Hun, I have married a Barbarian wife and have children by her; I am often the guest of Onegesius, and to tell you the truth I consider my present station preferable to my past. For when war is over one lives here decently without worries, one enjoys one’s own. War nourishes us; but destroys those who live under the Roman Government. Under Rome one has to trust to others for one’s safety, since the law forbids one to bear arms even in self-defence, and those who are allowed to fight are betrayed by the ignorance and corruption of their leaders. And even so the evils of war under the Romans are as nothing to the evils of peace, the insupportable taxations, the robbery of the tax-gatherers, and the oppression of the powerful. How can it be otherwise since there is there one law for the rich and another for the poor? If a rich man commits a crime he knows how to profit by it; but if a poor man transgresses the law, perhaps in ignorance, he knows not the formalities and is ruined. Justice can only be obtained at a great price, and this in my opinion is the worst of evils. You must buy an advocate to plead for you, and only after depositing a sum of money as security can you plead at all or obtain sentence.” Thus for a long time the renegade from civilisation defended himself and the Barbarians, and when at length he was silent Priscus begged him to listen patiently while he defended what, after all, was the future of the world. What appears most to have excited the animosity of the apostate was, as we might expect, the Roman law and its processes, and it is these that Priscus first defends. He explains the division of labour and responsibility peculiar to civilisation, the structure of the Roman State and society, divided, according to him, into three classes; those concerned with the making and administration of the law; those concerned with national and public safety; and those who till the soil. He defends all this nobly and eloquently, the logic and clarity of its complexity against the appalling promiscuity and confusion of Barbarian anarchy. He shows the individual as a part of society, and in the main his view of civilisation is ours, we can applaud and understand it. Even the apostate stranger is moved at last. There in the Hunnish land at dawn one morning, carried back by the eloquence of Priscus to all he had lost, he weeps and exclaims: “The law of the Romans is good; their Republic nobly ordered, but evil magistrates have corrupted it.” He might have said more but that just then a servant of Onegesius appeared and Priscus left him never to see him again.