In Avitus we have a figure which at once arrests our attention amid all the welter of Barbarians of which even Gaul was full. In him we see, and are assured, that the civilisation of Rome was still a living thing in the West, that it had not been overwhelmed by savages or lost in a mist of superstition. Avitus indeed seems to have stepped suddenly out of the great Roman time, he reminds us of what we have learned to expect a Roman noble of the time of Marcus Aurelius, or for that matter of St. Ambrose, to be. In him we see one we can greet as a brother; we should have been able to discuss with him the decline of the Empire. A rich man, coming of a noble family which for long had enjoyed the highest honour and the heaviest official responsibility, a scholar, a connoisseur, above all a somewhat bored patriot, he was also a soldier distinguished for his personal courage. He had already in 439 been successful in arranging a treaty for Rome with the Visigoths, and it was to him in this hour of enormous peril that Aetius turned again. He found him in his beautiful, peaceful and luxurious villa of Avitacum amid the foothills of the mountains of Auvergne, living as so many of our great nobles of the eighteenth century lived, half a farmer, half a scholar, wholly epicurean and full of the most noble self-indulgence, surrounded by his family, his son and daughter, and his friends, poets and scholars and delightful women. His son Ecdicius was the heir both of his wealth and his responsibilities, his daughter Papianella had married Sidonius Apollinaris of Lyons, a man already famous as a poet and coming of a distinguished Gallo-Roman family. It was this man who in the moment of crisis appeared on behalf of civilisation at the Visigoths’ Court--we could not have had a more noble representative. His mission was wholly successful; but the time spent in showing the Visigoths where their interests lay was to cost Orleans dear. The devoted city wholly surrounded and every day submitted to the assaults and the clouds of arrows of the Huns, hearing no news of any relief, was in despair. In vain the Bishop Anianus went in procession through the streets, and even among the troops on the ramparts, bearing the relics of his church; they called him traitor. Still firm in his faith in God and in the promise of Aetius, daily he made men climb the last high tower in expectation of deliverance. None came, no sign of the armies of Aetius could be discerned. Day after day the mighty roads southward lay in the sun white and empty of all life. At last he sent by stealth a messenger to Aetius with this message: “My son, if you come not to-day it will be too late.” That messenger never returned. Anianus himself began to doubt and at last heard counsels of surrender almost without a protest; indeed consented himself to treat with the Huns. But Attila was beside himself at the length of the resistance, he would grant no terms. Nothing remained but death or worse than death.