The contrast between the two attacks, the attack of Alaric and that of Attila, is very striking. To admire Alaric, even to defend him, is obviously not impossible, since so many historians have been found ready to do both. No voice unless it be Kaiser Wilhelm’s has ever been raised in behalf of Attila. Here was the Empire, Christendom; he fell upon it like a wild beast. At least the Goths were Christian--though Arian--the Huns were pagan heathen. At least Alaric had revered the Roman name and sought to assume it; Attila despised and hated it and would have destroyed it utterly. But if there is this moral contrast between the Gothic and the Hunnish attacks upon the Empire, militarily they are alike in this above all that both were directed first upon the East and were only turned upon the West after a sort of failure. Happily for us the attacks of Attila, while infinitely more damaging, were not nearly so dangerous as those of Alaric. The Empire was assaulted by an assassin; it was delivered. The Roman system with regard to the Barbarians had long been established when Theodosius II ascended the Eastern throne. It consisted not only in employing Barbarians as auxiliaries--thus Uldis and his Huns had fought under Stilicho against Radagaisus at the battle of Fiesole; but in setting the different Barbarian tribes and races one against another. The Huns especially had been favoured by the Empire in this way, Stilicho knew them well and Aetius who was at last to defeat them upon the Catalaunian plains owed them perhaps his life in the crisis that followed the death of his rival Boniface in 433. But that policy, always dangerous, and the more so if it were inevitable, was already bankrupt. The dispersal through the provinces of the Goths, the Vandals, the Alani, Suevi and other tribes left the Empire face to face upon its northern frontier with the real force which had driven them on. In 432 we find Roua, King of the Huns, in receipt of an annual subsidy, scarcely to be distinguished from a tribute, of 350 pounds’ weight of gold. He it was who perhaps first broke the old Roman policy. When the Empire, according to its custom, made alliances with certain Barbarian tribes his neighbours, he claimed them as his subjects and immediately swore that he would denounce all his treaties with the Empire unless the Emperor broke off these alliances. Moreover, he demanded that all those of his subjects then within the Empire should be restored to him; for many had entered the Roman service to escape his harsh rule. These demands could not be ignored or refused. In 433 Theodosius was on the point of sending an embassy to treat with Roua, when he heard that he was dead and that his two nephews, still young men, Attila and Bleda, had succeeded him. It was they who received the Imperial ambassadors.