wo greatest authorities on Venice are Thomas Hodgkin, who made
a life study of Italy and her invaders, and the immortal Ruskin,
whose grandly descriptive articles were written in the atmosphere
of Venice and the Adriatic Sea.

THOMAS HODGKIN

The terrible invaders, made wrathful and terrible by the resistance of
Aquileia, streamed through the trembling cities of Venetia. Each earlier
stage in the itinerary shows a town blotted out by their truly Tartar
genius for destruction. At the distance of thirty-one miles from
Aquileia stood the flourishing colony of Tulia Concordia, so named,
probably, in commemoration of the universal peace which, four hundred
and eighty years before, Augustus had established in the world.
Concordia was destroyed, and only an insignificant little village now
remains to show where it once stood. At another interval of thirty-one
miles stood Altinum, with its white villas clustering round the curves
of its lagoons, and rivalling Baiae in its luxurious charms. Altinum was
effaced as Concordia and as Aquileia. Yet another march of thirty-two
miles brought the squalid invaders to Patavium, proud of its imagined
Trojan origin, and, with better reason, proud of having given birth to
Livy. Patavium, too, was levelled with the ground. True, it has not like
its sister towns remained in the nothingness to which Attila reduced it.
It is now

"Many-domed Padua proud,"

but all its great buildings date from the Middle Ages. Only a few broken
friezes and a few inscriptions in its museum exist as memorials of the
classical Patavium.

As the Huns marched on Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, all opened
their gates at their approach, for the terror which they inspired was on
every heart. In these towns, and in Milan and Pavia (Ticinum), which
followed their example, the Huns enjoyed doubtless to the full their
wild revel of lust and spoliation, but they left the buildings unharmed,
and they carried captive the inhabitants instead of murdering them.

The valley of the Po was now wasted to the heart's content of the
invaders. Should they cross the Apennines and blot out Rome as they had
blotted out Aquileia from among the cities of the world? This was the
great question that was being debated in the Hunnish camp, and, strange
to say, the voices were not all for war. Already Italy began to strike
that strange awe into the hearts of her northern conquerors which so
often in later ages ha