends were then allured into the palace, and murdered in cold blood one by one. The courtly Sidonius Apollinaris was startled from his smooth Latinity into the vigour of old Roman speech by his indignation at this crime, and called the miserable Emperor a “crazy half-man,” scarcely possessing an individual name, a mere appanage to his mother Placidia. _Aetium Placidus mactavit semivir amens._ And it was reported that when, immediately after the murder, the Imperial murderer, probably doubting the prudence of his act, asked one of his courtiers if it was a good deed, he was answered with an epigram which made its author famous—“Whether it was a good deed, most noble Emperor, or something quite other than a good deed, I am scarcely able to say. One thing, however, I do know, that you have cut off your right hand with your left!” The feeble Emperor had not long to wait to prove whether his crime was a political success. Christmas came once more to Rome, with its message of peace; Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, with its boundless revelation of love, its boundless promise of redemption; and Leo’s noble voice rang through the great Christian basilica its trumpet-peals of victory, of warning, of summons to holy life, its sentences of just judgment on the unjust. And in March that sentence fell on Valentinian. He was riding out of the city to the Campus Martius, and halting amongst some laurel bushes in a pleasant grove, surrounded by his court and his guards, watching the games of the athletes, when suddenly two soldiers of the guard (whose names Optila and Traustila have a Gothic flavour) rushed upon him and stabbed him to death; and beside him also the minister Chrysaphius, who with him had planned the death of Aetius. No other blood was shed. In all that servile court, in all that dissolute city, no hand was raised to avenge the death of the Imperial murderer.