even meditating flight from Italy, and to have thought of persuading Valentinian to share his exile.  But counsels a shade less timorous prevailed.  Some one suggested that possibly even the Hun might be satiated with havoc, and that an embassy might assist to mitigate the remainder of his resentment.  Accordingly ambassadors were sent in the once mighty name of “the Emperor and the Senate and People of Rome” to crave for peace, and these were the men who were now ushered into the camp of Attila.

The envoys had been well chosen to satisfy that punctilious pride which insisted that only men of the highest dignity among the Romans should be sent to treat with the lord of Scythia and Germany.  Avienus, who had, two years before, worn the robes of consul, was one of the ambassadors.  Trigetius, who had wielded the powers of a prefect, and who, seventeen years before, had been despatched upon a similar mission to Genseric the Vandal, was another.  But it was not upon these men, but upon their greater colleague, that the eyes of all the barbarian warriors and statesmen were fixed.  Leo, bishop of Rome, had come, on behalf of his flock, to sue for peace from the idolater.

The two men who had thus at last met by the banks of the Mincio are certainly the grandest figures whom the fifth century can show to us, at any rate since Alaric vanished from the scene.

Attila we by this time know well enough; adequately to describe Pope Leo I, we should have to travel too far into the region of ecclesiastical history.  Chosen pope in the year 440, he was now about half way through his long pontificate, one of the few which have nearly rivalled the twenty-five years traditionally assigned to St. Peter.  A firm disciplinarian, not to say a persecutor, he had caused the Priscillianists of Spain and the Manichees of Rome to feel his heavy hand.  A powerful rather than subtle theologian, he had asserted the claims of Christian common-sense as against the endless refinements of oriental speculation concerning the nature of the Son of God.  Like an able Roman general he had traced, in his letters on the Eutychian controversy, the lines of the fortress in which the defenders of the Catholic verity were thenceforward to intrench themselves and from which they were to repel the assaults of Monophysites on the one hand and of Nestorians on the other.  These lines had been enthusiastically accepted by the great council of Chalcedon—­held in the year of Attila’s Gaulish campaign—­and remain from that day to this the authoritative utterance of the Church concerning the mysterious union of the Godhead and the manhood in the person of Jesus Christ.