l of Attila and the deep sea of the Adriatic, and had
they not found the lagoons ready at hand to offer them an asylum and to
prove a refuge in time of danger, it must have fared hard with them.

But this date of 452 is not to be taken as the date of the very earliest
occupation of the lagoon. Long before Attila and his Huns swept down
upon Italy, we know that there was a sparse population occupying the
estuary, engaged in fishing and in the salt trade. Cassiodorus, the
secretary of the Gothic King Theodoric the Great, has left us a picture
of this people, hardy, independent, toughened by their life on the salt
water; their means of living; the fish of the lagoons; their source of
wealth; the salt which they extracted from its waters; their houses,
wattled cabins built upon piles driven into the mud; their means of
locomotion light boats which were tied to the door posts like horses on
mainland.

"Thus you live in your sea-birds' home," he exclaims, "rich and poor
under equal laws; a common food supports you; house is like unto house;
and envy, that curse of all the world, hath no place there." No doubt
this early population of the lagoons, already intimately associated
with its dwelling-place, modified by it and adapted to it, helped to
form the basis upon which the latter strata of population, the result of
the Hunnish invasion, could rest; and in all probability some of the
characteristics of this early population, its independence and its
hardihood, passed into the composition of the full-grown Venetian race.
But beyond the brief words of Cassiodorus we know little about these
early lagoon-dwellers. It is really with the Hunnish invasion that the
history of Venice begins its first period of growth.

The population which flocked from the mainland to seek refuge in the
estuary of Venice came from many different cities--from Aquileia, from
Concordia, from Padua; and tho the inhabitants of all these, no doubt,
bore the external stamp which Rome never failed to impose, yet, equally
doubtless, they brought with them their own particular customs, their
mutual hates and rivalries.

While living on the mainland these animosities had wider space in which
to play, and were therefore less dangerous, less explosive. But in the
lagoons, under stress of suffering, and owing to confinement and
juxtaposition, they became intensified, exaggerated, and perilous. There
was a double problem before the growing Venetian population whic