The whole Empire had received from Alaric a moral blow from which it was never really to recover. It is true that much which happened in the years that immediately followed the retreat of Adolphus was fortunate. Placidia the spoil and the bride and later the fugitive widow of Alaric’s successor returned in triumph to Ravenna to be the unwilling bride of her deliverer Constantius. Largely through her influence, after the death of Honorius, when she ruled in Ravenna with the title of Augusta as the guardian of her son, the young Cæsar Valentinian, between East and West, a new, if unsubstantial, cordiality appeared. Italy at least was restored to prosperity, while in Aetius she possessed a general as great as the great Stilicho. But if Italy was safe the provinces were in peril and she herself saw Africa betrayed by Boniface and ravaged by and lost to the Vandals under Genseric. Nor was the domestic state of her household and court such as to inspire her with confidence in the future. If her son Valentinian was a foolish and sensual boy, her daughter Honoria was discovered in a low intrigue with a chamberlain of the palace, and when in exile at Constantinople sent, perhaps longing for the romantic fate of her mother, her ring to the new and youthful King of the Huns, soon to be famous as Attila, inviting him to carry her off as Adolphus, the Goth, had carried off Placidia. Such was the condition of things in the royal household of the West. In Constantinople things were not more promising. Theodosius, the young Emperor, called the Calligrapher, was a dilettante of the fine arts, not a statesman. Those who surrounded him were mediocrities intent rather on theological controversies than on the safety of the State, or sunk in a cynical corruption in which everything noble was lost. No one East or West seemed able to grasp or to realise that there was any danger. Had the Imperial Governments failed altogether to understand the fundamental cause of the Gothic advance, the Vandal attack, indeed of all their embarrassments? Had they failed to remember what was there beyond the Rhine and the Danube? Had they forgotten the Huns? FOOTNOTES: [2] See my “Ravenna” (Dent, 1913), pp. 1-10. II THE HUNS AND ATTILA The people called the Huns, “scarcely mentioned in other records,” are fully described by that Ammianus Marcellinus[3] whom I have already quoted. He lived at the end of the fourth century, was a Roman historian born of Greek parents at Antioch, and after fighting in Gaul, in Germany and the East, settled in Rome and devoted himself to history. He describes the Huns as “living beyond the Sea of Azov on the borders of the Frozen Ocean.” And adds that they were a people “savage beyond all parallel.” He then gives us the following careful description of them:--