[Footnote 1:  Jornandes, c. xxxi.]

Italy, however, needed peace as badly as the Goths needed a secure retreat.  And when negotiations were opened it was seen that their success depended entirely upon this question of Placidia.  A treaty was drawn up of friendship and alliance between the Goths and the empire.  The services of Ataulfus were accepted against the barbarians who were harrying the provinces beyond the Alps, and the king, with Galla Placidia a willing captive, began his retreat from Campania into Gaul.  His troops occupied the cities of Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, and in spite of the protests and resistance of the harassed provincials soon extended their quarters from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

To hold the Goth to his friendship and to secure his absence from Italy nothing remained but to accord him the hand of Placidia; and in the year 414 at Narbonne their marriage was solemnised.[2]

[Footnote 2:  Olympiodorus and Idatius say the marriage took place at Narbonne, but Jornandes, op cit. c. 31, asserts that it took place at Forli before Ataulfus left Italy.  Perhaps there were two ceremonies, or perhaps the ceremony at Narbonne was but the celebration of an anniversary.]

With the retreat of the Goth and the treaty sealed by the marriage of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, and the Gothic king, Italy secured herself a peace and a repose which endured for some forty-two years, only broken by the raid of Heraclian from Africa in 413.

But Ataulfus did not long survive his marriage.  Having crossed the Pyrenees and surprised in the name of Honorius the city of Barcelona, he was assassinated in the palace there, and in the tumult which followed, Singeric, the brother of his enemy and a stranger to the royal race, was hailed as king.  This revolution made Placidia once more a fugitive, and we see the daughter of Theodosius “confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives, compelled to march on foot above twelve miles before the horse of a barbarian, the assassin of a husband whom Placidia loved and lamented.”  On the seventh day of his reign, however, Singeric was himself assassinated and Wallia, who then became king of the Goths, after repeated representations backed at last by the despatch of an army surrendered the princess to her brother in exchange for 600,000 measures of wheat.

That must have been a strange home-coming for Placidia.  Bought and sold twice over, twice a fugitive, the companion of the rude Goth, she is the most pathetic figure in all that terrible fifth century, and never does she appear more pitiful than on her return from the camps and the triumphs of the barbarians to the decadent splendour and the corruption of the imperial court of Ravenna, 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.