Upon the night of his last orgy or wedding he had feasted and drunk beyond his wont and he was full of wine and of sleep when he sought the bed of the beautiful and reluctant Ildico, the last of his sacrifices and his loot. What passed in that brutal nuptial chamber we shall never know. In the morning there was only silence, and when his attendants at last broke into the room they found Attila dead in a sea of blood, whether murdered by his victim or struck down by apoplexy cannot be known. It is said that Ildico had much to avenge--the murder of her parents and her brothers as well as her own honour. From that dreadful, characteristic chamber the Huns bore the body of their King, singing their doleful uncouth songs, to bury him in a secret place prepared by slaves who were duly murdered when their work was accomplished. Jornandes has preserved or invented for us the great funeral dirge which accompanied the last Barbarian rite. It celebrated Attila’s triumphs over Scythia and Germany which bore his yoke so meekly, and over the two Emperors who paid him tribute. He left no memorial but his terror written in the fire and smoke of burning cities, and that tradition of “frightfulness” to which Kaiser Wilhelm II first appealed to his troops on their departure for China, and which he is practising upon the body of Europe to-day. For upon his death Attila’s vast and barbaric hegemony fell to pieces. Enormous revolts broke it in sunder, and e’er many years had passed the very memory of it was forgotten. “Kingless was the army left: Of its head the race bereft. Every fury of the pit Tortured and dismembered it. Lo, upon a silent hour, When the pitch of frost subsides, Danube with a shout of power Loosens his imprisoned tides: Wide around the frighted plains Shake to hear his riven chains, Dreadfuller than heaven in wrath, As he makes himself a path: High leap the ice-cracks, towering pile Floes to bergs, and giant peers Wrestle on a drifted isle; Island on ice-island rears; Dissolution battles fast: Big the senseless Titans loom, Through a mist of common doom Striving which shall die the last: Till a gentle-breathing morn Fires the stream from bank to bank, So the Empire built of scorn Agonized, dissolved and sank.” SOURCES I AMMIANI MARCELLINI RERUM GESTARUM LIBER XXXI