contents at his feet.

This little incident helps us to understand the next strange act in the
drama of Attila's invasion. To enjoy the luxury of humbling the great
Empire, and of trampling on the pride of her statesmen, seems to have
been the sweetest pleasure of his life. This mere gratification of his
pride, the pride of an upstart barbarian, at the expense of the
inheritors of a mighty name and the representatives of venerable
traditions, was the object which took him into Italy, rather than any
carefully prepared scheme of worldwide conquest. Accordingly when that
august body, the Senate of Rome, sent a consul, a prefect, and more than
all a pope, the majestic and fitly-named Leo, to plead humbly in the
name of the Roman people for peace, and to promise acquiescence at some
future day in the most unreasonable of his demands, Attila granted the
ambassadors an interview by the banks of the Mincio, listened with
haughty tranquillity to their petition, allowed himself to be soothed
and, as it were, magnetised by the words and gestures of the venerable
pontiff, accepted the rich presents which were doubtless laid at his
feet, and turning his face homewards recrossed the Julian Alps, leaving
the Apennines untraversed and Rome unvisited.

Even in the act of granting peace Attila used words which showed that it
would be only a truce, and that (452) if there were any failure to abide
by any one of his conditions, he would return and work yet greater
mischief to Italy than any which she had yet suffered at his hands. But
he had missed the fateful moment, and the delight of standing on the
conquered Palatine, and seeing the smoke ascend from the ruined City of
the World, was never to be his. In the year after his invasion of Italy
he died suddenly at night, apparently the victim of the drunken debauch
with which the polygamous barbarian had celebrated the latest addition
to the numerous company of his wives.

With Attila's death the might of the Hunnish Empire was broken. The
great robber-camp needed the ascendancy of one strong chief-robber to
hold it together, and that ascendancy no one of the multitudinous sons
who emerged from the chambers of his harem was able to exert. Unable to
agree as to the succession of the throne, they talked of dividing the
Hunnish dominions between them, and in the discussions which ensued they
showed too plainly that they looked upon the subject nations as their
slaves, to be partitioned as