a, and again as a captive, a
prize, booty.

For the man who had been at the head of that army whose approach, real
or supposed, had decided the Goths to deliver up the sister of the
emperor was Constantius, her old lover, he who had delayed her
marriage with Ataulfus and who now determined to marry her himself.

It was in 416 that Placidia returned to Ravenna. In the following year
Honorius gave her to Constantius, then his colleague in the consular
office for the second time. The marriage ceremony of very great
splendour took place in Ravenna; and in the same year was born of that
marriage Honoria, who was to offer herself to Attila, and in 419
Valentinian, one day to be emperor.

That marriage soon had the result Constantius had intended. In 421
Honorius was compelled to associate him with himself on the imperial
throne and to give to Placidia the title of Augusta. The new emperor,
however, survived his elevation to the throne but seven months and
once more Placidia was a widow. Her life, never a happy one, if we
except the few years in which she was the wife of Ataulfus, whom she
seems really to have loved, became unbearable after the death of
Constantius. At the mercy of her brother who was fast sinking, at the
age of thirty-nine, into a vicious and idiotic senility, she, always a
sincere Catholic in spite of her romantic marriage with the Arian
Ataulfus, seems to have been forced into a horrible intimacy with him;
at least we know that he obliged her to receive his obscene kisses,
even in public, to the scandal and perhaps the amusement of that
corrupt society. And then suddenly her brother's dreadful love seems
to have turned to hate and she is a fugitive again with her two
children at the court of her nephew Theodosius II. at Constantinople.
In the very year of her flight Honorius died and the throne of the
West was vacant.

It was filled by the obscure civil servant Joannes, the chief of the
notaries, the creature of some palace intrigue. But such a choice
could not be tolerated by Theodosius, who immediately confirmed
Placidia in her title of Augusta, which had not before been recognised
at Constantinople, and accepted Valentinian, whose title was
Nobilissimus, as the heir to the western throne, giving him the title
of Caesar. To suppress the usurper Joannes, Theodosius despatched an
army to bring Placidia and her children to Ravenna. After a short
campaign in northern Italy, by a miracle, according to the